Dynamite on Horseback

On a late summer day an amiable pleasant-looking young man stood hip-deep in the mustard weed which overruns Albertson’s Ranch, a TV location some 50 miles northwest of Hollywood, and explained why people don’t really know who Clint Eastwood is. “Because,” said Clint Eastwood, digging a scuffed boot toe deep into the yellow dust of Albertson’s, “I don’t really know who I am myself.”

The Great Who-Am-I-and-What-Am-I-Doing-Here Syndrome is hardly new to the acting profession, let alone to comparatively inexperienced actors who learned to star before they learned to act. But in the case of 32-year-old Eastwood, the co-star of a successful and dusty Western called Rawhide, the symptoms are particularly acute. He does not just idly wonder who he is and where he is going; he plunges headlong with a grinding singleness of purpose roughly tantamount to the forward motion of a Sherman tank. The cloak of boyish amiability — he has all too often been characterized as “mild,” “nonrebellious,” even “apologetic” — is just that: a cloak, and a thin one. Underneath there lies not so much a man as an explosion.