Clint Eastwood

[A Tribute By
Carletto di San Giovanni:]
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www.directorspotlight.com
Over the past three decades Clint Eastwood has been responsible for directing a varied range of films that have garnered both popular and critical acclaim. Moreover, through the formation of his own production company, he has exercised a considerable control over a string of other projects. Probably best known as an actor, he has appeared in 55 films to date and has regularly held the title of number one US box office star. His persona as a laconic anti-establishment icon was cemented early in his career, through his starring roles in A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). By the early 1970s he was already seeking out more challenging parts in films such as The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971) that allowed him to extend his star persona, maintaining some of its most popular features whilst shying away from a relegation to stereotype.Eastwood started directing just a few years after making his name as a movie star, although his presence as an actor in the majority of these early projects tended to eclipse his directorial achievements. Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s he was already starting to be recognised as a talented director with a consistent and idiosyncratic style. This critical recognition was enhanced by his movement away from genre pictures, as he showed instead an increasing predilection for less commercial projects such as Bird (1988) and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). His position as one of America's most respected directors was cemented by his receipt of an Oscar for directing Unforgiven (1992), which received widespread critical approbation as well as achieving his highest box office as either a director or a star.Less acknowledged than Eastwood's work as an actor and director is his role as a successful producer, overshadowed perhaps by his other roles, since to date he has produced only one film that he did not appear in or direct: The Stars Fell on Henrietta (James Keach, 1995). Nonetheless, an evaluation of Eastwood's work as a director is hard to separate entirely from his position as a producer of many of those films. Whether Eastwood accepted a producer credit or not, each of them was made under the umbrella of Malpaso, the production company that Eastwood formed in 1968, which has helped him to satisfy his drive to govern every creative aspect of the films with which he has been involved. This control has ranged from selecting and developing scripts to the approval of casting and choice of crew, including the director where he has not assumed this role himself.Eastwood first entered the film industry in the mid-1950s, appearing as a bit part actor in several undistinguished films. His big break as an actor came in 1957 when he took on the role of Rowdy Yates in the TV series Rawhide, in which he appeared throughout its seven year run that commenced with the first broadcast in January 1958. It was during this period that he developed an interest in directing. Having taken the opportunity to learn the business by observing the extensive team of directors working on the series, he was lined up to direct an episode himself, but the plug was pulled by the CBS network after a directorial botch job by an actor working on another series. The 'Dollars Westerns' he starred in for Sergio Leone were filmed during Rawhide's summer breaks, and gave Eastwood the opportunity to observe the work of a director who proved influential on both his star image and directorial style. The US release of these films was delayed for reasons of copyright – A Fistful of Dollars was essentially an unauthorised remake of Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961) – but their appearance in the USA in 1967–68 established his domestic reputation as a film star of note.Eastwood's first starring role in America was in Hang 'em High (Ted Post, 1968), a Western that derived its style explicitly from the Leone films. The director was selected personally by Eastwood, who had worked with Post on episodes of Rawhide. This coproduction between Malpaso and United Artists was just the first of Eastwood's many filmic collaborations with ex-Rawhide crew. His next film, Coogan's Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968), represented a significant moment in the movement towards his subsequent career as a director. It was the first of five films directed by Don Siegel in which he was to appear, and these collaborations helped to shape the development of Eastwood's own directorial style and practice. His debut as a director came with Play Misty for Me (1971), in which he gave Siegel his first acting role, as a way of thanking the director for sponsoring his application for membership of the Directors Guild. After Play Misty, he continued to appear in films directed by others, in addition to pursuing a string of directorial projects himself. As he became more secure in his own capabilities, Eastwood tended to hire only directors who would defer to his wishes. This tendency was compounded by his disagreements with Philip Kaufman, the original director he fired from the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Later he was to wrest directorial control of Tightrope (1984) away from Richard Tuggle, although Tuggle's name remained on the credits as, by then, the Director's Guild had instated the 'Eastwood rule' which prohibited actors from firing directors and taking over themselves. In more recent years his career has been characterised by a growing tendency to direct and it is now a full decade since he has performed for another director in In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Peterson, 1993). Although he continues to combine the roles of director, producer and star, most recently appearing in Blood Work (2002), he increasingly eschews starring roles in favour of directorial work, and his latest release, Mystic River (2003), is the fourth film for which he has remained entirely behind the camera.One of the most characteristic features of Eastwood's films as a director is a stylistic economy borne out of the production process. This is symptomatic of the ethos of the Malpaso Company, which has itself been shaped by the history of Eastwood's career prior to his emergence as a director. His experiences working in television had schooled him in working to tight budgets and deadlines, and his involvement in the Dollars westerns had shown him that economical modes of production could be translated into successful feature films. He also adopted many of the working practices of his mentor Don Siegel, praising in particular “the organised way in which [Siegel] prepares for production and his economy in shooting”. Robert Daley, a producer for Malpaso, describes a company policy whereby “only accurately and tightly budgeted screenplays would be bought. 