Elephant Man

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Screenplay by Peter Viertel, James Bridges and Burt Kennedy

It is a brave movie star who knowingly subverts the values implicit in his own image. It is a brave director who will guide him through a performance that satirizes the grand manner of one of recent movie history's most revered auteurs and, in the end, devastates the great man's macho posturings. Obviously, Clint Eastwood, who both plays John Wilson -- read that as John Huston -- and directs White Hunter, Black Heart, has more gumption than, say, Dirty Harry Callahan. After all, the short-fused San Francisco cop only had to face down outrageous criminals. Having committed this iconoclastic vision of Huston to film, Eastwood may find himself confronting roving bands of outraged cinephiles.

They should look closely at the film before they leap to conclusions. White Hunter, Black Heart is based on co-screenwriter Peter Viertel's roman a clef, published some four decades ago, about his experiences in Africa when he was engaged by Huston to polish James Agee's script for The African Queen. Eastwood has dared to attempt a faithful impression of the director, his growling drawl, his loose-limbed stride, the arrogant tilt of his head. The result is a stretch for him as an actor, and fun for the audience.

But the film's largest strength is its fully dimensional re-creation of the man's spirit, about which Eastwood is thoughtfully, often amusingly, ambivalent. Huston's love of risk and contempt for caution, qualities that brought out the best in people who co-ventured with him over dangerous ground, are admiringly stated. In one of the movie's best passages, Wilson deliberately picks a fight he knows he will lose with a white racist in an exclusive African club. Sometimes, he says, bloodily staggering away from the encounter, you have to volunteer for losing causes or "your guts will turn to pus."

If that's the good side of conventional maleness, there is a maddening side. A figure like Wilson loves putting everyone around him on hold while he boozes, wenches, arranges elaborate practical jokes and, in this case, pursues a childish obsession. He will not start his movie until he slaughters an elephant. And why must he assault one of nature's noblest creatures? Precisely because, as he says, it's a sin -- one large enough, as he sees it, to match his own inflated ideas about himself.

Wilson at last confronts his black heart's deepest desire -- with terrible consequences to innocent parties, to his sense of himself and most of all to the unexamined ideals by which he has lived. It is a broken man, at least temporarily, who finally calls "Action!" for his film's first sequence, which is the last one in this compelling study of an archetypal character. Especially for those who have pegged Clint Eastwood too quickly as a masculine traditionalist, White Hunter, Black Heart is a movie to conjure with.