The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (127 page)

Dwan’s filmography ought to be sufficient tribute—except that it is limited to films of four reels or more. In the years 1911–14, he made at least another two hundred one-or two-reelers. These were churned out at the American Film Company after he had begun as a lighting man at Essanay in 1909. In 1913, he moved to Universal, in 1914 to Famous Players, and in 1915 to Griffith’s Triangle Company. Within the next few years he worked for Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and, after
Robin Hood
, he went to Famous Players–Lasky where he made several of Gloria Swanson’s best films. But in 1926 he joined Fox and remained there with occasional distractions—like his trip to England, 1933–34—until 1941. While there, he usually directed second features, but returned to prominence with two of the better Shirley Temple films and the spectacular
Suez
. He moved to RKO and worked for Edward Small before joining Republic in 1945. His movies there were haunted by the interference of Herbert Yates, the icy presence of Vera Ralston, and the penury of the studio. But he produced films of constant invention, charm, and action.
Sands of Iwo Jima
has the surge of unaccustomed resources. In 1954, he went back to RKO and the producer Benedict Bogeaus. The films they made together are oddly assured products of working circumstances worthy of
Catch-22
. Only in 1961 did Dwan retire from a long and honorable battle against every handicap the industry could invent.

Inevitably, Dwan is best known for his more recent pictures, the fragmentary splendor of his travails with Yates and Bogeaus: the very funny situation in
Rendezvous with Annie;
Natalie Wood signaling her talent in
Driftwood; Sands of Iwo Jima;
the B-29 in
The Wild Blue Yonder;
Jane Russell in
Montana Belle;
the lunatic transposition of sexual roles in
The Woman They Almost Lynched;
the happy acceptance of the Western genre in
Silver Lode
and
Tennessee’s Partner;
the florid erotic rivalry of Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl in
Slightly Scarlet;
the violence of
The River’s Edge;
the hysterical eavesdropping of
The Restless Breed
.

In almost every case, these are distinct if small-scale treasures brought home against great odds. Dwan himself preferred silent pictures and remembers
Robin Hood, Manhandled
, and
Big Brother
fondly. Who can argue, or present a coherent view of Dwan’s career? Few have seen or can remember more than a fraction of his output. Only two obvious conclusions remain. Dwan was a natural, unpretentious storyteller, capable of real invention on the grand and the intimate scale; but with such competence and determined survival, how did he come to make so many forlorn films when men of far less talent were given better projects? Dwan told Peter Bogdanovich that he signed too many stupid contracts, but that he had no regrets. That sunniness speaks for his real nature and his origins in the days when one made two films a week. He is the Jack Crabb of the movie world, capable of endorsing both the boyish pleasure of all Fairbanks’s vaulting and the delicious Ritz Brothers parody of musketeering made in 1939. Dwan’s liking for visual narrative proved stronger than all the foolish corners he was forced to occupy. His flexibility was proof of imaginative cheerfulness.

E

Clint Eastwood
(Clinton Eastwood Jr.), b. San Francisco, 1930
1971:
Play Misty for Me
. 1973:
High Plains Drifter; Breezy
. 1975:
The Eiger Sanction
. 1976:
The Outlaw Josey Wales
. 1977:
The Gauntlet
. 1980:
Bronco Billy
. 1982:
Firefox; Honkytonk Man
. 1983:
Sudden Impact
. 1985:
Pale Rider
. 1986:
Heartbreak Ridge
. 1988:
Bird
. 1989:
Pink Cadillac
. 1990:
White Hunter, Black Heart; The Rookie
. 1992:
Unforgiven
. 1993:
A Perfect World
. 1995:
The Bridges of Madison County
. 1997:
Absolute Power; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
. 1999:
True Crime
. 2000:
Space Cowboys
. 2002:
Blood Work
. 2003:
Mystic River
. 2004:
Million Dollar Baby;
2006:
Flags of Our Fathers; Letters from Iwo Jima
. 2008:
Changeling; Gran Torino
. 2009:
Invictus
.

