As the BFI major retrospective of his work at the BFI in London, Time Out looks back at Clint Eastwood’s extraordinary career.
Published in Time Out London issue 1980 – July 31, 2008.
Magnum Opus
The Forties
Clint Eastwood’s route to stardom reads like a Hollywood publicists fever-dream: a childhood spent travelling through the grim, dusty majesty of rural California as his father sought what scant work he could find inform his feeling for sweeping moral landscapes. Follow that up with a host of menial but proletarian gigs such as steel worker and lumberjack that instil in him an intense feeling for the plight of the average Joe. Cap his adolescence with a spell in the Army during which he survived an air crash and heroically swam the three miles back to shore and you’ve already got a resume any of the anodyne buff-monkeys that currently fug up our silver screens would kill for. Throw in the charm and the good looks and it’s a wonder that Clint had any need for Tinseltown at all.
High: Mythic childhood.
Low: Actual childhood.
The Fifties
Eastwood’s eventual arrival in Hollywood coincided with the birth of television and the sickly demise of the studio system. Those preternatural good looks, his physical presence and gravity defying quiff soon landed him a contract with Universal, but he failed to parlay this into any great success. The minor roles he did score were the likes of First Saxon in ‘Lady Godiva of Coventry’ (’55) and Dumbo Pilot in hand-wringing travelogue ‘Escapade in Japan’ (’57). Little could he have known how fortuitous it would be to his later career when in 1959 he was cast as vacuous cowpoke Rowdy Yates in TV roundup, ‘Rawhide’. Though he has often dismissed the role as being nothing more than that of a randy sidekick, it was a part that would bring him to the attention of a certain Italian director…
High: Jet Squadron Leader in creature-feature ‘Tarantula’
Low: Tom, a Ranch Hand in forbidden-lust oater ‘Star in the Dust’
The Sixties
Cheaper than Henry Fonda and less choosy about the script than Charles Bronson, Eastwood landed the role of ‘The Man With No Name’ (in actuality he was credited as ‘Joe’) in 1964’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars’. A reworking of Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ set in the American West, filmed in southern Spain and directed by a director whose English was as good as Eastwood’s Italian, one can only empathise with Clint’s suspicions that he’d get little out of the enterprise other than a little experience and a free trip to Europe. The films formal audaciousness, moral ambiguity and sheer cool, however, made Clint a star – as well as an icon – and spawned two hugely successful and increasingly operatic sequels in ‘For a Few Dollars More’ (’65) and ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ (’66). By the end of the decade Clint was a Hollywood big-hitter, squaring up to Richard Burton in ‘Where Eagles Dare’ (’68 - sadly not included in the BFI season but screened by the BBC every two or three weeks) and failing to outcroon Lee Marvin in the spectacularly odd musical-Western ‘Paint Your Wagon’ (’69).
High: “God is not on our side because he hates idiots also.” ‘The Good…’
Low: “I talk to the trees.” ‘Paint Your Wagon’
The Seventies
Before the conceded the mantle to good ol’ boy Burt Reynolds, the Seventies was undoubtedly Clint’s decade. With his Malpaso Production Company already set up, he indulged in the relative freedom to star in more personal projects such as Grand Guignol Civil War sex-romp ‘The Beguiled’ (’71) in between action films that ranged in quality from the groovy Michael Cimino-directed caper flick ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ (’74) to the mediocre frontier saga ‘Joe Kidd’ (’72) and the elephantine absurdity of ‘The Eiger Sanction’ (’75). It also allowed him, under the tutelage of mentor Don Siegel, to make the long-pondered move into direction with 1971’s unsettling psychodrama ‘Play Misty For Me’ followed, in 1975, with the near-perfect meditation on catharsis vs. redemption, ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’. And then, of course, there was the small matter of Inspector Harry Callahan. Directed by Siegel, 1971’s ‘Dirty Harry’ hit theatres only a few years after the Miranda Act, and while Harry’s ‘shoot first’ policy may well have split the audience politically, it didn’t stop either side of the loon pant-divide flocking to see it. That’s not to say the decade was all kudos and controversy - Clint twice chose to star opposite a smart-ass orang-utan. Wrong turn, Clyde.
