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WHEN Clint Eastwood picked up an Oscar for directing Million Dollar Baby, he said he thought at 74 he still had a lot of work to do. He thought he was a kid compared to Sidney Lumet who was honoured with a lifetime Achievement Award. What we do know, however, is that Clint Eastwood has come a long, long way since his Dollar film days.
There were three of those spaghetti Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and the three constants in those films were director Sergio Leone, actor Clint Eastwood and music director Ennio Morricone, all household names today. It was Leone who popularised the closeup with Clint’s steely grey-green eyes. Halliwell’s Guide, 1998, has this to say about Fistful`85 : "A film with much to answer for ; it began the craze for spaghetti Westerns, took its director to Hollywood and made a TV cowboy a world star. It made the Western into a brutal baroque opera, a violent clash between individuals." I agree about the sadistic violence that bred stars like Eastwood, Franco Nero and Lee Van Cleef. But that was the
launching of Clint who as cop Harry Callaghan found a new persona in Dirty
Harry (1971) which immortalised the line "make my day"
when speaking to his prospective victim. It bred four sequels Magnum
force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact
(1983) and The Dead Pool (1988). Some of these films were never
released in India because of their excessive violence.
But it was in 1971 that he also made his debut as a director in Play Misty For Me in which he played a disc jockey being pursued by femme fatale Jessica Walter who made frequent requests for the song Misty and even more frequent demands for his love. It was very much like Fatal Attraction (1987), which showed that hell had no greater fury than a woman scorned. It plummeted Glenn Close to instant fame but surely established Eastwood’s credentials as a filmmaker. The late-1970s, however, saw Eastwood act in some pretty ordinary road movies like Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can(1980) in which he plays an Los Angeles trucker whose exploits with his orang-utan are eminently forgettable. It was the time he was living with Sondra Locke (she too is in the two films), a promising actress who made her debut alongside Alan Arkin in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. That Ms Locke tried to sue him after the break-up is now merely academic. It was in the 1980s too
that Eastwood became Mayor of Carmel, a seaside town on the West coast
of California known for its spectacular beauty and its 16-mile drive.
The 1980s saw him take to directing films more seriously, though not
always successfully. Bronco Billy (1980) was lukewarm but Firefox
(1982) was much better as it dealt with the stealing of a Russian
supersonic fighter with the air chases dominating the Heartbreak Ridge (1986) was about training soldiers who later became heroes in Grenada but that too was fairly lacklustre and it was only in 1992 that he came out with a winner as a director in Unforgiven, a tale of revenge which also marked the resurgence of the near-extinct Western. Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman (who was also in Million Dollar Baby) co-starred with Clint Eastwood who is yet to win a Best Actor Oscar like Martin Scorcese who has never won a Best Director Oscar. With so many films under his belt it’s hard to pick a few but apart from the cult films like Dirty Harry I remember rather fondly The Eiger Sanction (1975) because of the perilous mountain-climbing and In the Line of Fire (1993) because Clint acts his age, a near-retiring security man guarding a VIP and where the prospective killer is played to a nicety by John Malkovich. And of course Play Misty For Me which means leaving out the Oscar winners. I haven’t yet seen his Mystic River but most of those who’ve seen it speak very highly about it. So finally to Million Dollar Baby where the subject is sensitively dealt with. The boxing angle is succinctly handled, the repairs of the facial gashes, the use of speedbags et al, but then there’s that dramatic twist where the genre switches modes and that makes the film ever so powerful with Hillary Swank of Boys Don’t Cry fame turning in a superlative performance. Just when it looked like The Aviator was sweeping the awards they gave old man Clint the final push to claim the top Oscars. And though one felt sorry for Scorcese most didn’t mind that once spaghetti Western cowboy cornering the glory again.
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