In 1976, John Wayne starred in his final film, The Shootist. The parallels between the Duke and his character, John Bernard Brooks, were transparent. Brooks – like Wayne – was dying of cancer. Trying to live out his last years quietly, he can’t escape his reputation as a legendary gunfighter. Don Siegel’s film was a thoughtful, fond farewell to both the Duke and the western. Wayne was 69 when The Shootist was completed: the lung cancer he had had for two decades killed him three years later.
In many ways, Unforgiven was Clint Eastwood’s own The Shootist, his requiem for the West and the western. It was even dedicated to “Sergio and Don”, although the message was more revisionist and less elegiac. But while Wayne was saying goodbye to the world, if the 62-year-old Eastwood was taking leave of anything it was the cowboy movie. The very next year he was back in the box office charts, running around – a little out of breath – as a Secret Service agent in In the Line of Fire. He wasn’t about to fade out gracefully.
On May 31, Clinton Eastwood Jr turns 70. In two months time, Space Cowboys will be released in the US, starring Clint and contemporaries James Garner and Donald Sutherland – along with comparative youngster Tommy Lee Jones – as a group of astronauts hauled out of retirement. It is Clint’s 56th film as an actor, and 22nd as a director. He’s been a top-rank movie star for 35 years: few people – Wayne is one – have been consistently popular for as long. In a 1997 Harris poll, he was still America’s favourite star. And as he’s maintaining a rate of at least a film every two years, there’s no reason to think that he’s stopping any time soon.
Yet in many ways it has been a strange career. Eastwood became a great star of westerns as the genre was dying. He’s a man associated with very big guns who got his best reviews for a film – Unforgiven – that seemed to question Hollywood’s gun culture, if not in an entirely consistent way. He’s an unmistakably American character who has lived almost his whole life in California, yet had to go to Spain to an Italian movie based on a Japanese film to become a star. He’s an icon of the US Right but he once said: “I’ve always considered myself too individualistic to be either right-wing or left-wing.” And he’s a man who at the height of his popularity, when he could have done anything he wanted, chose to make two films co-starring an orangutan.
He was born in San Francisco, 100 miles or so up the coast from his current home of Carmel. His parents were itinerant workers during the Depression. Clinton Jr worked as a lumberjack and in steel mills before being drafted into the army in 1951. Serving as a swimming instructor, he didn’t have to go to Korea. It was his army friends who convinced him he could be an actor, and he spent the mid-Fifties doing bit parts in films such as Tarantula, Revenge of the Creature and Lady Godiva, as well as digging swimming pools to pay the rent. Then in 1959 a CBS executive decided that Eastwood looked like a cowboy, and cast him as one of the stars of the TV series Rawhide. But while Steve McQueen – born two months before Eastwood – made a smooth transition from TV star (Wanted: Dead Or Alive) to movie star (The Magnificent Seven), Eastwood had to take a chance with an unlikely invitation to go to Europe to make a western.
“I’d done Rawhide for about five years. The agency called and asked if I was interested in doing a western in Italy and Spain. I said, ‘Not particularly.’ They said, ‘Why don’t you give the script a quick look?’ I was kind of curious, so I read it, and I recognised it right away as Yojimbo, a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot. Over I went, taking the poncho with me: the cape was my idea.”
Clint Eastwood owes almost everything to Sergio Leone. It was Leone who turned him from a clean-cut American boy into the weird, mythic, amoral Man With No Name. If the Eastwood character in A Fistful Of Dollars is a reluctant good guy, helping the townsfolk because they are too stupid to help themselves, by The Good, The Bad And The Ugly he has few redeeming features at all. Even the process by which Leone worked – using a ragbag cast speaking a range of languages, which meant dialogue was kept to a minimum to keep the dubbing simple – contributed to myth-making. Leone also fetishised stares, and Clint had a great squinting stare.
Unlike the Americans who had worked for Leone making gladiator movies, Eastwood returned home a star, and started working with his other mentor – Don Siegel.
Dirty Harry sealed Eastwood’s place as one of the biggest film stars ever. But it also made a lot of people uncomfortable with him. Pauline Kael, who in 1971 was probably as influential as any film critic has ever been, took against Eastwood for life. She considered Harry Callahan a fascist. “There’s a lot of violence at the beginning of Grand Illusion,” she wrote, “But you’re appalled by it. Bonnie and Clyde suffered for their indifference and casualness about using weapons. Whereas in a Clint Eastwood movie, you identify with the guy with the biggest gun, not the victim.”
It is something Eastwood has been asked about many times. “I think people jumped to conclusions about Dirty Harry without giving the character much thought, trying to attach right-wing connotations to the film that were never really intended. Both Don Siegel – who considered himself a liberal – and I thought it was a basic kind of drama: what do you do when you believe so much in law and order and coming to the rescue of people and you just have five hours to solve a case? I think it was interpreted as a pro-police point of view, as a kind of rightist heroism, at a time in American history when police officers were looked down on as ‘pigs’, as very oppressive people. I’m sure there are some who are, and a lot who aren’t.”
