Movie history is filled with surprises. Who would have guessed that a football player from Iowa named Marion Morrison would transfigure himself into the most iconic of all Western heroes, John Wayne?
Among the most astonishing developments in movie history, however, is the evolution of “The Man with No Name” into the greatest living American filmmaker.
In 1964, Clint Eastwood signed up to play the nameless, poncho-bedecked lead character in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. He was compelling enough to reprise the part in a pair of sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), but that still was no indication that he had what it took to command a company of actors, extras, and technicians. After all, who would Eastwood, a veteran of the TV Western Rawhide, have looked to as a model if he secretly sought to direct? No one mistook, say, Gunsmoke star James Arness for an auteur.
But not long after concluding his legendary collaboration with Leone, Eastwood embarked on one of the most extraordinary left turns in Hollywood history: He began directing movies that demonstrated not only his authority on a set but his sensitivity as an artist.
To be sure, Eastwood, who celebrated his 90th birthday earlier this year, tiptoed into directing with the savviness of a businessman rather than the abandon of a poet. Among the six feature films he directed in the 1970s, Eastwood awarded himself the lead role in five. All were entrants in genres in which he had proven popular, including the Western (1973’s High Plains Drifter) and the action thriller (1977’s The Gauntlet). At the same time, signs of Eastwood’s emerging poetic sensibility were present in the 1973 drama Breezy, about a weary businessman whose outlook is enhanced after entering into a relationship with a hippie. The film was considered an aberration among Eastwood’s early output, but in hindsight, its gentle wistfulness pointed the way to his mature work.
Following Eastwood’s directorial career in the 1980s could result in serious cognitive dissonance. In his mainstream entertainments, he preferred a clean, efficient style that, in its combination of fierceness and self-assurance, mirrored his own affectations as an actor. In the endlessly quotable opening scene in Sudden Impact (1983), Eastwood’s Detective Harry Callahan displays unflappable competence in diffusing a robbery inside a diner, engaging in cool banter with the robbers before delivering former President Ronald Reagan’s favorite line: “Go ahead, make my day.”
In his more personal projects, however, Eastwood showed himself to be the same sentimentalist who had made Breezy. Bronco Billy, a touching 1980 drama revolving around the pitiful participants in a down-on-its-heels Wild West show, set the tone for numerous Eastwood films to follow. In Absolute Power (1997), Eastwood played a two-bit thief capable of cracking a safe but challenged in his relationship with his daughter. In Blood Work (2002), he portrayed an out-to-pasture G-man whose heart condition is as important as his skills of detection.
Eventually, Eastwood the director came to feel free to leave Eastwood the actor out of his films, sometimes turning to arcane subjects he felt were worthy of attention. The director commemorated the story of saxophonist Charlie Parker in the dazzling Bird (1988) and of the later life of Ira Hayes, a Native American marine and one of the flag raisers on Iwo Jima, in the much-neglected Flags of Our Fathers (2006). And while Eastwood has never been known for his work with top-tier actresses, in The Bridges of Madison County (1995), he memorably cast Meryl Streep as an Italian-born housewife restively resettled somewhere in Iowa.
Eastwood’s reputation as the chief melancholic in American film was confirmed by his visual style, which was solidly unpretentious in the 1970s but had become dark, rich, and heavily lacquered by the late 1990s. Films like Changeling and Gran Torino, both from 2008, are shot not so much in color as in shades of gray, and in the great Mystic River (2003) about a trio of pals in Boston rocked by crimes, past and present, he found a perfect visual metaphor for childhood trauma spilling into adulthood: In the haunting final shot, the camera dips into the water and stays there.
Those who find themselves with time to stream will be amply rewarded by exploring the nooks and crannies of Eastwood’s filmography, which includes such unlikely gems as his embellished account of the making of John Huston’s classic The African Queen in White Hunter Black Heart (1990) and his quiet drama about the plausibility of belief in the afterlife, Hereafter (2010).
Eastwood has been amply honored for his efforts, netting Oscars for best director for two of his films, the brilliant Western Unforgiven (1992) and the dark study of the margins of the boxing world, Million Dollar Baby (2004). Rounding out a career that, as of this writing, encompasses some 38 feature films, Eastwood has lately been making cases for real-life figures whom he judges worthy of celebration, including pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in Sully (2016) and the three young Americans who spring into action to forestall a terrorist attack in The 15:17 to Paris (2018).
Once, Eastwood almost single-handedly preserved the Western as a viable genre. Today, he is virtually alone in attending to the stories of decent people whose virtue is either misunderstood, questioned, or attacked by those who pull the levers of power in our society — a preoccupation brought forth most fully in last year’s Richard Jewell, which reclaimed heroic status for the Atlanta security guard wrongly suspected of bombing the 1996 Olympics.
Well known for his expressions of enthusiasm for libertarian politics, Eastwood is a case study in the power of artistic self-reliance. He recognized, when no one else would have, that his best role was that of director. Who would have thought that a filmmaker of such skill and sensitivity would spring forth from that man in the poncho who said so little?
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
