Screen Memories

Dirty Harry in Marrakech

When I was traveling in Morocco during the early 1970s, Mohammed Ali’s picture was plastered everywhere. Along with James Brown, he was claimed as Africa’s native son; most local movie houses were showing films of Ali’s fights and Brown’s concerts. Seeing their faces and names made me feel more at home: the people of Morocco and I shared at least this intimacy. So, one dusty afternoon, my friend and I, tired of the hot glare of the sun, retreated into a dank movie theater, thinking from the billboards of the Ali-Foreman fight that we could catch this mythic match.

Figure 2.

Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Photo from The Museum of Modern Film Stills Archive.

Figure 3.

Dirty Harry. Photo from The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.

Figure 4.

The Exorcist. Photo from The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.

We made our way to the balcony already jammed with men and women of all ages wearing long jalabas and trilling Berber. The air was smoky and smelled of bread and broiled lamb; the darkness was broken by dozens of cigarette ends glowing randomly. No one stopped talking when the screen lit up with an inspired double feature—The Exorcist and Dirty Harry. I hadn’t seen either film. In Boston, audiences at The Exorcist had fainted at the blasphemous language and imagery. Some theaters had refused to show the movie after angry patrons had hurled rosaries at the screen. The Archbishop had denounced the film for inciting such uncivilized behavior. This condemnation alone should have sent me directly to see Linda Blair’s head revolve as she spewed vomit and cursed God and her mother, but for many years, during the Vietnam War, I simply could not watch even the mildest violence. Of course this meant that I never went to see any Clint Eastwood movies, especially not the Dirty Harry films glorifying police vigilantism in the sacred city of San Francisco. But now we were on other turf, and the cartography that mapped moviegoing in the States offered little direction here.

Both films were dubbed in French with Arabic subtitles, so I could follow quite well. The audience loved both films. Everyone erupted into wild hysteria the moment Linda Blair opened her mouth. No one could stop laughing as she spilled curses and vomit all over her bedroom. What was blasphemy in the Irish Catholic neighborhoods of Boston was just plain slapstick to this highly sophisticated crowd. They liked Dirty Harry even more; its stylized acting and the locations around that gorgeous city gave the plot a surreal gloss. The guns kept getting bigger, and the audience howled at the absurd vision of this tall, thin white man blowing bad guys away.

I loved the films also; they are among my most vivid memories of that foreign place. All movies need audiences whose presence charges the screen with unexpected energy and recuts the film into something completely original. These really bad films looked good here; it took this Marrakech crowd to show me just how funny white people in America were. You see, I didn’t know these movies were comedies.

My Summer Job

During the summer of 1976, I ran a program, jointly sponsored by Northeastern University and the City of Boston, to give summer jobs to high-school kids from South Boston and Roxbury. The aim was to get the kids some money and thus keep them off the streets—or rather, since most of the work was street-sweeping and park maintenance, to keep them visibly laboring in the street and so to deny the unemployment figures that for Boston youth were running about 50%. And ideally, of course, to promote interracial harmony. This was the summer of the bicentennial, but it was also the first summer after full-scale busing between these two racially segregated neighborhoods had been enforced. It had been a violent and frightening year...