An homage to Clint Eastwood, the iconic Western star, examining how he became one of America’s most revered filmmakers.
There’s no putting Clint Eastwood out to pasture. Clint turns 91 today, and it’s worth celebrating the fact that this Hollywood legend is still turning out work at a faster clip and higher quality than practically anyone in the business. Granted, prolific doesn’t always mean better, and it can be frustrating to see his fans greet every new film as a fresh masterpiece, when only a fraction of them truly deserve the title. But consider that since the turn of the century, he has given us 17 films including “Mystic River,” “Million Dollar Baby,“ “Letters from Iwo Jima” and “American Sniper” (the latter earned more than half a billion dollars, baby). Four decades ago this year, Eastwood made his directorial debut in “Play Misty for Me,” and for a time, he was dismissed as one of those “actors who directs” — a condescending label typically slapped on dilettantes who did the job just once, like Marlon Brando (with “One-Eyed Jacks”) or Steven Seagal (“On Deadly Ground”). But here we are, with 39 movies made in nearly as many years — that’s counting Clint’s upcoming “Cry Macho,” a grizzled-cowboy-makes-good saga in which he also appears — and the world has come around to recognizing Eastwood as a filmmaker first and an actor second. It helped that the French took him seriously, as press agent Pierre Rissient and other Paris-based champions insisted on treating Eastwood as an auteur early on. Five of Eastwood’s films have competed in Cannes, including “White Hunger Black Heart,” in which he played a loosely fictionalized version of John Huston, another “actor who directs” — and who did his best work behind the camera. Like Huston, Eastwood can’t be pegged down to a single genre, having tried his hand at many, from action (you can feel Don Siegel’s influence in “Sudden Impact”), romance (“The Bridges of Madison County”), war (“The Flags of Our Fathers”), musical (“Jersey Boys”) and of course, Western. Apart from his “shoot first, ask questions later” Dirty Harry character — who appeared in five movies spanning the ’70s and ’80s — Eastwood is most associated with the Western, having effectively replaced the earlier tradition of a friendly, white-hat hero with a stoic, understated character of ambiguous intentions.
