Clint Eastwood

Watching Dirty Harry on cable right now. Such a great movie...

i've just watched all five this week (got the box set for xmas).

first three- great. dead pool- fun.

i can't believe someone up there repping for sudden impact, which we watched for twenty minutes then had to turn off.

ha i bought that box for my brother for his birthday

tcm were showing them all a few weeks back and it was the first time i'd seen sudden impact, and yeah agreed wtf? that film is just rong

dead pool also gets a wtf for the rc car chase

by "Eastwood" Eric of course means "Scott."

Whoa Clint's a big fan of Christopher Guest movies and The Hangover pic.twitter.com/224ixkQjMz

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) September 8, 2021

White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) was not as great as some of his earlier films like The Outlaw Josie Wales or High Plains Drifter, but it was a pretty good pre-Unforgiven film.

I kind of enjoyed the incessant gay panic humor from the super-straight military guys in Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

Pale Rider (1985) was another great one

I’ve been using my netflix dvd subscription to watch various directors’ films in order, to get a sense of the progression of their style and aesthetic


Eastwood has directed an amazing number of films! Unforgiven (1992) was a pinnacle obviously.

For the most part, I would have been fine with him stopping there.

One of his films that was not on my radar was A Perfect World. I don’t remember reading or hearing about it when it was released in 1993

thought it was a good film about the cinematic past, how law enforcement was irrelevant, how a boy was treated at the hands of a killer

I haven't seen it since it was in theatres. Given how its reputation has grown in recent years, I should probably give it a fresh look; I remember liking it just fine, though I did snicker along with the rest of the sparse matinee crowd at Costner complimenting the boy's penis.

I think I was going and seeing about 4 films a week when Perfect World came out. Most of the new ones in Dublin . Both mainstream and what was showing at the IFC.
So caught that and think I have the end scene in my head. Or definitely one major still.

Think he's been quite good as a director.

Shame about the politics. I just heard he had an immediate reaction to the speech made by Marlon Brandos guest at the Oscars. Cropped up in the Behind The Bastards on John Wayne. I guess he's likely to support the cowboys but did seem a little cynical.
& him funding searches for still captive Vietnam soldiers which I think was fruitless.

Feel like a lot of the talk about him as a director - "in the Hawks school", "the last classicist" - is trying to get a positive spin on him just not making many interesting choices.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sW-PoPy6TAo/TWXFr0f-9lI/AAAAAAAAC5s/4ScDuUZz-gA/s1600/Any+Which+Way+But+Loose+%252763+Chevy-01.jpg

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhkkBFhW-MM

^^New directorial effort Juror #2 trailer

I’m a little surprised no one here was talking about juror #2. I guess I am part of the problem considering I just watched it for the first time now

I thought it was fantastic. aside from the indelicate racial politics in the jury room, I thought it was a really piercing study of morality and the nature of redemption, and, with the caveat that I’ve never served on one, likely a very realistic depiction of the grasp an average jury has of their instructions, which is horrifying obviously.

really powerful final scene!

Not your fault, because there's no way around it, but another one of those figures still worthy enough to warrant a thread bump but also old enough to make your heart skip a beat when you see it bumped.

His best since Sully, though some of the dialogue is straight outta Matlock. I wonder whether Eastwood’s TV-indebted blocking eulogizes an extinct era of competence or shows a reluctance to further murk the script.

He seems like a director who often embraces the "good enough" efficiency model of filmmaking, which indeed does owe a debt to television.

Straight outta Matlock, crazy motherfucker called Eastwood

Might be time for a re-poll. Dude was old when this thread started, but he's made dozens of films (well, at least 1.1 dozen) since, some of which might well make a run at the spaghetti westerns.

I would have voted for “White Hunter Black Heart”

A poll of films he's directed might be interesting. Or just post-Unforgiven films.

He was my favorite movie star when I was a kid -- I've seen pretty much everything up to the 90s but nothing since. I have no idea if any of his later films are at all worthwhile. He still often makes some box-office at least.

Worth watching: A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County, Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima, American Sniper, Sully, Juror #2. I don't defend each item; Mystic River and American Sniper have developments and overtones that at times make me ill. But I can't think of another Hollywood director this century who'd try.

"Mystic River and American Sniper have developments and overtones that at times make me ill"

this times a thousand for American Sniper, which to me is indefensible garbage

What's defensible: Bradley Cooper, on the hunt for a subtler movie; his best work imo.

I'm kind of indifferent to him nowadays but when Lalo Schifrin died I watched some Dirty Harry clips which got me remembering some of the good stuff he'd done. Also talk of Escape from Alcatraz in the news, lol.

Also thanks Alfred that's a useful response.

i think mystic river is a good deal better than described there tbh

gran torino makes the list, but has a lot more asterisks against it- its a throwback to a classic 80s clint performance/movie archetype and so jarring in the ways in which aspects of that just cannot work now, and worth acknowledging that some of it nevertheless does work just as well as ever.

^^ exactly my response re Mystic River.

He also likes to cast non-professional actors and goes for a certain “naturalism” in terms of directing actors… which I think might have a tendency to result in work that is maybe unintentionally reflexive of other media? Like if the actors’ performances come out of their familiarity with related genres (e.g. Matlock in re Juror #2), then he just goes with that rather than be more authoritarian?

morgan freeman has some good video clips out there about how clint treats actors like horses (what it turns out to mean is rather more than clint directs his projects as if horses were on set which is either a post hoc rationalisation of his approach or fairly sensible depending on whether you prefer to print the legend or not,)

idk you gotta be gentle with horses

Tom Hanks talking about that.