In September 1993, at London’s National Film Theatre, H.R.H. Prince Charles presented Clint Eastwood with the fellowship of the British Film Institute. Their briefly shared stage was a fascinating study in celebrity and fame’s divinity. A visitor from another planet, advised on how to recognize modern royalty—its natural eminence, its grace and authority, its sense of divine right made agnostic in simple glamour—would have had no doubt which man was the prince. In a tuxedo, with close-cut salt and silver hair, a gaunt head, and a tranquil boy’s smile, Clint may have been as good as sixty-three ever looked. About a month before the date in London, he had had a child by the actress Frances Fisher (from
Unforgiven
). There had been no scandal or mockery. Nearly everything that comes to Eastwood now is rendered fitting by his majesty. Whereas, Charles Windsor (he sounds like a spiv who sells secondhand cars off the South Circular Road) can hardly pick up the phone without making himself a laughingstock, and he could not stand beside Clint without looking uneasy, a sad fidget, a tailor’s dummy denied life or glory.

Has it occurred to you that, by 1994, Clint Eastwood was among the very few Americans admired and respected at home and abroad, without qualification or irony? When the onetime mayor of Carmel insists that he is not running for anything else, we feel regret. We have had such shifty actors looking after us—don’t we deserve Clint? For he has become an authentically heroic image, a man cast in Gary Cooper’s rock, even if his eyes are still rather more self-satisfied than Cooper’s. He is a magnificent businessman, the boss at Malpaso Productions, and golden goose for the studios lucky enough to have his films, a model of managerial economy and fruitful independence. Has there ever been so unneurotic, so steadfast, or so steadily improving a moviemaker? As a director, he matches his own work as an actor: acutely aware of his limitations, he knows how to look good, how to serve and broadcast himself, while doing interesting, honest work in the mainstream. There is nothing coy, boastful, or unstable, nothing out of balance or true. As he said at the National Film Theatre, he felt himself lucky—and he leaves us feeling fortunate to be in his presence (a true attribute of stardom). There is no one else in Hollywood today who can bear up under such success without the savage, twisted grin of plunder, vengeance, or absurdity. He is our knight—somehow—and he shames the astrologers, the alchemists, the courtesans, and the robber barons who otherwise run the court.

By the late seventies, Eastwood had already proved himself in three distinct areas: on TV, in Italian Westerns, and as a Don Siegel hero. His own company, Malpaso (named after a creek in Carmel, his primary residence), had allowed him to direct his first film,
Play Misty for Me
, a generous nod in Siegel’s direction and an intriguing study of masculine assurance whittled away by feminine paranoia. Even then, Eastwood had wit and humor enough to undermine the very male supremacy that had made him famous. It is in the area of self-education that Eastwood is most liberal.

His parents were not well off. Clint had worked as a lumberjack and served in the army before being signed up as a tall, pretty athlete by Universal. He played tiny parts in
Francis in the Navy
(51, Arthur Lubin);
Lady Godiva
(55, Lubin);
Never Say Goodbye
(56, Jerry Hopper);
The First Traveling Saleslady
(56, Lubin);
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
(58, Jodie Copeland); and
Lafayette Escadrille
(58, William Wellman). Wider fame came with a seven-year spell (1959–66) playing Rowdy Yates in the TV series
Rawhide
(where he started to take a hand in script and direction).

That status helped him go to Italy to play the taciturn “man with no name” in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of mercenary violence and Spanish deserts:
A Fistful of Dollars
(64);
For a Few Dollars More
(66);
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(67); and in an episode from
Le Streghe
(66, Vittorio de Sica). Wildly successful and influential, those films had a camp attitude that Eastwood gradually disowned. But he came back to America to set up Malpaso and to make the first American Italian Western,
Hang ’em High
(68, Ted Post). Two lavish attempts to extend his appeal into war film and the musical were less than totally successful:
Where Eagles Dare
(68, Brian G. Hutton);
Paint Your Wagon
(69, Joshua Logan); and
Kelly’s Heroes
(70, Hutton). He could still look stiff and anxious as an actor, as if persuaded by Leone that it was enough to be an icon.

