In Clint: The Man and the Movies, the film critic digs into the life and times of the legendary Hollywood actor and director.
Was there something from your research that really surprised you?
The big surprise about Clint Eastwood is that his is one of the longest careers in Hollywood, either in front of or behind the camera. This is a man who, at age 94, released a movie last year, funded by a studio. I was surprised by the sheer, cussed determination of the man, whether that’s to make a career as an actor when he was let go from Universal, after two years of talent school in the ’50s, or to do 200 hours of episodic television. This is a guy who’s made about 75 movies, and I think that, in terms of sheer minutes, he did more hours of Rawhide than all his movies combined. It takes a tremendous will to do that. And he has that in business, he has it when he plays golf or skis, or is on the tennis court. He’s had it, by his own confession, in sexual relations. He’s got some genetic and frame-of-mind assets that few of us have.
Was Eastwood actively seeking a career as an actor?
He was trying to make a go of it. But in about 1958 he had made this terrible western, Ambush at Cimarron Pass. He was appearing in one-off shots on TV shows that nobody watches any longer. And then he got lucky, and I believe if he had not been cast on Rawhide, he would have found another line of work. I think he was really at the point where he expended a lot of effort to get jobs and the compensation and the satisfaction was minimal. He was paying in more than he was getting out. And then, he was cast, in part because he was tall and lanky, in a western at a time when westerns were the most popular thing on television, and that made his career.
But Rawhide did so by leading to his second big break, which was being recruited by Sergio Leone, correct?
Yes. That again was pure luck. I mean the idea that there was a guy in Italy trying to make westerns, and he had $15,000 to hire an actor. No royalties. A one-off, and no American actor whom anyone in Italy had ever heard of would do it for $15,000. So they got the second banana from a TV show that was falling in the ratings, and it turned out to be the perfect combination of the director, the actor, the material, and the opportunity.
Do you feel that there’s a major misconception about Eastwood?
He’s politically a Republican, but an old-fashioned Republican leaning more toward libertarianism. I suppose his ideal Republican would have been someone like Dwight Eisenhower. I think Ronald Reagan and Eastwood overlapped quite a bit in their views. Eastwood has stood in one place, and the culture has moved, and our perception of who he is has been colored by where we have moved with the culture. He’s thought of as this right-wing zealot. But he signed petitions for handgun control and supported the Brady Bill. He has been, quietly, in favor of gay equality. He has been an advocate for hiring and paying women equally. He’s donated thousands of acres of land to conservancy causes. So his politics are more complex than most people think.
