Breezy (1973)

(On Cable TV, January 2022) There are dozens of ways Clint Eastwood’s intergenerational romance Breezy should not have worked. Building a film on the idea of a teenager falling in love with a fifty-something man is already a tricky proposal: any hint of leering, deviance, or wish-fulfillment would have made the film a reprehensible object of derision. As it stands, Breezy is still awkward and suspicious, but it has enough of a patina of good execution to keep it from careening out of control. Historically, this was Clint Eastwood’s third film as a director (he doesn’t star in it) and an occasion to provide classic Hollywood actor Richard Holden with a solid late-career role. As a bitter, divorced fifty-something, his character is brought back from the brink of cynicism by the influence of a precocious seventeen-year-old hippie. While the subject matter sounds and occasionally feels like the kinds of things that older Hollywood executives would enjoy seeing on-screen, much of the film has the decency to be about the problems inherent in such a lopsided relationship. The film is at its strongest when the older man is very conscious of how doomed their affair is—alas, Breezy ultimately settles for a wholly unconvincing ending precipitated by some limp dialogue. Some will be reassured that the film was, even in the early wild and woolly 1970s, not a success and has drawn mixed critical reactions up until today. The best I can say about it is that it doesn’t humiliate itself nor feels unacceptably exploitative. But that’s not necessarily an endorsement: Breezy stinks of the worst aspects of the early-1970s and constantly feels one moment away from a much worse film. That it keeps it together long enough to have a few moments of dramatic interest is probably the best that the film could hope for.