The steel cowboy, shaken by the music of Charlie Parker, has put his Magnum away in the locker room.
A pause for a beautiful film, Bird. His former supporters want him as president, and Dirty Harry
may return for the fifth time within months.
While his latest directorial feature, Changeling, was praised by critics on the Croisette,
the five films of the Inspector Harry saga — which marked the birth of the anti-hero in cinema —
are being reissued on DVD. Another opportunity to celebrate
Clint Eastwood, tireless actor and director.
Clint Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco. His family’s constant wandering in search of work, and the fact that as a child he often had to spend time alone, influenced his personality, making him a quiet and introverted man.
While attending technical school in Oakland, he first encountered the stage by participating in school productions. Encouraged by friends, he applied for screen tests at Universal Pictures. He was directed toward drama training and in 1955 signed an acting contract.
At first he played small episodic parts in B-movies, and his first major role in the television serial Rawhide was the result of a chance meeting with producer Robert Sparks. Between 1959 and 1966 Clint Eastwood appeared in 254 episodes of the series.
The actor’s characteristic walk and appearance attracted the attention of Italian director Sergio Leone, who offered him a role in his western A Fistful of Dollars.
Wrapped in a dirty poncho, with several days’ stubble and a constant cigar clenched in his teeth, the Stranger appears. Cynical and brutal, he leaves a trail of corpses behind anyone who stands in his way. He protects no one and fights for no ideal.
The anti-hero of A Fistful of Dollars, and of the two following films in the so-called Dollar Trilogy — the spaghetti westerns: For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — permanently defined the actor’s image in films of the 1970s and 1980s, reinforcing his image as a cold, ruthless tough guy and bringing him international popularity.
The fastest surface route between Los Angeles in Southern California and Carmel in the north takes approximately six hours of drive time, although “it’s been done in four” according to Clint Eastwood, Carmel’s most famous citizen. While not the most scenic trip available to the northward traveller, the direct route is not without its points of interest. Among these is a site smack in the middle of the most lonesome and nondescript part of the trek: the place on Highway 46 where James Dean cut short his too-brief career and sealed his legend by slamming his Porsche into an oncoming Ford on September 30, 1955 and dying instantly at the age of 24.
Clint Eastwood is mesmerized. He puts lunch on hold and stares intently at the flat screen TV at the Saloon in the Clubhouse at Tehama. A few miles down the road, the third round of the US Open Golf Championship is underway at Pebble Beach, which Eastwood owns with a group of partners. But instead of fighting the crowds at this most famous of golf courses, Pebble’s co-owner opts to watch the Open at Tehama, his 2,000-acre sanctuary high above the Carmel Valley and the Monterey Peninsula.
“Why would I want to be at Pebble Beach, fighting with 250,000 people to watch this guy putt when I can be here at my own club with my friends watching the whole tournament on a big screen TV?” he asks.
“This guy” happens to be Gary Woodland, a burly Kansas Jayhawk who is not only atop the leaderboard but is playing on cruise control.
“Look at him. Look at the way he walks the course. He’s playing golf out there. Meanwhile, everyone else is playing the Open,” Eastwood says.
Woodland has opened a four-shot lead over Brooks Koepka. A tightly bunched group of challengers sits one and two shots further back. To a man, they line up their putts with laser-like precision, calculating speed, distance, azimuth, and atmospheric pressure. Woodland? He eyes the green, addresses the ball, and drains his putt.
“If he stays this loose and keeps playing like that, he’ll win the tournament,” Eastwood says. (The following day, the 35-year-old proves Eastwood’s point, shooting 2-under in the final round to finish three strokes ahead of Koepka at 13-under.)
Staying loose definitely qualifies as Eastwood’s mantra. The guy’s legendary on-screen cool is no act. During lunch, he and his fellow members at Tehama hail one another casually and catch up about their golf games and their families while they watch the Open.
Says the actor, director and onetime mayor: “I’ve always thought of myself as a character actor, never a leading man.”
By Ric Gentry
At a corner of the Burbank Studios lot, Clint Eastwood meets you at the door of his Malpaso Productions with an easy smile. None of the intimidating grimace movie tough guys are famous for. In fact, Eastwood in person is friendlier or more hospitable than his image would suggest, and more open, too, about himself, what he takes so seriously. And no one in the business, certainly none of his stature, works harder than he does. In the last year he has released three films — The Dead Pool (which premieres on cable this month), Bird and Pink Cadillac — and has begun work on another, White Hunter, Black Heart, to be photographed this summer in Zimbabwe. Despite his recent breakup with longtime lover and frequent co-star Sondra Locke, he doesn’t appear the worse for wear. At 59, Eastwood looks easily a decade younger, wearing a Dos Equis T-shirt, starched laundry Levi’s and a pair of running shoes. Eastwood relaxes in a nicely appointed but otherwise unpretentious conference room, occasionally resting a leg over the corner of a walnut coffee table. He sipped a glass of cold fruit juice as he nestled in and began discussing his films.
