Clint Eastwood

(On Cable TV, October 2019) I do not envy anyone who takes on the challenge of watching all of Clint Eastwood’s westerns back-to-back. Sure, Eastwood’s westerns feature some all-time classics and the man himself has an exceptional charisma. But at some point, they all start to blend into each other without much to distinguish them. I’ve been able to avoid that ennui by spacing these movies at a few months’ interval, but I’d be shaky about any pointed quiz to differentiate them, and I think I’ve finally reached by saturation point with Joe Kidd. Eastwood once again stars as a quiet but capable protagonist, this time going after a landowner for a variety of reasons. While a reasonably revisionist western, Joe Kidd nonetheless fails to impress—it feels like rote repetition of familiar tropes, with only a few quirks to perk things up throughout the film. The best flourish comes near the end, as a train is used to smash through a saloon and instigate a brief shootout. Otherwise, I’m going to have problems even remembering Joe Kidd in a few days, let alone identify what makes it different.

(On Cable TV, August 2019) There’s something in the air about older movie stars not quite wanting to face down retirement. So, we get The Old Man and the Gun, and The Mule, about older men turning to crime. The similarities are uncanny, with both films (inspired by true stories) showing legendary movie stars playing old guys using their charm to get away with things that old people really shouldn’t be doing, and featuring the criminals unknowingly interacting with their police pursuers. But while Robert Redford may push it to charmingly flirt with bank tellers in The Old Man and the Gun, Eastwood here can’t help but cast himself cavorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters (usually two of them at once). Ah well—what’s the use of being a Hollywood celebrity director if you can’t engineer yourself a threesome? Even though The Mule follows the usual formula, it does invite scrutiny: Eastwood, notoriously conservative, tries to have it both ways by showing how one can personally benefit from crime until it becomes dangerous, while also tut-tutting younger generations wasting their lives in a cycle of crime and violence. (This is called “hypocrisy,” and it is indeed a central feature of modern American conservatism.)  There are a few sops here to Eastwood’s old-guy crankiness, from “There’s something wrong with you, kids” to motorcyclists who won’t take his advice and so on. It does occur to me that we’re in sore need for a further subcategorization of what it means to be “old”—Sixty may be the new fifty, but when you have Eastwood pushing ninety, that’s an entirely different ball game. Every film of his may be the last, and The Mule at least has the distinction of being quite a bit better (and enjoyable) than the much maligned The 3:17 p.m. to Paris. [April 2022: Peeking from the future, I also note a similarity between The Mule and Cry Macho, which will probably keep going for as long as Eastwood casts himself in tough-guy roles.]  Even despite the issues and flaws and contrivances, I did still like The Mule—it’s a fun crime caper that features an unusual character, and I have a hunch that despite my having some issues with Eastwood-the-man, I’m going to miss him when he’s gone. But I have a feeling he’s going to die with his boots on, on a movie set.

(In French, On TV, August 2019) One of the strongest arguments for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States may be the incessant stream of message movies taking it as a premise to be denounced. The Player laughed about a last-minute stay of execution climax in 1994, but True Crime played it absolutely straight in 1999 (and The Life of David Gale would subvert it in 2003). Other examples abound, but the point still stands: The death penalty can be a cheap tool in the wrong hands, and even the best-intentioned filmmakers can fall in the trap of excessive melodrama. Granted, Clint Eastwood’s film has other problems, and one of his worst ones here is to cast himself in wildly inappropriate roles. Here we have Eastwood directing 69-year-old Eastwood as a two-fisted rogue reporter who regularly steps out of his marriage to have affairs with wildly inappropriate (and much younger) partners. Knowing what we know about Eastwood’s personal behaviour, we have to ask: Wish fulfillment or acting from experience? The problem is that we never believe Eastwood in the role of a clearly much younger (as in: forty-something) protagonist. Even as he goes beyond the expected article to investigate the events leading to an impending execution, we know where this is going. If you manage to set your disbelief aside for a moment, however, True Crime does actually manage to turn into a decent potboiler thriller, with the death penalty as the big consequence everybody runs against. The ending is as predictable as it’s mildly hilarious if you have fresh memories of The Player. With Eastwood’s no-nonsense style, it becomes a serviceable thriller with a few basic script issues, one unforgivable miscasting and an over-the-top conclusion that couldn’t have gone any other way.