'Pre-sold' packages would be avoided, as would screenplays which involved too much spectacle and special effects. Location filming would be favoured over studio work”.In addition to these features, Malpaso films are characterised by the collaborative nature of their production. “That auteur crap is exactly that,” Eastwood has stated. “It's an ensemble: fifty, forty, twenty – or however big your crew is – guys all working together”. “When I went into directing,” he says, “I brought to it the philosophy that a director needs a lean, creative, hand-picked crew – large enough to do the job but small enough so that everyone has a sense of participation and constant involvement”. Although keeping few on permanent salary, Malpaso productions have often used the same cast and crew in many projects. Some of these, such as director Ted Post, first worked with Eastwood on Rawhide. Others were bequeathed him by Don Siegel, such as the stunt man Buddy Van Horn, who would subsequently direct Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can (1980), The Dead Pool (1988) and Pink Cadillac (1989), and the cinematographer Bruce Surtees, “The Prince of Darkness”, whose own distinctive style has made an enormous contribution to the look of Eastwood's directorial works. Ferris Webster, Eastwood's regular editor until the early 1980s, when the role was assumed by his assistant Joel Cox, first worked with him on Joe Kidd (John Sturges, 1972). This was also Eastwood's first contact with James Fargo, who was one of Eastwood's regular assistant directors and took the director's chair himself for The Enforcer (1976) and Every Which Way But Loose (1978). Readings of Malpaso as a family endeavour were later literalised in Eastwood's casting of his own children in several films, including Kyle in Honkytonk Man (1982), Alison in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and Francesca in True Crime (1999). He was also notorious for providing girlfriends with acting roles, seen especially in the series of collaborations with long-time partner Sondra Locke, which resulted in The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet (1977), Bronco Billy (1980) and Sudden Impact (1983), as well as two further films in which he starred but did not direct, Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can.If economical production values are a pivotal feature of the films Clint Eastwood has directed, there are also many other shared properties that characterise his work as a director, some of them stylistic, others based upon a proclivity towards certain themes and characters. “Every picture takes on its own style,” claims Eastwood. “I get into the film and then I get the look of it as it comes, rather than having a constant style that goes through each film, putting a mark on it”. His visual style has indeed shown variations, tailored to create the appropriate tenor for each work, and also evincing some signs of a linear development across his career. His first film, Play Misty For Me, established many of the features that critics came to read as characteristic of his style, such as hand-held camerawork, tracking shots, aerial photography, and low camera placement when filming actors. The juddering hand-held camera proved especially effective for moments that combined physical and emotional tension, such as the spontaneously violent outbursts of Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), the one-night-stand-from-hell who assumes the persona of a crazed stalker wreaking devastation on the life of Carmel disc jockey Dave Garland (Eastwood). Like Siegel, Eastwood has always been effective in his filming of violent action scenes, preferring to move the camera into the heart of the skirmish, capturing its intensity with a furious montage of fragmented bodies and barely-glimpsed weaponry.Play Misty also heralded Eastwood's ongoing predilection for a style of location shooting in which the landscape itself became an important player in the film. Set in his hometown of Carmel, California, the opening sequence shows Dave driving along the coast that features repeatedly through the film. The lengthy romantic scene with his girlfriend Tobie (Donna Mills) also takes place out of doors, traversing beaches, woodlands and meadows to the accompaniment of Roberta Flack's now classic song, "The First Time I Saw Your Face". Eastwood has attributed his penchant for working in “realistic, authentic backgrounds” to his experiences of location shooting in Europe, especially, one assumes, on the Leone Westerns.Eastwood's next film as a director, High Plains Drifter (1973), showed significant changes in the way that location shooting was used. Although shot out of doors, the set of a Western town was constructed specifically for the picture (and burned down for the end of it). This film does not attempt the naturalism to which Play Misty aspired, opting instead for schematic stylisation and what several critics have seen as “operatic exaggeration”. In this respect, more than any of Eastwood's other directorial works it manifests the influence of Leone. By the time he directed his next Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, three years later, he had already shed most of the Leone mannerisms and, bar occasional moments of stylistic flourish, opted for a more self-effacing style.Josey Wales represents another defining moment in the development of Eastwood's directorial style. Although it was not the first of his films to use Bruce Surtees as cinematographer, it was the first in which he fully harnessed Surtees' capability to assemble a tablature out of richly textured