|
 
|
|
Clint Eastwood -
The Action Star |
 While
attempting to master the screenwriter's trade,
F. Scott Fitzgerald once
wrote:
"Action is character"
Sometimes this can apply, but
often in motion pictures (particularly in the last few decades), action
really is nothing more than just that - "action". This situation can become frustrating to players who regard themselves primarily as character actors.
While discussing the merits of this topic, Clint Eastwood once stated
(somewhat surprisingly):
"I've never thought of myself as a leading man,"
"though I guess at one time I was considered one...
being one of the young guys
'boppin' around town on a television series.
But I always tried to be a character actor even then."
Maintaining this identity was hard for Clint-casting directors couldn't see beyond his good looks. Later, when he had established himself with Rawhide and the spaghetti westerns, agents and studio bosses wanted him to play straightforward heroic leads. That's where the money is, after all. For a time, he obliged them with
"Where Eagles Dare", "Kelly's Heroes", "The Eiger Sanction",
but almost always alternating these big pictures with smaller, anti-heroic ventures like
"The Beguiled" and "Play Misty for Me" (his debut as a director).
It seems he's an economical pragmatist, but a true actor at heart.
The more expensive, expansive films fulfilled their function of helping to establish Clint's credentials as a star
one who could carry a big movie. "Bankable" is the term used within the
industry. This was a status that provided him the ability to sell other
projects, leading, of course to the early establishment of Malpaso
Productions. Yet his performances in the blockbuster type films tend to
be more subdued, withdrawn and shy, sometimes almost self-effacing. His
performances in these contexts reflects an actor more serious about his craft than he sometimes chooses to let on.
As a producer and director, it appears he's in search of a screenwriter capable of
developing a real character for him to portray. He's never been shy
about taking a chance in his choice of acting roles (Josh Logan's "Paint
Your Wagon"), and even more adventurous when behind the camera ("Plat
Misty For Me" and his recent triumph - "Million Dollar Baby").
Though the more "off-beat" movies
aren't usually as successful on a financial level, they do
provide Clint
with the opportunity to hone his acting chops, as well as present
divergent themes to the movie audience (1980's "Bronco Billy" comes to
mind). A comparison of "Bronco Billy" to the action-less, but expensive
musical, "Paint Your Wagon" shows that the latter, after a period, wears poorly, precisely because
it does not intelligently confront personal issues, such as the costs of heroism,
(machismo?) and such. This is a subject that deeply interests Clint
Eastwood, though he seldom discusses the issues.
Clint
intended to explore this theme on a deeper level when directing 1982's "Firefox".
However, during production, the emphasis of the plot, and particularly,
the overriding special effects, forced the thematic examination into the
background to ensure commercial success. He was more successful in 1986
when he produced and directed "Heartbreak Ridge". As the "aging
Leatherneck", Gunnery Sgt. Tom 'Gunny' Highway, Clint raucously, yet
poignantly, asks what a lifelong soldier is supposed to do when he's too
old to fight, especially in wars that are becoming increasingly
meaningless. Again in 1990's "White Hunter, Black Heart", Clint examines
what a macho movie director must do when he reexamines the noisy,
careless audacity by which he has lived his life and in particular, the
manner in which he has managed his lifelong professional career.
With these movies,
Clint, the character actor, has found some real, intricate characters to play,
men who, in some ways, subvert, or at least cause us to question, common (and superficial) assumptions about Clint Eastwood's
macho, movie image. In his mind, he has never been an action star, any more than he has been a leading man.
Consequently, without talking about it directly, he would like us to
see, and more importantly, understand this about his "Action Star"
status.
An interviewer once asked Clint:
"Did
you once describe yourself as a bum and a drifter!"
"No,"
he replied.
"What are you, then?" he asked.
 ,
"A bum and a drifter."
This is the image of
himself that Clint has loved to portray to the press and his fans
for decades. Indeed, he was
a child of the Depression, forced to move about constantly as his father
looked for work all through California (mostly the San Francisco Bay
area). His beloved mother, Ruth, also was usually employed as well, so
Clint and his sister, Jeanne, spent several summers at their maternal
grandmother's chicken ranch in the mountains of Northern California.
Despite the family's itinerancy, he grew up in a loving, supportive
environment, and subsequently, developed his hard-working, independent
spirit from both his parents, and especially from his single
grandmother. As a consequence, he left home relatively early and spent a
few years as a young man drifting about in an attempt to find himself.
He joined the Army, serving most of his stint at Fort Ord in the San
Francisco area. An excellent swimmer, he served a good portion of his
army career as a lifeguard, a job that he held outside of the service as
well. He worked in his share of manual labor jobs as well, including
lumberjacking, steel mills, and aircraft factories. While in Los
Angeles, he attended Los Angeles City College, digging
swimming pools under the hot sun of the San
Fernando Valley, and searching for work as an actor.
His lifelong passion for jazz drew
him to his share of shady clubs, just as he had done while in the Army.
