by James Perloff, James Perloff:
Perhaps a better title for this post would have been “A Tale of Two Clint Eastwoods,” but I’m no Eastwood expert. I know he’s done quite a bit of directing as well as acting over recent decades, and I haven’t kept up with his work. That’s because I rarely watch modern films, since Hollywood has gone progressively so dark.
I also acknowledge that some people will bitterly disagree with this article. Tastes vary widely, and that’s why any almost any movie or product on Amazon will have reviews that span the full range of one to five stars. This article is something I would have liked to have written over 30 years ago, but I didn’t have a blog back then—in fact, neither did anyone else.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The post isn’t really just about Clint Eastwood; it’s about the Oscar ceremonies, a topic I’ve written about before—e.g., why James Stewart and It’s a Wonderful Life were snubbed as Best Actor and Picture of 1946; why a dull, lifeless story was named Best Picture of 1947; and the remarkable discrepancies in the way Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur were treated at the Academy Awards for 1951 and 1959. The reasons were always political.
Clint turned 95 this year. If you’d like to see him at 25, here he is in an episode of Highway Patrol.
From 1959 to 1965, he starred in Rawhide, a show my family never happened to watch.
His star status continued to rise, of course, with his appearances in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns of the mid-60s; I didn’t watch them until they appeared on TV, but wasn’t all that impressed.
My outlook on Clint changed dramatically, however, in 1972 when one of my apartment roommates told me, “Hey, if you liked The French Connection and Shaft, you’re gonna love Dirty Harry.” I watched it, and definitely became an Eastwood fan. Mixed in with successes like The Eiger Sanction, I enjoyed watching the “Dirty Harry” sequels of the mid-70’s, Magnum Force and The Enforcer.
I think most of Eastwood’s appeal was his masculinity, blended with right-leaning politics. I graduated from Boston University in 1975, and one night a campus dorm was playing an Eastwood double feature. I watched the movies with a roommate, and when the showing ended, and the lights turned on, I looked around and laughed. There was a huge audience, but not one girl. Clint was definitely a man’s man. I‘m not suggesting that Clint wasn’t appealing to girls; it’s just that his films were too violent to attract many women, at least in that era.
In this scene from the Enforcer, Eastwood, as Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, opposes DEI hires in the San Francisco Police Department. One got the impression that Eastwood believed what his character was saying, and the scene is every bit as relevant today. (I don’t own rights to this clip; I’ve just linked it from YouTube.)
For me, Eastwood reached his peak with The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Gritty, authentic, and the most pro-Confederate movie I’d ever seen, with the possible exception of Birth of a Nation. Here is one of several of Josey’s encounters with bad guys:
But the beginning of the end—for me—came with the release of The Gauntlet in 1977. When the film started, a man in the audience rose to his feet and cheered. That was the kind of icon Eastwood had become. But The Gauntlet was a disappointment. Sure, lots of violence, but not a particularly well-crafted or interesting script. Eastwood was apparently determined to make a star of his new girlfriend, Sondra Locke, making a string of movies with her—even his next “Dirty Harry” picture, Sudden Impact (1983), which was so poorly done, I walked out of the theatre without finishing it—something I’d never dreamed I’d do to Dirty Harry.
I think the final straw for me was Tightrope (1983). Eastwood played a cop into kinky sex. As I recall, in one of the early scenes, he has a woman give him a blow job—oral sex. And I was like “What? What’s happened to Clint Eastwood?” Why was that once-conservative icon now doing porno flicks that previously would have been restricted to back-alley theatres? I walked out on that one too. I was pretty much done with Clint Eastwood.