shades of darkness, faces shadowed by backlighting even in the height of day. Eastwood conceived of the lighting effects as playing as much a part in the movie as the natural landscape, shifting its tonalities in accord with the development of the narrative and characters. Surtees' dusky cinematography came to dominate the visual style of Eastwood's films as a director, persisting years after the role of cinematographer was passed on to Surtees' former camera operator Jack Green who acted in this capacity on every film from Heartbreak Ridge (1986) through to True Crime. Reviewing Heartbreak Ridge, Richard Combs found fault with the ubiquity of this style, arguing that, “Eastwood's recent films have closed around him with a stylistic heaviness, a sombreness... [acquiring] a peculiarly penumbral look, even in broad daylight, suggestive of a twilight of the gods”. This appearance is evidenced especially in some of the later character-focused pieces such as Bird, where the faces of an almost entirely black cast are sometimes barely visible in the shadowy enclaves of the night-time sets, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is composed almost wholly in shades of brown.The mise en scène is not the only distinctive formal attribute of Eastwood's directorial work. Perhaps more than anything the tone of his films is characterised by the tempo of the editing. If elements of his shooting style, such as the rapid cutting of action sequences, owe a great deal to Don Siegel, the dominant pace tends towards all the lazy grace of the characters for which Eastwood is best known as an actor. It is rare for Eastwood to bring in a film under two hours long, with Bird stretching to 161 minutes and Midnight in the Garden not far behind. Eastwood characterises his style as “a combination of pace and an eye for composition”, although in recent years many critics have expressed concern that pace is exactly what Eastwood's films now lack. Certainly his more recent thrillers, such as True Crime and Blood Work, proceed with a more languorous gait than did earlier films such as The Gauntlet, or even the critically panned Firefox (1982). Interpreted by several reviewers as a throwback to a far older style of filmmaking, Blood Work inspired critic Kenneth Turan to muse, “You don't know whether to admire the film's stately nature and call it classicism or be exasperated by a noticeable lack of pace”.Other defining features of Eastwood's work hinge upon the repetition and variation of themes and characters. Some of these are borne out of the ways in which he has consciously developed and subverted his own already-existing star image, a persona he has used with some considerable irony when directing himself. Others, such as his preoccupation with American cultural identity, have been read by some critics as arising from elements of his own autobiography, as well as from his cinematic upbringing in the intrinsically American genres of the Western and the urban cop film.Whatever its origin, it is hard to ignore an obsession with characters that fight to achieve, in various ways, the American Dream of material success coupled with self-actualisation, occasionally failing but generally succeeding against all the odds. One of Eastwood's most important and celebrated starring roles, as the eponymous Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), crystallised a persona where Harry is represented as crusading for the rights and values of the common man, in the face of a corrupt bureaucratic system on the one hand and on the other a psychotic killer preying on victims emblematic of societal fragility.In Eastwood's own directorial work the theme of the triumphant underdog is perhaps most clearly expressed in The Gauntlet. There he plays long-time cop Ben Shockley who is given the task of bringing trial witness Gus Mally (Sondra Locke) from Las Vegas to Phoenix, where she is due to testify in a high profile trial. With both the mob and the police attempting to kill them, and a betting line running odds of 100-1 against their arrival, Shockley struggles to accept that his own police force is corrupt. Mally finally makes him understand that the reason he was chosen for the assignment has nothing to do with his regular boast of “I get the job done”, bellowing at him:They don't want the job done! They sent you because you're a bum. If they waste you, nobody – not a fucking soul – is going to give a rat's ass! You're a nobody, Shockley. A nothing. You're just a faded number on a rusty badge, and you've been set up by your own people to take the fall with me. Wake up, for chrissake! At least that way, when the bullets hit you, you'll know where they came from!In this film, as elsewhere, the Eastwood character combines a drive to make a useful contribution to society whilst proving to himself, if not others, that he has a personal worth. Through this character the director explores both the personal weaknesses that underlie the facade of control and the inner resources that pull him through the blackest moments. In his next directorial project, Bronco Billy, Eastwood cast himself as an ex-shoe salesman who reinvents himself as “the fastest gun in the West”, a fancily kitted-out cowboy who tours round with his very own Wild West show. One of the messages the film offered was that you can be whoever you want to be. “Eastwood's work, and his star persona, are intimately involved with his national culture,” writes Edward Gallafent. “He dramatises the fantasies of representative Americans (or considers the conditions in which these fantasies are able to exist)” (12). It is arguable whether any of Eastwood's films have epitomised this project so precisely as Bronco Billy.Honkytonk Man was to provide the dark side of this vision, as the drunkard Red Stovall (Eastwood) journeys across Depression era America in order to perform his country and western music at the Grand Ole Opry, dying of tuberculosis whilst in the very act of cutting the record that will make his name. The film exemplifies Richard Schickel's argument that, “In many of his best films he has explored the various ways that a man can fail to do what a man's got to do, showing how through his sexual arrogance, self-absorption, self-destructiveness, pride, perversity and even stupidity, he can