He was a student Disc Jockey while in college, a job that didn't
pay any bills, but did provide him the opportunity to develop his
artistic, performance skills (think "Play Misty For Me" - his first
experience as a director). This background gave him the sympathetic
sense of the working-class life, neither patronizing nor indulgent, that
marks some of his best, and no doubt most
enduring, work.
Sergio Leone's
film, "Per un Pugno di
Dollari" was released in Italy and received an unexpected, overwhelming
response. Its popularity spread throughout Europe and into countries
west. It was eventually dubbed in English and released in the US as "A
Fistful of Dollars". Little did Eastwood suspect that in an effort to
escape the evils of typecasting, he would again be consumed by a
character that would follow him for 28 years, aging before film
audiences, eventually retiring as
William 'Bill' Munny (the old,
burned-out gunslinger), in 1992's
Academy Award winning classic "Unforgiven".
Clint Eastwood
once said:
"I never considered myself a cowboy, because I
wasn't,"
"But I guess when
I got into cowboy gear
I looked enough like one to convince people that I
was."
Surely, there were short,
chubby, talkative cowhands in the Old West, but in Hollywood, these guys
are called "Sidekicks". In the movies, the classic western heroes have
always been tall, thin, laconic--and usually, low talking and
flinty-eyed. Does the name John Wayne ring a bell? Clint looked the part, and he gained his first featured
movie roles ("The First Traveling Saleslady", "Ambush at Cimarron
Pass"), his first taste of fame (Rowdy Yates - Rawhide), the
beginnings of his international film stardom (three spaghetti westerns
with Sergio Leone) a twenty year film career (a dozen western
characters) and finally, the ultimate coup, his Academy Awards
(Unforgiven), all for playing the role of the quintessential "cowboy hero".
When he left for Italy to
film 'A Fistful of Dollars", Eastwood thought: "the western was in a dead place, encrusted with myth, poetry, stale pictorialism and simple moralizing." The thing that drew him to this unlikely, low-paying project was the
innate quality that has earned it and his other two Leone films so much disapproval when they first appeared--their straightforward, darkly comic insistence on the primitive and entirely ignoble nature of frontier life.
The impact on the genre
by Leone's western trilogy was ultimately liberating, both for Clint Eastwood as well as to
most of the others working within the form. In the first Leone film, Clint's character was styled as "a grizzled Christ figure" (to use critic Richard Corliss' phrase) who undergoes a
Calvary and a resurrection before bringing redemption--at the end of his gun barrel--to the hellish Mexican border town of San Miguel.
In the first film Clint's Malpaso Productions produced,
"Hang 'Em High", his character, Jed Cooper, is hanged and left for dead in the movie's opening minutes. Rescued, he becomes a lawman who liberates an entire frontier territory from
its reliance on the age-old "lynch law". In
"High Plains Drifter", the first western Clint directed, his character quite possibly represents a figure reincarnated to bring justice to a town every bit as evil as San Miguel. In
"Pale Rider", his Preacher is unquestionably such a figure--returned from the grave to defend the meek from their earthly tormentors. In the two most aspiring
western films he has directed,
"The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Unforgiven", he plays a man broken in spirit who finds redemption through altruistic actions reluctantly undertaken (and in the latter, more ambiguously stated).
Some aspect of the western landscape obviously moves Clint Eastwood to thoughts of regeneration, a subject
not addressed in his other films. Perhaps such meditations can be traced back to his boyhood, when his parents took him to
California's Yosemite National Park. He remembers when he first "looked down into that valley" and was
"moved to something like a spiritual experience by the silence, the emptiness, the beauty of the place".
If ever a man were lost and needed to find himself, it is in such a place that he might begin the search.
What we find in his westerns, harsh and "realistic" as they may be in tone,
is a whispered yearning for--dare one use the word--"transcendence",
that can sometimes be heard.
Clint Eastwood became a star in westerns, but he became a superstar playing cops. One can even identify the exact moment when it happened. It is early in
"Dirty Harry", when a gang tries to rob the bank across the street from Inspector Harry Callahan's favorite hot dog stand. He looks up irritably as sirens sound, guns fire, cars start crashing. Then he strolls out into the street, still chewing his food as he
draws his .44 Magnum, wounds one of the miscreants and opens his immortal dialogue with the man:
"I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five."
This exchange provides one of the sublime moments in modern American movies, not least because it so deliciously parodies the whole tradition of super-cool movie heroism without ever acknowledging what it is up to. Audiences, of course, loved the scene and the tough, suspenseful Don Siegel movie in which it was embedded. Ultimately, Clint would reprise his Dirty Harry characterization four times. But one critic, Pauline Kael, loathed it. The action genre, she wrote,
"has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced." Her
harsh criticism of the movie resulted in it being branded "controversial",
but worse was her insinuation that Clint, himself, was some kind of right-wing crazed
fanatic. These allegations dogged the actor for several decades.
