American performing artists do not generally go gentle into that good night. As Dylan Thomas eloquently exhorted his father to do, they rage against the dying of the light so long that one sometimes uncharitably wishes they would give it up and at least retire.
Some, however, exhibit the humility that only true greatness and an understanding of that greatness entails. This enables them to walk away before they start to embarrass themselves and their audiences.
Tony Bennett has, over the course of the last fifteen or so months, been removing himself from live performances starting with his announcement about a year ago that he had developed Alzheimer’s. As this was at the height of 2020’s Covid lockdown, not much mention was made at the time of his live concerts, although they were clearly on hold. Just recently, Bennett’s family announced that he would no longer be doing live concerts.
One must admire the combination of pride and humility resident in Bennett and his family to bring him to this point so that his unfortunate condition can not tarnish his legacy.
Clint Eastwood, whose age comes in four years short of Bennett’s, 91 v. 95, could be expected to issue cautions comparable to those from Bennett. Ageing is unforgiving.[1] But Eastwood sems to be persevering.
There are many elements that distinguish the body of work Eastwood has created, starting with the Leone films. Yes, I know he didn’t direct those films, but he did create The Man with No Name just as certainly as Leone did the films around him.
Let’s consider ageing. Over the course of the roughly 125 years of film history, a fair number of stars have aged in real life and in front of the camera. (It does work that way generally; Billy Wilder’s Fedora potentially notwithstanding.)
Unique among these stars, Eastwood has incorporated the ageing male body as part of the story. In The Mule, characters took apparent pleasure in mocking the central character’s age and lack of youthful energy. They had no problems physically abusing that body. In Cry Macho, Eastwood’s new film, his Mike has a history of medical issues which explain some of his physical impairments. There is a sense, though, that his physical issues are psychological – to some degree. He is, after all, able to tame a wild horse and punch out a thug. These events can be seen as protecting some one or some thing; they have a purpose which energizes Mike.
Cry Macho, in itself as the film’s title, can be seen as a general exhortation to root for macho, which could be seen as an attempt at justification of Eastwood’s career. Macho, however in this case, is personified in a championship class cock-fighting rooster owned by a Mexican-Texan teenaged boy, living officially with his mother in Mexico. The boy, Rafo, calls the rooster Macho because of the fierce determination with which the rooster vanquishes his opponents.
Not often do you see a male-role-model-malnourished teenager finding the necessary inspiration from a barnyard fowl. This is only one of the wise ruptures of convention with which Eastwood populates the film from Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash’s script based on Nash’s novel of the same name.[2]
The story is put into gear by the self-destructive game-playing within a broken family. Rafo’s mother, Leta, and father, Howard, as might be expected both from real life and the genre conventions of broken family stories, use their son as a pawn. It is a role which he fervently rejects, giving his time, attention, and respect to Macho the rooster, as Macho with his inherent spirit deserves it.
These parents are central to the background of the relationship between Rafo and Mike. Rafo has been in the custody of Leta, living a drugged, sybaritic life in Mexico. Knowing he is just a possession to her, Rafo has left home and is living on the streets, surviving thanks to Macho’s violent skills, none of which Eastwood visualizes for us. Rafo rejects his mother because, among other things, she has let one of her hired hands beat him to bring him to subjugation, which only helped enable him to escape. Howard, a rich Texas rancher, has hired Mike, an old friend from their rodeo days, to find the boy in Mexico and bring him back; he lays out his desire as honorable, even noble. Reluctantly, Mike agrees out of a sense of duty. Later, Howard discloses angrily that he saw the boy as negotiating leverage in a legal conflict with Leta over some joint holdings which she has and he wants. In his own way, he sees Rafo as no more a viable being, let alone a son, than Leta does.
As Mike gradually becomes aware of all this, his perceptions of his own situation shift. He comes to understand why Rafo would want to be with neither parent. In doing this, Eastwood engages the essential central theme story of the film.
