On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Clint Might Be Complicit in an Orangutan Date Rape
By 1978, Clint Eastwood had starred in Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy, headlined three “Dirty Harry” movies, and directed six feature films. He could have pulled an Alexander the Great and wept because there was nothing left to conquer. Instead, he teamed up with a monkey.
Against the advice of his agent and manager, Eastwood used his Hollywood clout to force a weird little comedy script called “Every Which Way But Loose” into production. He stars in the film as Philo Beddoe, a bare-knuckle boxer who lives with his mom at the age of 48 and spends most of his time listening to country music with an orangutan named Clyde. It’s an unremarkable movie that deserves to be left on the ash heap of history — even if its $100 million box office haul is an enduring reminder of how low our standards for entertainment once were. But we can’t completely ignore it, because its sequel is a midnight masterpiece.
The 1980 follow-up “Any Which Way You Can” boasts the same robotic acting and stilted dialogue that made the first film so strange, but a gonzo trip to Jackson Hole and a disproportionate amount of focus on Clyde’s ravenous libido make for a transcendent cinematic experience. It’s the absolute pinnacle of the brief American obsession with tough guys driving around with primates that also produced “The Cannonball Run” and “BJ and the Bear.”
Buddy Van Horn’s film utilizes the classic dramatic structure of alternating between fist fights, monkey antics, and mirages of sexual confusion for two straight hours. If “Every Which Way But Loose” was an ode to Philo’s unresolved horniness, its sequel gives Clyde’s frustrations their turn in the spotlight. The film takes every opportunity to remind us that this orangutan is a deeply sexual being — and that Philo has a perverse emotional investment in ensuring his needs are met.
Every Hollywood legend made something embarrassing early in their career — nobody blames Brad Pitt for “Cool World” — but these Philo and Clyde movies are fascinating because Eastwood was a star at the height of his powers who could have done anything. Whenever I watch him break into the monkey cage at a zoo to tranquilize a sexual partner for Clyde, I’m reminded that “an independently wealthy 50-year-old man is doing this because he want
There’s no need to watch “Every Which Way But Loose” before “Any Which Way You Can” — save those two hours of your life for literally anything else. But if you’re up at 1 a.m. and want to drift into a slice of befuddling cosmic Americana about a horny orangutan with super strength, this is really the only which way you can go. —CZ
The Aftermath: I’m Beginning to Like the Pain
Bare-knuckle brawler and would-be opponent Jack Wilson (William Smith) makes an early assessment of Philo’s fighting style when the pair team up for the first of multiple bar fights. “You like pain. You eat it like candy,” he says in a pitchy twang, sizing up Eastwood. “I’ve seen a few cases like that in my time. The more they get hurt, the more dangerous they become.”
Even supported by a clunky confession from Philo in the first act, it’s a minor theme that means next-to-nothing in “Any Which Way You Can”: a movie that ultimately centers its playing field on the fulcrum of beer-fueled fisticuffs and intraspecies fucking. (Clint and Sondra Locke did the dirty with that ape in that barn. You know it, and I know it. End of discussion.)
But the line still sticks with me as a lover of cinema that often makes me profoundly and delightedly uncomfortable. Why are so many of us such masochists when it comes to movies? And why do movies as weird as this one make us wants ones that are even weirder?
Yes, the initial punch of watching, for example, a Clint/Sondra sex scene…intercut with an orangutan sex scene…intercut with two pearl-clutching tourists pulling their backs out…lands like an unwelcome pop to the temple. But, like a prize fighter training in cinema’s grimiest, stupidest, horniest basement, I can’t help but obsess over every weave, jab, step, bob, and boink that one of Hollywood’s most legendary heavyweights, as Christian pointed out, chose to send our way.
Picking apart a bizarre movie like a gameday highlight reel informs you endlessly about a filmmaker’s priorities, and can leave you pondering wonderfully silly mysteries.
Like, there’s a fastidiousness to the factual accuracy of the orangutan mating ritual in “Any Which Way You Can” that’s genuinely alarming. (“He’s showing off!”) But countless other logical oddities — Even neo-Nazis cannot survive baths in boiling tar? How strong is Clyde if he’s ripping apart sheet metal? Is the mob just…stupid? — make you wonder what really made Clint want to make this movie.
Was he after a franchise? A moving tale of friendship? An excuse to make that ferret fight that snake? Or does it really, truly come down to the monkey fucking?
For me, witnessing something so depraved, particularly from someone so famous, gives me an adrenaline rush akin to getting drunk on power. I’ve seen Clint get shirtless and swing from a chandelier. I’ve seen Clyde semi-consensually seduce a recently tranquilized kidnapee. I’ve seen into a part of the 93-year-old filmmaker too many supposed Eastwood fans will pass up for another rewatch of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” What I haven’t seen is “Every Which Way But Loose,” and I’m trusting that’s for the best. Right, Clyde? —AF