Eastwood was luckier to find himself, his humor, and some ease in the increasingly beleaguered heroes of Don Siegel. Their relationship proved mutually beneficial. Siegel got a new lease of life while Eastwood found an education—“if there is one thing I learned from Don Siegel, it’s to know what you want to shoot and to know what you’re seeing when you see it.” Their films together are
Coogan’s Bluff
(68);
Two Mules for Sister Sara
(69);
The Beguiled
(70);
Dirty Harry
(71);
Play Misty for Me
(with Siegel playing a small role); and
Escape from Alcatraz
(79).

As an actor, Eastwood flowered under Siegel, exchanging arbitrary brutality for an impressive gallery of brutalized loners. His work in
Dirty Harry
, for instance, is more complex and enticing than Gene Hackman’s extravagantly commended mugging in
The French Connection
. While Hackman turns the subway sequence into situation slapstick, in
Dirty Harry
Eastwood gives a very moving account of the infuriated lawman driven to abandon his badge by the intractable growth of disorder and liberal bureaucracy.
Harry
was called fascist in some quarters, but by now it is clearer that Eastwood was offering a tortured vision of conservative ideals at breaking point.

Eastwood was still torn in different directions—to make easy hits, or to insist on new territory and attitudes.
Joe Kidd
(72, John Sturges) showed that he might revert to enigmatic violence. His second direction,
High Plains Drifter
, owed more to the Leone films than to Siegel. In
Magnum Force
(73, Post) and
The Enforcer
(76, James Fargo) one saw how Detective Harry Callahan could become a cynical institution, complete with vicious one-liners and total destruction.
The Eiger Sanction
was his silliest film. But
Josey Wales
(taken away from its writer, Philip Kaufman) was an unusual, picaresque Western, exposing its resolute hero in search of vengeance to the wintry humor of an old Indian and a disorderly group of eccentrics.

It was remarkable how, in the eighties, more “distinguished” careers—Beatty, Hoffman, Redford, say—dwindled or stalled, while the ostensibly “lower-class” Eastwood had learned, improved, developed, and become one of the most respected and loved figures in American film. The rather dangerous Clint of
Dirty Harry
yielded to a grizzled veteran, allegedly older, wiser, and gentler.

There is argument still over Eastwood the director—though no one can dispute the benefits of having done ten films in the years 1980–90 (so few match that figure, let alone anyone who acted in nine of the ten!). Moreover, Eastwood’s refinement as an icon has affected his directing: there is a larger air of wisdom, irony, and regret that now coexists with his very practical, professional precision. I don’t yet feel eloquence, let alone poetry or beauty, and I have to underline the failure of
Bird
, his most ambitious film. The music was cleaned up, and Parker was sanitized in the casting of the sweet Forest Whitaker. The real Parker, I suspect, was rougher and more aggressive. Indeed,
Bird
left the feeling that Eastwood was closer in temperament to Benny Goodman or Stan Kenton.

Bronco Billy
and
Honkytonk Man
were welcome departures from male supremacy:
Tightrope
(84, Richard Tuggle) was a startling treatment of sexual dysfunction in the hard cop, and an altogether impressive, if disconcerting, picture. Against that,
City Heat
(84, Richard Benjamin) with Clint and Burt Reynolds,
Firefox, Sudden Impact
, and
Pale Rider
were risk-free and mind-dulling meal tickets.

White Hunter, Black Heart
was another honorable failure, and one that showed Eastwood’s definite limits as an actor.
Unforgiven
was his best performance, and certainly his best script (from David Webb Peoples). But the film was overpraised: Why or how can this man leave his children on the prairie? And how does his understandable ineptness as a gunfighter suddenly and conveniently fall aside to reveal the old Leoneesque angel of death?

But this may be a touch too grudging. Eastwood has become a surprising, enterprising man: he produced the documentary
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
(88, Charlotte Zwerin); he was a friend to
’Round Midnight
(86, Bertrand Tavernier); and he sponsored the directorial debut of a girlfriend in
Ratboy
(86, Sondra Locke). In addition, he keeps rare company: not just an orangutan in
Every Which Way But Loose
(78, Fargo) and
Any Which Way You Can
(80, Buddy Van Horn), but a string of interesting, odd (and economical) actresses: Sondra Locke, Marsha Mason, Diane Venora, Bernadette Peters, and Geneviève Bujold.