fail, or come perilously close to failing, this primary obligation of the screen hero” (13). Honkytonk Man made little impact on the box office, achieving one of Eastwood's lowest draws to date and yet it stands, along with Bronco Billy, as one of the director's personal favourites.Eastwood's exploration of such themes has not been limited to a development of his own star image. In later years he was to direct other leading actors, as well as himself, in complex and challenging roles that are haunted by the ghost of Red Stovall. In 1988 he filmed Bird, which was based on the life of jazz musician Charlie Parker. In it he explores the ways in which Parker (played by Forest Whitaker), both a dazzling artist and long-term junkie, was destroyed by his own demons and the very addiction that helped to fuel his unparalleled creativity. This film provided the opportunity for Eastwood to explore both the conditions under which the artist functions and to further his own long-time relationship with another form of indigenously American music.The theme of the artist as maverick assumed a particular resonance with his next directorial project, White Hunter, Black Heart. Based on Peter Viertel's roman à clef about the making of The African Queen (John Huston, 1951), it starred Eastwood as director John Wilson (Huston disguised in name only). Set on location in Africa, it showed the way that Wilson's obsession with hunting and killing an elephant came close to demolishing the whole film project as well as Wilson himself. Paul Smith writes that:Eastwood's turn here... is primarily back to old Hollywood, to its tradition and history as they are displayed in the figure of Huston, a grand old master of the sort that Eastwood has been encouraged now to deem himself. That is not to say that the film is autobiographical in any sense, but it does draw on the established image of Huston as auteur to consolidate that of Eastwood as auteur... it addresses directly some of the issues that arise around the question of the auteur's freedom and his responsibility toward his work and his audience.Furthermore, Richard Schickel's description of the film as a “clear-cut and devastating comment on the hollowness of macho posturing” highlights its role as a remarkable inquiry into the ways in which men try to create a personal meaningfulness for themselves in a society in which they fail to fit. A Perfect World (1993) took this theme further. It centred on Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), an escaped convict who finds personal redemption through his relationship with a young boy he has taken on the run with him. A film of innocence and experience, it shows how Butch guides Phillip (T. J. Lowther) in his first steps to becoming a man, but sacrifices his own life in doing so.In putting under scrutiny the macho images of his leading characters, Eastwood's films as a director also evince a movement towards a remarkable moral complexity. If High Plains Drifter, his second directorial work, positioned its lead character in a mythic role that showed little sign of authentic human frailty, his other films have moved away from the archetype first adopted as an actor in the Dollars westerns. The moral complexity of the lead characters frequently stems from a dialogue between their actions and those of others, especially figures of authority. Authority figures, be they politicians, high ranking army officials, police chiefs or other imperators, are often presented as unambiguously corrupt, and yet it is implied that the institutions they represent are the adulterated result of utilitarian efforts. This calls into question whether it is more moral for Eastwood's protagonists to combat the systems themselves or work within them in order to point the way forward towards their eventual redemption.If the leading roles are the focal points of issues of masculinity, morality and personal freedoms, it must nonetheless be acknowledged that one of the features of Eastwood's directorial work, and Malpaso productions more generally, is the strength of the supporting cast. Strong female characters feature regularly, perhaps best epitomised by Sondra Locke's roles in The Gauntlet and Sudden Impact. The latter is the fourth film of the Dirty Harry franchise, and the first that Eastwood directed himself. In it, Jennifer Spencer (Locke) engages in the systematic assassination of a gang that raped her and her sister. Unlike the earlier Dirty Harry films, the movie is structured with a great sensitivity to the killer's cause, so that Harry (Eastwood) ultimately condones and assists with her project. The minor characters that populate the films also add a richness to their fabric, and familiar faces often recur. The presence of Geoffrey Lewis, for instance, graced three films directed by Eastwood, and a further three in which Eastwood starred, a relationship spanning from High Plains Drifter in 1972 to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in 1997.The dominant movement in Eastwood's career as a director has been towards a focus on characters and interpersonal relationships, deepening an investigative project begun many years before. This is partly rooted in his exploration of acting roles suited to his own ageing self, and yet he has not entirely pulled away from roles that centre significantly upon physical action. Nevertheless, if Space Cowboys (2000) was Eastwood's successful gesture towards attracting a new generation of younger film viewers, the commercial success of The Bridges of Madison County (1995) demonstrated that in today's youth-oriented market, an audience can still be found for old-fashioned classically constructed dramas focused upon mature themes and characters. His increasing appeal to older cinemagoers can be seen as symptomatic of his growing desire to adopt the persona of respected auteur. Whilst his films of recent years have made few gestures towards contemporary filmmaking fashions, the positioning of his work within an older Hollywood tradition confers what now seems a startling singularity. Any perceptions of anachronism should give scant cause for concern when, as Geoff Andrew has written of the forthcoming Mystic River, “the sheer classical elegance of Eastwood's direction is a delight to behold”.© Deborah Allison, July 2003