The timing was everything: the history of cinema is full of trigger-happy, rule-breaking cops. But in the context of 1971, as the Nixon backlash against the counterculture was in full swing, Callahan was bound to be seen as a political figure. The film was set in San Francisco, after all. And a lot of Americans enjoyed Callahan’s brutal but effective approach as a contrast to what they saw as the social breakdown around them.
But Dirty Harry isn’t Death Wish. One of Eastwood’s biographers, Richard Schickel, has called him “one of the great ironists of the age”. That’s stretching the point too far. But Callahan is so clearly not just the normal screen cop with a wreck of a personal life, but a borderline psychopath, that the film deserves to be seen as ambiguous in its treatment of its hero.
And while Eastwood was being vilified by the Left, John Wayne refused to work with him. “I gave him a piece of material that I thought had potential for us to do as a younger guy and an older guy. He wrote me back critical of it. He had seen High Plains Drifter, and he didn’t think that represented Americana like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and other John Ford westerns. I never answered him.”
The confusion over Eastwood’s political role was intensified by his stint as mayor of Carmel from 1986-88. Many, including Bob Dole, thought that Eastwood was launching a real political career. But he only ran because he was infuriated by his own problems getting planning permission in the pretty but rather proudly twee California town. His politics are of a traditional American anti-government type: he doesn’t like taxes, bureaucracy or lawyers. On the other hand, he’s wise enough not to be a family-values bore, which would be hard with at least (there are stories of more) five children from four mothers. His first marriage produced two children, but he also had an illegitimate daughter during the same period. He had another daughter between marriages (with actress Frances Fisher). And he’s got a young daughter by his present marriage. His most famous relationship – with actress Sandra Locke – still has legal repercussions 12 years after they split.
His current wife, Dina Ruiz, is part-African American and part-Japanese. Isaiah Washington, who starred in Eastwood’s recent True Crime, suggested that Ruiz might have had something to do with that film’s critical look at race and justice in the US. But Eastwood, as befits a jazz obsessive, has always had a decent record on race, which fits in with his description of himself as “a social liberal and a fiscal conservative”. Even while serving as Carmel’s mayor, he kept making films. There’s no doubt he works hard: those 22 films he has directed were made in 29 years, with other acting roles slotted in between. They always come in on time, and on budget. “I loved it,” James Garner says about Eastwood’s approach to directing. “Be ready. Do it. Bam! Bam! Get out of there.” You couldn’t call him a great actor. Although he said, “I always tried to be a character actor,” he doesn’t have much range. But he is a great film star, an unmistakable presence: the eyes, the voice, the walk, the one-liners. A history of cinema without Eastwood is as hard to imagine as one without Bogart or James Stewart or Marilyn Monroe.
Is he a great director too? He’s certainly made his share of bad films: Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Heartbreak Ridge, The Rookie. And he was given a little too much credit for the films that seemed to mess with the image: Unforgiven and Bird. But he has made stranger, more interesting films: White Hunter, Black Heart – which dissects the macho approach to being a film director. And Honkytonk Man, a bleak and messy film about country music during the Depression, with Clint playing an utterly unsympathetic singer dying of tuberculosis that plenty hated. The unqualified triumphs are all westerns: 1985’s Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and most of all, the spooky, funny and harsh High Plains Drifter (1972), only the second film Eastwood directed and by some way the best.
Here’s a simpler reason to admire him. Asked how he had managed to turn the sickly bestseller The Bridges Of Madison County into a half-decent film, Eastwood didn’t try false modesty or attempt to defend the book. He just said, “I took all the drivel out.” So if you do happen to see him, wish him a happy 70th: he’s earned it. – The Guardian
Clint, year by year
1930 Born 31 May in San Francisco, son of working-class parents Ruth and Clinton Eastwood Senior
1953 Marries Maggie Johnson
1955 Makes first film appearance as ‘Jet squadron leader’ in Tarantula
1959 Wins starring role as Rowdy Yates in new TV western Rawhide. The show and its theme song become hits
1962 Famous enough to guest star as himself in an episode of the talking-horse sitcom Mr Ed
1964 Appears as The Man With No Name in A Fistful Of Dollars, later
followed by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
First daughter (Kimber) born to Roxanne Tunis; Eastwood remains married to Johnson
1965 Current wife Dina Ruiz is born
1969 Makes only musical appearance in Paint Your Wagon
1971 First appearance as brutal San Francisco cop Harry Callahan in
Dirty Harry. Directs first film, the intelligent stalker thriller Play Misty For Me
1978 Makes his first appearance alongside Clyde the orang-utan in In Every Which Way But Loose
1980 Divorces Maggie Johnson
1984 First grandchild (Clinton III) is born
1986 Becomes Mayor of Carmel, CA, winning 72.5 per cent of the vote
1988 Finishes his term as Mayor
1993 Wins best picture and best director Oscars for ‘revisionist’
western Unforgiven.
1995 Given Irving Thalberg Memorial Award at Oscars
1996 Marries news anchorwoman Dina Ruiz. Their daughter Morgan is born
2000 Produces, directs and stars in Space Cowboys. Turns 70