(On TV, June 2019) At first, there is a bafflingly familiar quality to High Plains Drifter that may make you question why the film exists, so closely does it feel like half a dozen other Clint Eastwood westerns. Here we have a loner coming to town, shooting a few people up to no good, and asked to stick around to protect the town from a bigger evil. But even at the same time, there’s something not quite right with the movie, something that sets it apart: Our protagonist rapes a woman in the film’s first ten minutes and before long we understand that the villagers are clearly plotting among themselves to keep a secret from the hero. High Plains Drifter gets weirder the longer it goes on, as more secrets are revealed and the “innocent” villagers’ true allegiances are revealed. Throughout it all, we also realize how there’s a strong probability that the film is not entirely realistic. The dark-red climax gets positively occult as evidence of supernatural happenings accumulate. Noteworthy for being one of Eastwood’s first solo directing efforts (clearly inspired by Leone and Siegel), the film includes—of all things—what could be interpreted as one of cinema’s earliest first-person-shooter sequences. While the film may or may not belong to the supernatural horror genre, it’s the explanation that makes the most sense and interest given the clues given by the film. Eastwood fans may want to compare High Plains Drifter with Pale Rider, which seems to come to a similarly ambiguous situation from the other side of the good/evil coin.

(On Cable TV, January 2019) If you’re having trouble keeping track of Clint Eastwood’s westerns at home—I certainly can use a refresher from time to time—, Hang’em High is pretty much what it says in the title: This is the one where Eastwood (playing essentially the same character) gets hanged by a gung-ho posse too quick to designate a guilty party, but miraculously escapes and becomes a volunteer federal marshal eager to enact some revenge. The third act is also all about a big public hanging. In between, we get thoughts about frontier justice. If there’s anything looking like an unusual take on Eastwood’s persona here, it’s that his character ultimately works within a (very loose) judicial system, although Dirty Harry isn’t too far away in having him go to extraordinary lengths to punish villains with little regard to due process. (In how many movies has Eastwood played a lawyer? I rest my case, your honour.) The atmosphere of a frontier town is well presented, enough to make us reflect about the rocky colonization of the frontier and how justice took a bit longer to arrive. Eastwood is equal to himself (for better or for worse) and the film doesn’t quite have the worst qualities of later westerns that presented Eastwood as a quasi-supernatural figure. The Leone influence is clear, and that probably tells you all you need to know about the film’s direction. Hang’em High remains a solid Eastwood western, not particularly distinctive but not dull either.

(On TV, January 2019) In some ways, Pale Rider can be seen as a typical stranger-cleans-town western, what with lead Clint Eastwood playing a mysterious stranger coming to a remote mountain town to get rid of the rapacious mining tycoon that has assaulted the citizenry. But there are enough hints (in the film’s title, or the end of the prologue, or the stranger’s lack of backstory, or his near-magical shooting ability) to suggest that this is a quasi-supernatural Eastwood western along the lines of High Plains Drifter. Whether you’ll enjoy the results will depend more on your appreciation for the realistic part of the film than its more supernatural or religious implications—at least it’s considerably less creepy than High Plains Drifter. Still, Eastwood has made a truckload of westerns featuring more or less the same character, and anyone can be (un) forgiven if they have trouble telling them apart. It’s competently executed, obviously relying on Eastwood’s iconic portrayal as a man of few words—although there are a few odd moments in which producer/director/star Eastwood gets to pat himself on the back by having nearly every female character (including the teenager) throw themselves at him. (He, of course, refuses—but it’s the thought that counts.) Pale Rider may have a few symbolic and religious aspirations, but much of it remains the same old western: generic but not bad. Eastwood fans, obviously, will get a lot more out of it.