Clint Eastwood at 78 : Reckless Again
He’s sitting at home, stroking his pet rabbit. His wife is out. His latest picture is a wrap. He is content to have nothing to do.
“When you’re young, you’re very reckless,” says Clint Eastwood with his usual economy of words. “Then you get conservative. Then you get reckless again.” That is, if you live long enough.
Days before, I had seen Clint’s latest film, Gran Torino, in which he plays a bent and bitter old racist. In the film he lopes, with his trademark dynamic lassitude, into a hail of bullets. He does not look like a man who pets rabbits.
But that’s Clint—a coil of contradictions that go to the very soul of the American male. On film, Clint likes his characters gritty, dark, uncomfortable. In person, he looks younger, kinder, incredibly fit. He could be 50. He is, in fact, a year and a half from 80.
After the screening, I await him in the bungalow where he set down his production company 40 years ago. Clint always seems to appear out of the mist. He arrives generously. His voice is gentle.
“I just ran into a guy a little younger than me,” he tells me. “He says, I’m going to retire. I say, Wait for me. Keep going.” Everybody in my generation, once you get in the seventh decade, they go, ‘Well, what the hell. I’m on bonus time. Let me retire.’”
But making movies is your passion, I say. Would you ever want to give it up?
“No. Never. Never would.” He muses about his father, who was in and out of work during the Depression. “All he ever dreamed about was retiring. And so he did, around 60. He didn’t last very long.”
What we know about Clint Eastwood, this elusive American icon, is that he drifted through his youth: loner, self-taught jazz pianist, digger of swimming pools, star of spaghetti Westerns. In the 1970s, when he was in his early 40s, he asked to direct, did it for nothing, and invented characters who captured cultural moments: the victim of an obsessed stalker in Play Misty for Me, the vigilante cop “Dirty Harry” Callahan, the avenger on a horse for The Outlaw Josey Wales.
“I’m lucky to be here” : Clint Eastwood Rides Again in Cry Macho
Screen legend Clint Eastwood on why he’s still making movies at 91, a missed opportunity with Marilyn Monroe and returning to his Western roots with Cry Macho By Mara Reinstein
“I was in New Mexico for nine weeks working on this project during the pandemic,” Clint Eastwood says, referring to his upcoming film Cry Macho, which premieres on HBO Max Sept 17. “When I got back home, I thought, I’m lucky to be here.”
Eastwood, 91, doesn’t take luck lightly. “My career has been so much based upon luck, things falling into place at the right time,” he says. And the Hollywood legend — with more than 70 acting roles and 45 directing credits — refuses to hang up his boots and call it a career. He enjoys working way too much, directing nine films since 2010 alone.
Cry Macho is one of his most personal yet. In addition to directing, he stars as Mike, a washed-up, broken-down rodeo star in the late 1970s who agrees to take on a new assignment for his ex-boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam): to reunite Polk with his estranged son, Rafa (Eduardo Minett), a young streetwise teen who turned to cockfighting in Mexico — with a rooster named Macho — after his parents’ divorce.
Eastwood enters the picture wearing a cowboy hat, befitting a man who made his mark in Hollywood in the 1959–65 CBS Western series Rawhide (in which he famously played assistant trail boss Rowdy Yates), then took on a fierce turn in the so-called “spaghetti Western” Dollars trilogy as well as a string of other films, including High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Cry Macho, though, marks Eastwood’s first return to the genre since Unforgiven, his 1992 Oscar-winning classic.
…and the prize for the strangest magazine cover featuring Clint Eastwood goes to…TV Taro!
CLINT EASTWOOD
Quiet Gemini
by Jeff Jawer
Clint Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, 5:35 PM PST, in San Francisco. This means that he was born with his Sun in Gemini. In astrology, the sun is meant to describe the core or the essence of a person. Newspaper astrology utilizes only the Sun’s sign to provide its questionable daily forecasts. Astrologers, though, know that all the planetary elements present at the time of birth play a role in describing one’s character and personality potentials. This must certainly be the case for Clint Eastwood as his stolid attitude and reluctance to talk is atypical for Gemini. Gemini is known as an Air sign and has a great deal to do with communications. When Clint plays a role in one of his films you know it is going to be action, not words that count. However, if we look at the meaning of Gemini a bit more carefully, we may find that he does fulfill at least a couple of its basic premises.
Geminis are dualistic or changeable. Gemini is one of chameleon signs—those born under it can assume different roles. For years we have known Clint as the relatively silent hero of action films. His acting and his films received little critical support in spite of great public popularity. Now, in his mid-fifties, Clint Eastwood is being recognized as a leading filmmaker, the rare star who can direct his own work successfully.
Film Comment : May – June 1996