To mark a major Clint Eastwood retrospective at the BFI Southbank, Adam Lee Davies provides a decade-by-decade survey of the great man’s life in film
1940s
Clint Eastwood’s route to stardom reads like a Hollywood publicist’s dream. A childhood spent travelling through the grim, dusty majesty of rural California as his father sought factory work informed young Clint’s feeling for sweeping moral landscapes. Follow that up with a host of menial but rugged proletarian gigs such as steel worker and lumberjack that instilled 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 actors that currently fug up our screens would kill for. And this isn’t even to mention the easy charm and good looks.
High: Mythic childhood.
Low: Actual childhood.
1950s
Eastwood’s eventual arrival in Hollywood coincided with the birth of television and the demise of the studio system. Those handsome features, 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 what a stroke of luck it was when in 1959 he was cast as vacuous cowpoke Rowdy Yates in TV series ‘Rawhide’. Though he has often dismissed the role as nothing more than 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’.
1960s
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 filmmaker whose English was as good as Eastwood’s Italian. One can only empathise with Clint’s suspicions that he’d get little from the enterprise other than a free trip to Europe. The film’s formal audaciousness, moral ambiguity and sheer cool, however, made Clint a star, and spawned two hugely successful, 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 struggling 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’.
1970s
Before he conceded the mantle of Hollywood good ol’ boy to Burt Reynolds, the ’70s 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 absurd climbing picture ‘The Eiger Sanction’ (’75). It also allowed him, under the tutelage of mentor, director 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, which guaranteed certain rights for police suspects, and while Harry’s ‘shoot first’ policy may well have split the audience politically, it didn’t stop either side of the 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 orangutan. Wrong turn, Clyde.
High: Squaring off against David Soul in ‘Magnum Force’.
Low: Those bloody monkey films.
1980s
Eastwood has shown time and again a readiness to try something new. In the ’80s, however, this adventurousness would yield fewer rewards than audiences had come to expect. Although his films were still highly polished and, in the main, watchable, the impetus he had built up with austere prison flick ‘Escape From Alcatraz’ (’79) and the loopy masochism of ‘The Gauntlet’ (’77) towards the end of the ‘70s had dissipated. His heartfelt biopic of junk-addled bebop-jazz pioneer Charlie Parker, ‘Bird’ (‘88) and the huge box-office returns of the fourth Harry Callahan outing, ‘Sudden Impact’ (‘83), proved he could still knock one out of the park. The tit-for-tat Cold War politics of ‘Firefox’ and cartoon Imperialism of ‘Heartbreak Ridge’ (‘86) – which revolved around the invasion of sleepy Caribbean isle 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 Californian seaside town Carmel and immediately set about repealing a law that banned the public consumption of… ice-cream.
High: As full-time dreamer ‘Bronco Billy’ (’80).
Low: Opposite Burt Reynolds in Prohibition-era no-no ‘City Heat’ (’84).
1990s
After closing out the ’80s with purported 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 the Coens’ ‘No Country for Old Men’. But towering over both is ‘Unforgiven’ (’92), the outwardly simple tale of a broken-down ex-gunslinger who gets lost in the smoke from his own blazing pistols. Written way back in 1976 by the script-wizard behind ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Twelve Monkeys’, the project had been on the shelf for years, waiting until Eastwood felt he was the right age to play William Munny, a widowed former outlaw who returns to his violent ways to put food on the table at home. It is a majestic piece of filmmaking, one that cemented Eastwood’s standing as one of the great directors of the modern era.
High: The solemnity of ‘Unforgiven’.
Low: Two words: ‘Absolute Power’.
2000s
In what is now something of a pattern, 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 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. Similarly, one can accuse ‘Million Dollar Baby’ (’04) of being mawkish, but, if a filmmaker’s job is to stir his audience, then the big man more than deserves the Oscar he won for best direction. And while the jury might still be out on his World War II 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 over Western cinema like Mount Rushmore – imposing, grandiose, undeniably impressive.
High: All those Oscars.
Low: ‘Blood Work’.
Clint Eastwood season runs at the BFI Southbank throughout August. (020 7928 3232/www.bfi.org.uk)
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