From guns to roses, it has been one long haul for the flint-hearted man.
His on-screen, granite-faced, monosyllabic tough guy persona once prompted a critic to assign him to the Mount Rushmore school of acting. As a producer-director, they said, he could not think beyond his guns.
So when he mused aloud, “I just do my thing… eventually you do something that someone thinks is okay,” cinema savants did not give it a penny’s thought.
But this turned out to be one Cassandra’s prophecy when the US Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences honoured Clint Eastwood with the Irving Thalberg Award for producers/directors, ensuring for him a place in the annals of Hollywood cinema alongside the likes of Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.
Like him or hate him, there’s no denying the popularity of either Eastwood himself, or the roles he enacted in his 50-plus films, more than 30 of them as producer-director.
Attracted as one was to the non-conformism of the cowboy and the cop (two genres that he made his own), one wondered why their range of expression could barely stretch beyond the Winchester at one end and a Magnum at the other.
After all, the quintessential Eastwood characters just shot people at random, this gang, that gang, bang, bang, bang. And quit the scene (or what was left of it). Everyone, save the undertaker and the usher, were left dodos. One had to have a bullet-sized brain to find it heroic.
The loner of the Eastwood roles grew up in the playground of his childhood. Born in recession-hit San Francisco on May 31, 1930, the young Clinton lived in 10 different homes and studied in as many schools while his family moved across the California country looking for work. “I was always the new kid on the block, always on the defensive, always having to punch my way out of something, I got used to hanging out by myself,” he recollected once.
Clint Eastwood got into the gear as a truck driver in Hollywood and literally gatecrashed into the Universal Studios. His screen debut (as a laboratory assistant trying to catch a mouse) lasted less than a minute in Revenge of the Creature (1955), a sci-fi film shot in 3-D.
After Francis in the Navy (1955) and Escape in Japan (1957), Eastwood switched to the small screen, playing Rowdy Yates in Rawhide, a TV Western that ran on CBS for more than seven years. His portrayal convinced Vittorio de Sica’s ex-assistant, Sergio Leone, to rope in Clint Eastwood, for his audacious, so-called ‘spaghetti Westerns’.
The first in the shot-in-Spain spaghetti trilogy was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a bizarre subversion of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It came to be widely accepted as a cult film and cast Eastwood into the mould of the archetypal ‘Man with No Name’; squinting in the scorching sun, curt, cool and laid-back, but remorseless and rancorous at the same time, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, without a past, without a future.
The film raked in enough money, alluring Eastwood to stay with Leone in the two equally successful sequels to the new-look Western: For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). The stranger cowboy spoke little and Eastwood had more than a say in it.
In Fistful…, he persuaded the director to hack three pages of script down to two sentences: “I knew someone like you once. She had no one to help her.”
Clint Eastwood became so much steeped in the dollar syndrome that even his first American-made Western smacked of the all-too-familiar-spaghetti-flavour.
“I do the kind of stuff John Wayne would not do,” he had declared proudly (as if anyone needed to be told). Wayne himself, however, was graceful enough to admit that Eastwood was the best remaining hope for the Western.
But after High Plains Drifter (1976), Wayne was forced to eat his words. He write to Eastwood, “This isn’t what the West was about. That aren’t the American people settled in this country.”
Clint Eastwood finally tread on the traditional Western path in his tenth of the genre: Unforgiven (1992), a work that echoed the glory of the great Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Though the storyline was nothing new – that of the old gunman picking up his weapon for one last job, it did fetch him a fistful of Oscars for the Best Film and the Best Director, something he had not won before.
Yet, Eastwood’s elegiac tribute to the West was not really original. Its story of the gunman failing to shake off his past owed much to Gregory Peck’s The Gunfighter.
If, after the death of Wayne, Eastwood almost singlehandedly kept the Western alive as a commercially viable genre, few police-city crime dramas have achieved more popularity than his Dirty Harry saga.
Clint Eastwood’s tryst with his second genre began when he brought his cowboy to the big city and made him into a cop. Like the spaghetti dishes earlier, Dirty Harry (1971) was lapped up, this time by an audience sick and tired of ever-increasing city crimes.
The role was vintage Eastwood: a hard-nosed, terse, cynical loner who was more than willing to bend (read, break) the law to protect the weak.
Critics were far from pleased and were soon gunning for the Harry Callahan character. And after the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), they said Eastwood could do only one thing – play Harry over and over again.
The overwhelming success of the series failed to cut ice with the cineastes. Pauline Kael even went to the extent of dubbing Callahan as a man who stood for ‘vigilante justice’, besides describing the films as ‘fascist’.
Clint Eastwood has flirted, time and again, with this genre and that, but commercial success more often than not flowed from the barrel of the gun. His two ear movies: the Alistair Maclean adaptation of Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970) were moderately successful, as was the prison drama Escape from Alcatraz (1979). The musical Paint Your Wagon (1969) (in which he also sang two numbers) was ridiculed by the classes and the masses alike.
The comedy Thunderbolt and Highfoot (1974) was a departure from the usual fare, he poked fun at his own macho image in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1981), but ended nowhere. All said and gun, Eastwood failed to hit comedies, though his Capteseque Bronco Billy (1980) did impress the critics for once. The tearjerker Breezy (1982) too proved beyond the range of guns.
Eastwood’s paeans to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in Bird (1988) and Hollywood giant John Huston in White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) were better received. He first, hailed at Cannes for its technical sophistication, was only the second venture he directed by did not star in. The first was Breezy.
The gun still rules and the Irving Thalberg Award has codified Clint Eastwood as a respected filmmaker and Hollywood statesman, after a 40-year career as an actor, and since Play Misty for Me (1971) as a director.
If Clint Eastwood’s success is of any measure, he has earned his laurels for sticking to the gun.