High: Squaring off against David Soul in ‘Magnum Force’.
Low: Those bloody monkey films.
The Eighties
Eastwood has shown time and again through his unique career that he is always prepared to try something new. In the Eighties, however, this adventurousness would yield fewer rewards than audiences had come to expect. Although his films were still highly polished and, in the main, hugely watchable, the impetus he had built up with austere prison flick ‘Escape From Alcatraz’ and the loopy masochism of ‘The Gaunltlet’ toward the end of the Seventies had dissipated somewhat. His heartfelt biopic of junk-addled jazz-cat Charlie Parker, ‘Bird’ and the huge box-office returns of the fourth Harry Callahan outing, ‘Sudden Impact’, proved he could still knock one out of the park now and then. The tit-for-tat Cold War politics of ‘Firefox’ and cartoon Imperialism of ‘Heartbreak Ridge’ – which revolved around the invasion of, yes folks, Grenada – were the other side of the coin. Politics were also to the fore in Clint’s public life when the on-screen scourge of City Hall was voted mayor of sleepy Californian seaside town Carmel and immediately set about repealing a law that banned the public consumption of… ice-cream.
High: ‘Bronco Billy’ (’80)
Low: Opposite Burt Reynolds in prohibition no-no ‘City Heat’ (’84).
The Nineties
After closing out the Seventies with purported/rumoured comedy ‘Pink Cadillac’ and Charlie Sheen cop nonsense, ‘The Rookie’, Eastwood would go on to direct and star in a remarkable series of films exploring the nature and corollaries of violence. ‘White Hunter Black Heart’ (’90) saw him essay a thinly veiled portrait of director John Huston on an abortive big-game hunt during pre-production of ‘The African Queen’, while his turn as a modern-day sheriff in ‘A Perfect World’ (’93) prefigures Tommy Lee Jones’s grave exasperation at a world going to hell in a handbasket in the Coen Brothers’ recent ‘No Country For Old Men’. But towering over both of these fine movies is the outwardly simple tale of a broken down ex-gunslinger who gets lost in the smoke from his own blazing pistols one last time, ‘Unforgiven’ (’92). Written way back in 1976 by the script-wizard behind both ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Twelve Monkeys’, Eastwood had been sitting on the project for years, waiting until he felt he was the right age to play the character of William Munny, a widowed former scofflaw who returns to his violent ways only to put food on the table for his ankle-biters. It is a truly majestic piece of filmmaking and one that cemented Eastwood’s standing as one of the great directors of the modern era.
High: Opposite Morgan Freeman in ‘Unforgiven’.
Low: Opposite Denis Leary in ‘True Crime’.
The OOs
In what is becoming something of a motif, Eastwood just about rode out the tail end of the previous decade with a couple of pointless procedurals in ‘Absolute Power’ (’97) and ‘True Crime’ (’99) and the geriatric jolly boy’s outing ‘Space Cowboys’ (2000) before hitting his stride behind the camera. Whether you view 2003's ‘Mystic River’ as nothing more than a forgettable TV movie propped up by a stellar cast, there is no doubting the sure hand at the tiller and the seriousness of Eastwood’s approach to the sensitive subject matter. Similarly, one can accuse ‘Million Dollar Baby’ of being contrived and mawkish, but, if a filmmaker’s job is to manipulate his audience, then the big man more than deserves the Oscar he won for best direction. And while the jury might still be out of his WWII double-header ‘Flags of our Fathers’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’ (both ’06), their scope and daring cannot be faulted. He impressed at this year's Cannes festival, drawing a fine performance from Angelina Jolie in his lavish period puzzler, 'Changeling' and the forthcoming 'Gran Torino' assures us that he has no intention of slowing down.
By this stage in his unique career Eastwood looms across Western cinema like Mount Rushmore – imposing, grandiose but utterly and undeniably impressive.
High: All those Oscars.
Low: ‘Blood Work’