Watched "Juror #2" on a plane not so long ago. The "dialogue is straight outta Matlock" thing is true (well I guess, I don't think I've ever actually watched a full episode of Matlock), it looks and feels very much like a TV movie, in that none of the characters feel even remotely like real people, but this weirdly makes the movie better I think? The whole movie just seems so efficient and straight to the point. I highly recommend it.

also watched on a plane!

I'd never seen "High Plains Drifter" before, but really liked it. It's a weird little movie, basically a parable that also works as a sly subversion.

I remember seeing it as part of a series of Clint Eastwood westerns on television, sandwiched between The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider. They were the slices of bread and Drifter was the filling. What kind of filling? Salami and Vegemite, microwaved for a few seconds. God, I love salt. Wales is more quotable. Rider is better-looking but I barely remember anything about it, although it feels like a different take on the same idea.

Drifter on the other hand is much more vivid. Although I was left wondering how audiences in the 1970s reacted to the sexual assault scene early in the film. It feels completely out of place in the film and also in Eastwood's filmography - as if he was trying to show that the character is a hard-ass, but he took it much too far. If it was supposed to make him come across as an arse the rest of the film undermines this by making him the star. It doesn't even fit into the "punishing the town" theme because it happens in private and the victim didn't appear to be part of the conspiracy against him.

I remember when the Star Wars prequels came out, if George Lucas was thinking of Drifter when he tried to tell the tale of how a little boy turned into Darth Vader. If he had modelled his storyline on that film the results would have been much better.

There are some takes that Pale Rider is a sequel to High Plains Drifter in the slight supernatural take on the stranger.

It's bizarre to find out that the scriptwriter of High Plains Drifter was inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964. I'd have to watch the film again to see what the connection is.

I'm sure there is an Italian western with the same premise of High Plains Drifter that predates it, but I can't think of which one it is right now.

I think this is the connection (from wiki):

Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article claiming that thirty-seven witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid...The incident prompted inquiries into what became known as the bystander effect, or "Genovese syndrome," a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in the presence of other people.

Anyway, the premise of "High Plains Drifter" is kind of ingenious. And it was neat to see Anthony James pop up. I mostly recognize him from a "Naked Gun" movie, but Clint drew him out of retirement and cast him in "Unforgiven" decades after this movie. Also, some fun trivia: "It is notable that Anthony James's first and last major film appearances were each in Academy Award-winning films for Best Picture."

There are some takes that Pale Rider is a sequel to High Plains Drifter in the slight supernatural take on the stranger.

Pale Rider felt creaky to me the one time I saw it (admittedly, on commercial TV) but this kinda makes me want to revisit it. And yeah, HPD rocks.

Pale Rider has some great location footage, nb this is going to be a huge image because I can't use Imgur:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjYzNWEyODEtNzMzMy00Y2VjLTk3YzAtZmExNDE0YzljZjY3XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_.jpg
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews40/pale%20rider/large/large%20pale%20rider%20blu-ray12.jpg

It also has really subdued lighting - seemingly no lighting at all - which must have looked weird in the 1980s but feels refreshingly modern. In comparison Heaven's Gate looks nice but the use of fog filters and ND filters dates it to the 1970s.

There weren't very many mainstream Hollywood Westerns in the 1980s. Silverado, Young Guns, and that was about it until Dances with Wolves came along. It was one of those dead genres, like the sung-through musical or the World War Two film. It's just a shame that Pale Rider wasn't a better film.

I didn't dig Pale Rider the last time I saw it. Felt ... dull?

watched pale rider last night, was blindsided by just how good it looks (had not seen this thread until now). kind of the default clint eastwood western besides that but man the production design and landscape photography carries it. definitely adding it to my 'good movies to zone out to' list

His son says he has retired

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2026/5/31/happy-birthday-clint-eastwood

And at a mere 96, what is he going to do with all his spare time?

Talk to chairs

Manoel de Oliveira completed six more feature-length films after he turned 96, (and was actually completing one a year going back to 1988!) on top of ten shorts and documentaries. I haven't seen many of these, but The Strange Case of Angelica from 2010 (completed when he was 101!) remains a favorite, one of the greatest films he ever made.

I don't believe any filmmaker of merit was going to match Oliveira, but it wouldn't have surprised me if Eastwood came close. He had a good shot at that, but when Zaslav came aboard Warner Bros., he immediately pushed back on the support Eastwood had enjoyed in the past - it wasn't enough to stop him from making films, but it likely made things more difficult. (Haven't seen all of his recent work, but the last ones I caught were Richard Jewell and Cry Macho, and I thought both had plenty of merit, enough to make them worth seeing. Juror #2 had its fans too, but I missed what was a paltry, brief theatrical release and haven't been motivated enough to stream it, especially since I don't have HBO Max or whatever it's called now.)

It's better than the last two.

Actually just checked and Juror #2 was the ONLY movie he was able to make under Zaslav, who was incredulous that WB financed Cry Macho (before he became CEO) and snapped at the other executives who defended their decision, telling them "we don't owe him anything."