"Dirty Harry" tapped into popular resentment of what many felt at the time was an excessive judicial concern for criminal rights. In those days, the liberal intellectual community felt that these protections, most famously expressed in the Miranda decision, had been late in coming and required defense against critics in law enforcement. When Dirty Harry appeared in 1971, the
liberal spirit of the sixties (generally anti-establishment, specifically anti-police), was still very much
present in the public's mind. Thus, critic Kael's excessive panning and
negative ideological spin of the picture ignited controversial
discussions throughout the nation. It is certainly true that Harry Callahan's attempts to capture a psychopathic killer who is terrorizing San Francisco are constantly thwarted by a police bureaucracy bowing to liberal pressure and that he fails to observe all legal niceties in this case. Granted, Harry is not always--to put it mildly--careful in the way he expresses contempt for this caution, and he is not often delicate in his handling of suspects. On the other hand, his willingness to take certain aspects of the law into his own hands fits well within a long tradition of rebelliousness against bureaucratic authority in police dramas. The cop who refuses to go entirely by the book is nearly always the hero in these films. Dirty Harry merely ratchets up the intensity of that very basic conflict. In any event, Kael was dead wrong about the nature of fascism: in its essence, fascism is bureaucracy gone mad, intruding into every aspect of ordinary life, and is, as this century's history amply proves, a phenomenon of both the left and the right. Since Dirty Harry Callahan is at least as much against bureaucracy as he is against "coddling" criminals, he is manifestly an anti-fascist-some kind of instinctive libertarian more likely, and a man who judges his fellows on the basis of deeds rather than ideology. As we look back on the film almost a quarter century later, we see two things: that at every level of society sympathy has switched decisively toward victim rights and away from criminal rights, which makes Harry Callahan look almost like a prophet; and that the violence of the movie, also much criticized at the time, looks mild in comparison to the preposterous firepower now routinely released in urban action films (Die Hard or Lethal Weapon films or almost anything starring Sylvester Stallone).
All of that aside, Harry Callahan's popular appeal
was not based on his actions, or even in his "philosophy." It was a matter of character. He was the ultimate blue-collar guy, stuck in a tough, underpaid, generally unrewarding job, harassed by fancy-talking, over-privileged bosses. The difference between
the character of "Harry" and the ordinary guys (females, as well) in the audience, is that he had the
guts (gumption) to talk back and to take muddled matters into his own hands,
rectifying them without seeking the permission of the proper
authoritative figures. Additionally, his lonely, loveless life, his bad wardrobe, his cruddy diet,
these were the sacrifices necessary for his independence and his devotion to duty.
These personal sacrifices were a resultant tradeoff, ones with which the
movie audience could readily identify.
Clint Eastwood understood this character with whom
he too could identify. He had been raised in blue-collar Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, gone to a trade and technical high school, knew (and continued to respect) working-class people, their virtues, their frustrations, their outrages. Ultimately,
he felt that that was what this movie, and the subsequent "Dirty Harry"
films, were most concerned. Plus, the other cops he played--whether it was the drunken loser Ben Shockley in
"The Gauntlet" or the sexually confused Wes Block in "Tightrope", also
possessed these same characteristics. They were never smooth, articulate
guys. They weren't especially intelligent; they just had good, sound instincts. These
characters all used flattery, with understanding, to calm the enraged
authority figures, yet never toadied to them. It's no wonder Clint's audience could never get enough of them.
|
|
|
Films Directed by Clint Eastwood |
|
|
|
Latest Clint Eastwood News |
|
April 28, 2006 |
|
|
|
|
Movie veteran CLINT
EASTWOOD blew former child star JAMIE BELL away with his
amazing feats of athleticism while shooting new war movie
"FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS". Despite being 75, the macho movie icon
continually impressed the "BILLY ELLIOT" star with his
tireless displays of enthusiasm and adventure.
 |
Bell says:
"Clint could kick all of our asses put together, we were out on the
Icelandic Sea doing the landing-craft sequence where the
marines hit Iwo Jima and Clint's in the boat with us, he's
jumping from boat to boat. He's seventy-something, but he
flies helicopters and he drives four-wheelers". |
|
MERYL STREEP mentally
"put a dress" on directors CLINT EASTWOOD and MIKE NICHOLS
in order to garner inspiration for her hard-bitten role in
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA.
Streep, who plays
fashion editor MIRANDA PRIESTLY in the new movie, has always
been bemused that toughness in men is always accepted, but
in women it is seen in a negative light. But she chose to
use this reality to inspire her steely character.
|
Aug.
09, 2006
She says, "Clint Eastwood would say 'Give me that' and
it would be given to him. That same directive, that same
tone of voice from a woman is intolerable. "A woman who
says 'Give me that' without adding 'Would you please' or
'Sorry, I hate to trouble you, but would you...' will be
dubbed a bitch." |
|
 |
|
|
Clint Eastwood Sites on the web:
|
|
|
 TOP
 |
MALPASO
PRODUCTIONS
