The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 102

i suitably masculine and impenel The picture's title translates as Reward, and Cooper says it's I mm i I I Why Mexicans buy Jeff Cooper BY FATANNESLEY FFI 1 'i; A jt8 'r 1 a HOMBRE INCRBBLE Jiife enchilada western. Because, of Kaliman wasn't really a western if filmed in Egypt without a sound dubbed into Snunkh in MvlR re-dubbed into English for An distribution). If $5,000 Reward I it internationally we'll be seeing I a. I Buuiuics. nuicn, OI COUJ how we first saw Clint Eastwood! now-classic A Fistful Of Dollars.

I Eastwood again. Now I know I who know Clint Eastwood, and hil to be a likeable fellow. Great! cooperative on the set, a non-J who cheerfully choked on all I Italian cigars for his protl Eneacinu. vital, but "far fmm a I as my source puts it. 1 lis I career as this umrM'i MnmKar nnI office attraction would seem I based mainly on his profile ail uppeal of the strong, silent tyl UI I lily nil inC SCTtCI Jeff Cooper, on the other well-read, highly articulate and than somewhat of a philosophe discovered shortly after he sett! my holcl-room floor with his Mail He speaks contemptuously or apparatus" (that's the six-Con body, the 48-inch chest, the Ne blue eyes), and announces rathil sionalely that "the only way to II, I.

I using iur eventually becoming everythin apparatus stands for, is to be that smarter than the rest of them mucn more ot a functioning intell. that much more together in you His heroes are Dylan and Thomas Wolfe, and he uses sions like "the cosmic man" as he knows what he's talking about. Why would such a man fast aspirations on a Dint for that matter, would he want movie star at all? Because that name of the game, and Cooper nr. I. 1..

iu uuiics uuuui ii. lie iricu IO CXf I all over dinner, at a fashionable ainp restaurant mat served ex. I organic food (for The Apparatul excellent French wine (for The! presumably). It seems to me there are tw to go with a film career. One wa; be an ac-tor, in the classical sens the other is to be an actor.

As an you play all sorts of different rolt as an actor you're just a guy Robert Mitchum or Clint Eastwoo 7 1 1 liui nn 1. Mtmdu.li. Oklahoma or Texas with your oh and you have one characterizatio rt jeu wooper, me ooy irom Hamilton become the biggest box-office smash in Mexican movies. He's outdrawing Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind. the Number One movie star in fo today? Nope, it's not Cantinflas.

ed to be Cantinflas. Give up? It's Jeff Cooper from Hamilton, Ont. an ambitious fellow who 's got his Clint Eastwood's throne, and he to make it the same way Clint did. or less. They dont call them letti westerns in Mexico City.

what's wrong with enchilada rns? was one of those bright, perfect they still brag about in Los les, despite the smog. The shutters opened on to the palm-lined and the hotel room was awash sunshine. There W3S a knock at the And there was this unreal ire, framed in golden light. ,11. Tanned.

A halo of blond-ted brown hair. Lots of even, jng-white teeth. He wore Levis and itching faded-blue denim shirt, ne by just the right number of ns to show off just the right ise of bronzed, well-furred chest, as pure Hollywood. He was vintage md Rock and Clint all rolled into Updated, of course (stars didn't hair on their chests in those days, All packaged and ready for Jting. iorgeous, gorgeous man" mur-1 the lovely young Canadian doing a screen test with him in ito, three weeks later.

i only we had guys like this in la," said the ex-CBC director, that Los Angeles. "The male-aniinal nen, you know. I mean, what's i with a little sex appeal?" ly god, he's even got a cleft chin," night, as he came through the room door, sat down on the floor i fashion and pulled out a pack of oros. It would be Marlboros. This nay have been born in Hamilton, was manufactured in Hollywood, der who streaks his hair? I guess I picture was playing, and there were five cops there to keep the crowds back, and I was hugging all these little kids and signing autographs, and afterwards they had to whisk me out a back door through the alley.

And you know I like to think I have a pretty realistic attitude about this movie-star business. Got it in and all that. But when I was sitting there at that little table at the front of the theatre, signing all those Kaliman figurines and bumper stickers and lapel buttons and posters that all looked like me, and all those big-eyed little kids were looking at me like I was God or something it felt pretty good, I'll tell Is he exaggerating? No. he's understating it, say two of his Canadian I friends who vacationed in Mexico in August. Actor Jack Creiey and fashion designer David Smith saw Cooper when he was in Toronto earlier doing the screen test, and he told them he'd made a movie that was a hit in Mexico.

"But we had no idea," says Creiey. "I mean, my dear, you go there and his face is everywhere. We kept encountering groups of children, and we'd tell them that Kaliman was at our house for dinner just last week, and their eyes would roll and they'd go raving out into the streets. Just mention Jeffs name, and the reaction is fantastic." It's only the beginning, if all goes well. The picture is expected to be released in Canada and the United States sometime next year, two more Kaliman movies are scheduled for shooting next summer, and meanwhile Cooper has signed a contract to star in a western for the same Mexican producers, to be made in that old John Wayne stomping ground, Durango.

It's all in Spanish, which will take some doing on Cooper's part. He's the only English-speaking actor in it. But it's an Eastwood-type role, he says, so it mostly calls for "si" and "adios" and looking Mexican poster advertises Jeff Cooper's really expected him to say ma'am, and have a horse waiting outside. I certainly didn't expect him to tell me, in language sprinkled equally with four-letter words and references to Plato, how he really is a manufactured product, a working-class kid from a steel town who made himself into a movie star, and how he went about doing that. He'd just come back from Mexico City, where he'd had his first taste of stardom.

The Mexican-made picture Kaliman had been released earlier in the year. Cooper. 33. plays the title role of the tall, blue-eyed super-hero Kaliman, a character already beloved by Latin-American children through comic books and radio programs kind of a combination Tarzan. Errol Flynn and Buddha," says Cooper, "whose mental and spiritual development are supposed to have reached the same heroic plateau as his physical Now swashbuckling role as a comic-book hero.

Cooper says that any actor who played the part in this first Kaliman movie would have been an instant star. But he himself had no idea of Kaliman's popularity until he went on a personal-appearance junket to Mexico City in July. He'd been told the picture was a big success in fact, the biggest box-office smash in Mexico's movie-going history, outdrawing even the imported and dubbed hits like Gone With The Wind and The Sound Of Music but it didn't really sink in until he arrived at the airport in Mexico City. "And then I realized something was really happening. All those people at the airport they knew me.

They were staring and pointing and following me around in little groups. And I don't understand Spanish, but 1 could hear them saying 'Jeff Cooper and 'Kaliman' and I thought: Wow. And then they took me to this theatre where the 9.