Mike and Rafo are the hearts and souls of the film. Those moments I mentioned earlier, the horse breaking and the punch, during which Mike’s physical limitations related to his age seem to be rendered irrelevant, both have to do with Mike’s nurturing Rafo like the surrogate father Eastwood has often been over the decades of his films.
As Rafo learns of Mike’s history with ranching and the rodeo, he identifies Mike as a cowboy; Mike’s hat cinches Rafo’s typing Mike in the heroic mode of the classic cowboy created by the Penny Dreadfuls and Hollywood. This automatically wins Mike Rafo’s respect; he sees Mike as the “macho” role-model he has been looking for. While Eastwood does not make an overt issue of his/Mike’s age, he clearly does not want the audience to think he is Josey Wales still. That said, he does get off that one really good punch. It is worthy of Eastwood’s Philo Beddoe from the “Clyde” films, 1978 – 1980. I do think, though, that the audience sighs in secret relief that he doesn’t need to throw a second one.
This punch is critical to the film and to our understanding of Mike’s character. Whatever physical prowess Mike may have had in his youth, those days are gone. His macho now derives from his character. He conveys that idea to Rafo by letting him discover himself.
Over the course of their journey back to the Mexico-Texas border where Howard will be waiting, Mike helps Rafo understand “macho.” There is no real Hollywood didactic conversation where the father figure tells the child: ”This is how you become a man. Got it?” Oh, it happens, but if you aren’t paying the closest attention, you’ll be like a 1960s National League batter waiting for a Sandy Koufax fastball. That batter knew the pitch would come, knew that it would be a fastball, but didn’t know the ball had come by already until he saw the catcher throwing it back. Pay attention, but check your expectations at the door. You won’t get what you are looking for, but you will get what Eastwood wants you to have.
You have to navigate those waters, just you and Clint. It‘s the difference between having to prove that one is macho and simply being so. Rafo has been asking Macho to prove himself every time he was in the ring, in part as a proof of his own macho-ness. Rafo comes to a point where he does not need Macho to be his surrogate. He can be macho himself – without the violence.
The final exchange between Mike and Rafo at the border resonates on many levels, all having to do with Macho/”macho” in specific terms, but they also have to do with Mike’s paternal relationship with Rafo. This is not to say that he tells Rafo what to do. Mike would not do that to Rafo, just as he wouldn’t have that Hollywood didactic conversation. Mike is more concerned with helping the boy understand how to be. If he can do that, what to do will take care of itself. Mike himself, just like Eastwood, doesn’t have anything he needs to prove.
Macho, although he does little in the scene, in essential to clarifying Rafo’s understanding and acceptance of what Mike has been telling him all along.
There is a brief coda, a second cousin to the closing moments of Million Dollar Baby, except that here Eastwood’s character is not alone. Quite an achievement. Eastwood’s heroes rarely have found the relief of an elegant and loving dance, especially at the end of the story. Mike does.
One looks at Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Hitchcock’s The Birds, Huston’s The Dead, Mizoguchi’s Princess Yang Kwei Fe, Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, and Renoir’s Le Petite Theatre de Jean Renoir among late career films of the masters, and there are others. One sees in these a crystallization of a style, a heightened understanding of cinema, that represent a lifetime spent in refining the creation of works of art.
Welcome Eastwood and Cry Macho to that group.
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[1] Pun not intended but accepted.
[2] Copyrighted in 1975, the book has apparently been kicking around Hollywood since then. Reportedly, the story started out as a screenplay, garnered no interest, and became a book. Nash’s reputation as a playwright enabled the book to be published. He died in 2000 and does share screen credit for the script. The data I have been able to find does not say if Eastwood simply went back to the original screenplay or supervised a fresh adaptation of the novel. In any event, Nash’s story made it to the screen after one of the longest gestation periods for a work originally written for the screen.
Forty-six years.
Congratulations, Richard. You won the waiting game!
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Gonna Say it Now 