Clint Eastwood

Watched Unforgiven for 1st time this weekend. Hackman was great, Eastwood was just sorta…there. I'd heard his performance was well-regarded but don't know why. And I kept expecting his character arc to be something other than the very predictable one it wound up taking. It's more than 2 hours long but not much happens. A decent western overall but not one of my favorites.

The Richard Harris section is dead. And loooooong.

I'd heard his performance was well-regarded

probably a halo effect from his also being the director and the film being a critical success. I thought the production design was the star of that movie and the script was pretty poor stuff.

xpost It's not terribly necessary, but I didn't mind it that much on recent rewatch, and it's an important way to underscore the different degrees of ruthlessness the movie depicts.

Clint himself has gotten lots of mileage out of depicting himself as vulnerable, or incapacitated, from the spaghetti westerns on up. Unforgiven was one of a few more obvious apotheosises (is this a word?) of this.

Yes. I liked his performance as well, but kept waiting for a payoff or twist that never came. Meanwhile the transformation of Schofield Kid (also very predictable) occurs in like one shot of his face and one line.
It's pretty fucked up that the only westerns to win best picture are Cimarron, Dances With Wolves, and Unforgiven.

Xp to Alfred

I also found it deeply weird that neither Eastwood nor writer David Webb Peoples once mentioned Ned's race aloud, nor was it commented on when the sheriff and his people lynched him.

xps some also count No Country among the westerns that won BP but I'd beg to differ

and fwiw the Academy doesn't have a much better track record when it comes to nominating the best westerns either...

In Old Arizona (1929)
Viva Villa! (1934)
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
Stagecoach (1939)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
High Noon (1952)
Shane (1953)
Friendly Persuasion (1956)
The Alamo (1960)
How the West Was Won (1963)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
True Grit (2010)
Django Unchained (2012)
The Revenant (2016)

Solid stretch:

Stagecoach (1939)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

The Ox-Bow Incident was the last movie to be nominated for best picture and nothing else, I believe.

That's the one of those 3 I haven't seen. Should I?

Yes. A clumsily powerful anti-lynching picture. Dana Andrews and Jane Darnell like you'd never seen them or would again.

Generally well regarded, then and now:

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/the-ox-bow-incident/

A Western set in Nevada in 1885 that is also an attempt at a poetic tragedy about mob violence. Two cowboys (Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan) ride into a small, lonely cattle town and become involved in the hysteria of a lynch mob. Three innocent men (Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and Francis Ford) are hanged, while we see not only their fear and despair, but the varied motives of the members of the posse who take justice into their own hands. It's easy to be put off by the studio sets and lighting and by the 40s approach to a "serious" subject, but the director, William Wellman, has made the characters so vivid that after many years people may still recall Frank Conroy as the sadistic Southern major, and the rapid changes of expression of William Eythe, as his son. With Harry Davenport as Mr. Davies, Leigh Whipper as Sparks, and Jane Darwell as the cackling, lewd old woman who enjoys the excitement--a much better performance than her Ma Joad in THE GRAPES OF WRATH. From the very fine novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark--it has ambiguities that Lamar Trotti's script couldn't encompass; reading the book expands the movie.

SPOILERS above, technically.

god, I forgot Anthony Quinn was in it.

Good cast! Thanks y'all, putting it on my list.

I just started to watch "Unforgiven" and thought it was the worst movie in the world

as an actor his "just sorta...there" persona has been his essence

Firefox wasn't very good

Or late '90s/early'00s dreck like True Crime and Blood Work.

xpost there was a movie about a web browser?

You're right Dan, which is why the "mysterious stranger" character is his best. Once you try fleshing it out or just giving him more dialogue, it falls apart.

I thought Firefox ruled when it came out, but haven't seen it since

I didn't see it until now, wonder what I would have thought of it then

Iirc I definitely slotted it as a kid along with the other military assault aircraft projects, like Blue Thunder and Airwolf.

The film was shot on a $21 million budget, the largest production budget ever for Malpaso.[2] Of that amount, over $20 million was spent on special effects.[3]

Firefox did rule if, like me, you were 12 or so and watched it a lot on HBO. Very much proto-Tom Clancy, or at least the novel it was based on was (was a sequel too, IIRC)

anybody have any strong opinions whether A Perfect World holds up?

I've been watching some of his more recent movies lately, and A Perfect World might have been the best of them. The ending is way drawn out and some of the scenes with the man himself and Laura Dern and Bradley Whitford are superfluous, but pretty much every scene between Costner and the kid is great

I also really liked Changeling. Mystic River was ok, Gran Torino pretty bad. No desire to see American Sniper

'Must think in Russian...Russian...Russian...Russian'

"Heartbreak Ridge" was another 80s 'boy we Americans got a spoilin' for war and get that big L in Vietnam off the books' setup. It's also the beginning of many roles for Clint as the old haggard hard ass.

Like Firefox, I have not seen either one since I was a teenager but I liked them both back then.

Heartbreak Ridge was ... Grenada? Iirc it was one of those more "prestige" riffs on "Rambo," along with "Uncommon Valor" a few years earlier. Man, Ted Kotcheff (90! Still alive!) had a weird career.

It's funny to think of "A Perfect World" as one of his more recent films. Almost 30 years ago! He's had an impressive run, or really, more accurately, several of them.

I mean, for him it is recent but it probably reflects on my age too. I referred to Bruno Mars as a "newer" artist in my class one time a few years ago and my students all laughed at me

Hah, yeah, I think my point was that as far as Clint is concerned, "A Perfect World" was at one point a late career peak, but now it's more like a mid-career peak and the beginning of another imperial phase. Unforgiven, A Perfect World, In the Line of Fire, Madison County (take a breath for a couple of years), Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, the WW2 films, etc. He's been totally hit or miss for many years, but that's largely because he keeps cranking them out. Around 20 films in the last 20 years, half of which he stars in *and* directs!

Actually, ITLOF aside, he only stars in movies he directs.

Yeah, but not every movie he directs. Just about half, I think.

oh I meant after Unforgiven, sorry. I remember an interview then where he made it clear it was his future.

You mean if he acts he only acts in movies he directs, you mean?

He only has threesomes in movies he directs.

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