How Clint Eastwood’s biggest risk delivered his biggest hit: “Most sane men were sceptical”
In life, sometimes you need to take a risk in order to get what you want. This can be as simple as cooking a meal you’ve never had before for dinner, or it can be much more consequential, such as applying for a job you’re convinced you have no hope of landing. After all, you’ll certainly never know if you could have gotten the job if you never put yourself out there to fail. Clint Eastwood understood this need to take risks – it just so happened that his version of it involved working with an orangutan.
By the late ’70s, Eastwood had become one of Hollywood’s most established and bankable stars. After shooting to fame in the late ’60s as the ‘Man with No Name,’ Eastwood racked up hit movies in the ’70s like they were going out of fashion. In addition to three ultra-successful Dirty Harry movies in that decade, Eastwood also busted blocks in High Plains Drifter, Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and The Gauntlet.
However, over time, Eastwood began to get itchy feet from playing a similar type of character in all those films. There was some variation, yes, but generally he played a taciturn, gruff, steely-eyed action hero who was quick with a gun and unflappable in even the most dangerous situations. “That’s fun to play,” he admitted in 1984, “but I’ve done it a lot. I’ll do it again, probably, but I have to broaden the scope.”
To the abject horror of everyone in his inner circle, though, Eastwood’s idea of broadening his scope involved signing up for a script which had been laughed out of the building at most major studios. Every Which Way But Loose was about a trucker who moonlighted as a bare-knuckle brawler travelling across the US in search of the aspiring country music singer he’d fallen head over heels for. For the journey, he enlists the help of his brother and another very important passenger: his pet orangutan, Clyde.
Naturally, the idea of Eastwood making a “monkey movie” was seen as a step too far by his people, with Eastwood admitting to the Los Angeles Times, “Most sane men were sceptical about it; there were conflicts about it in my own group. They said it was dangerous.” While dubbing an action comedy like Every Which Way But Loose “dangerous” may seem more than a little silly nowadays, at the time, Eastwood’s team was as worried about him tackling comedy as they were about him driving around with a great ape in his front seat.
“It’s comedic, and yet it’s different,” Eastwood said. “And if I hadn’t felt in a broadening mood, I might have said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, that isn’t me. I’d better do another Harry or a cowboy.'” However, the thing that really rankled the star was when he was told, “It’s not you,” as if the grim-faced men of action he’d played before bore any actual resemblance to his real-life personality. “It is me,” Eastwood told these naysayers. “Nothing on the screen yet has been me. It’s a left-handed compliment when people say, ‘That’s him.’ If you make people think that, you’ve done a lot.”
So, buoyed by the chance to go out on a limb for once, and frustrated by all the doom-mongers trying to stand in his way, Eastwood threw caution to the wind and made the movie. Critics lambasted it, naturally, but to the astonishment of everyone – except Eastwood – the film was a genuine box office smash, making $104.5million at the worldwide box office.
For reference, even the Dirty Harry sequels fell short of $50million. In fact, to this day, Every Which Way But Loose and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can, are Eastwood’s two most commercially successful films – and we can all agree that ain’t bad for a monkey movie no one wanted him to make.
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