MOVIE REVIEW : Clint Eastwood’s Acid Test

You see, movies are all foolishness . . . an exercise in insanity . . . pure madness. . . . But, as we’re in this thing, well, we might as well bluff our way through to the bitter end.

--John Wilson, in Peter Viertel’s “White Hunter, Black Heart.”

Films about moviemaking often veer between honey and gall: the sweetness of self-celebration, the acid of iconoclasm. In “White Hunter, Black Heart” (citywide), Clint Eastwood reaches for the acid. He’s adapted a famous, bitter, backstage roman a clef : Peter Viertel’s scalding fictionalization of events leading up to the making of “The African Queen.” And he’s cast himself in its great central role: violently self-indulgent filmmaker John Wilson.

Wilson is modeled on John Huston, and the movie is a marriage of seeming opposites. In 1953, when Viertel wrote “White Hunter,” Huston was a rebel and Hollywood outsider. The book--which Viertel may have intended partly as vengeance for a bad time and partly as a plea for a reckless, brilliant talent to recover his own balance--is a little poisonous.

Wilson is shown as a sublime egotist, stranding his company in the Belgian Congo, while he scours the plains in pursuit of the “big tusker,” the magnificent bull elephant he wants as a trophy. Viertel’s surrogate character--screenwriter “Pete Verrill” (played in the film by Jeff Fahey)--is the self-conscious voice of sanity and reason. And the characters obviously modeled on Sam Spiegel (George Dzundza’s Paul Landers), Katharine Hepburn (Marisa Berenson’s Kay Gibson) and Humphrey Bogart (Richard Vanstone’s Phil Duncan) are stunned or somewhat helpless bystanders.

Reading or watching “White Hunter, Black Heart,” it’s hard to imagine that “The African Queen” was made at all--much less that it became a major box-office hit, Oscar-winner and well-beloved classic. Now, almost four decades later, we see John Huston and his film--even his obsessions--in a different light. Huston may have seemed a semi-legendary rogue in 1953. After his death, he’s a legend, pure and simple.

The moviemakers play on this--even quoting actual dialogue from “The African Queen” during the Wilson-Verrill script sessions and inventing a sequence where Wilson takes the Queen on a test run and almost sends her over Victoria Falls. Inevitably, a little reverence glazes over the criticism. Plot and dialogue are intact--”Hunter” lists Viertel as one of three screenwriters--but the tone has shifted. It becomes, more clearly, Wilson’s tragedy.

Eastwood, playing Wilson, takes the biggest gamble of his career. He doesn’t play a new conception of Wilson, or Eastwood-as-Wilson. He actually plays John Huston. He imitates the vocal timbre, the loose, aimlessly expansive hand gestures, the mockingly grand manner, the avuncular “Hey, kids.” Occasionally the impersonation works shockingly well. In two scenes, when Wilson grins at a soccer match or slumps exhausted after another unsuccessful hunt, the resemblance is almost eerie.

But it’s erratic. The mix of mannerisms is distracting; it might have been better to soft-pedal them, take the role deeper inside. Sometimes, Eastwood seems to be weaving languid gestures in the airy, arch manner of a Restoration fop; he doesn’t drink in interlocutors with his gaze the way Huston would. The voices are a weird blend: Eastwood’s light and pinched, where Huston’s was a slightly cracked organ, wheezing out ironic toccatas in a mash of Ohio drawl and pure stage blarney.

If profligate, eloquent, life-gorging Huston was, for James Agee, “one of the ranking grasshoppers of the Western Hemisphere,” considerate Clint seems his opposite: the model citizen, the ant. (Verrill is his more natural part.) Yet, beneath every ant’s skin, a grasshopper’s heart may secretly beat, and vice versa--something Eastwood’s “Bird” also suggested. This split is reflected in the movie’s spare, visually laconic style. It doesn’t dwell on the landscapes, the sun, the vibrant life around Wilson. Instead, it zeroes in on the characters and conflict, fixes them in a cool, hard gaze that verges on the clinical.

“White Hunter” is a movie about an obsessive artist, a moviemaker--but the story’s dark joke is that the artist isn’t obsessed with his own work, the movie he’s about to shoot. He’s obsessed with the movie he’s made of his life: the willful, outrageous character he’s created for himself. Like the classic American adventurer of literature, he’s pulled back by his community--the film crew--and his “wife,” the alienated screenwriter, trying to keep him on the set and out of the savannah.

Wilson, a patriarch of flamboyant jokes, is a God who seems driven to become his own Lucifer. But the movie also make it clear that he’s a secret moralist, a portrait that jells most strongly during Wilson’s quietly furious put-down of the anti-semitic Mrs. McGregor (Mel Martin), and his challenge of a burly hotel manager who’s been maltreating black servants. They’re ferocious scenes, impeccably acted. And they connect Wilson to Eastwood’s previous roles: fantasy heroes who actually deliver on their quixotic gestures.

“White Hunter, Black Heart” was not a great novel--in some ways, it’s not even a good novel--but it’s always been first-rate movie material. And perhaps it’s wrong to complain that Eastwood hasn’t made a perfect version of it. The ideal “White Hunter” probably would have been shot around 1970, would have starred Huston himself and Paul Newman as Verrill, and it would have been directed by either Huston or Sam Peckinpah. But that “White Hunter” doesn’t exist and the one that Eastwood has made is a good, solid, admirable, deeply felt movie.

It’s well-acted--not only by Eastwood, Fahey, Martin and Dzundza--but by Alun Armstrong as a sour location manager and Timothy Spall as a raffish pilot. The last scene has withering power. And it’s a movie that’s about something: the contradictions of the artist and American macho, the evils of racism, the byzantine madness of some big-time movies. It’s about exploitation and betrayal, man’s attacks on nature and the dark side of the adventurous spirit.

It’s a fine film in many ways--even if Huston’s persona becomes Eastwood’s own big tusker: the prey he can’t quite shoot. He doesn’t bring back the Big One, but he doesn’t return empty-handed; intellectually and morally, there’s plenty of game for the pot.

‘WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART’

A Warner Bros. presentation of a Malpaso/Rastar production. Producer/director Clint Eastwood. Script Peter Viertel & James Bridges and Burt Kennedy. Executive producer David Valdes. Camera Jack Green. Production design John Grasymark. Editor Joel Cox. Music Lennie Niehaus. Costumes John Mollo. With Clint Eastwood, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, Alun Armstrong, Marisa Berenson, Mel Martin, Timothy Spall.

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (mild profanity, violence).