The Man from Malpaso (Part 1)

Clint Eastwood turns 94 on May 31st and he’s still making films as he’s currently directed the film Juror No.2. His career has spanned over 65 years whilst being movie superstar for close on 60 years whether it be acting in over 60 films, directing over 30 films, producing and composing. Such is his mark on cinema I couldn’t just restrict myself to one post so I’ll be covering his career both this week and next.

Eastwood got his major break on TV in the eight season western cowboy series Rawhide (1959 – 1965). Although he appeared in several earlier films, mostly uncredited, his breakout film role was as The Man With No Name in the Sergio Leone directed Dollars Trilogy – A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966) which weren’t released in the United States until 1967/68. Today they still stand as some of the best westerns ever made and the The Man With No Name is one of cinema’s most iconic characters.

Following his success with these three spaghetti westerns, Eastwood formed his own production company Malpaso Productions which has produced all but four of his American films. The company’s first film was the revisionist western Hang ‘Em High (1968) in which Eastwood’s character survives a lynching and becomes a Deputy U.S. Marshal. the film was a major success cementing Eastwood as one of Hollywood’s newest stars.

He had a monster hit co-starring with Richard Burton in the classic WWII adventure film Where Eagles Dare (1968) and he showed he could sing in the overblown musical Paint Your Wagon (1969) but Eastwood had an itch for directing and the opportunity soon presented it to him with Eastwood helming Play Misty For Me (1971), a coolly calculating psychological thriller that was a success both critically and commercially.

From the very early days of his career, Eastwood was frustrated by directors’ insistence that scenes be re-shot multiple times and perfected, and when he began directing he made a conscious attempt to avoid any aspects of directing he had been indifferent to as an actor. As a result, Eastwood became renowned for his efficient film directing and ability to reduce filming time and control budgets. He often avoided actors’ rehearsing and prefered to complete most scenes in one take.

He also assembled a stock company of character actors which appeared in many of his films during the 1970s including John Quade, Bill McKinney, Geoffrey Lewis, Dan Vadis, William O’Connell, Anthony James and Roy Jensen.

Eastwood has gone on to direct over 30 films, including westerns, action films, musicals and dramas, winning 2 Academy Awards for Best Director. He is one of the few top Hollywood actors to have also become a critically and commercially successful director. He is IMO cinema’s greatest actor/director.

In 1971 Eastwood played another of his iconic characters – Inspector Harry Callahan in the film Dirty Harry in would play him in another four times in Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact including directing (1983) and finally The Dead Pool (1988). Callahan became the template for a new kind of film cop: an anti-hero who does not hesitate to cross professional boundaries in pursuit of his own vision of justice, especially when the law is poorly served by an inept, incompetent bureaucracy.

Eastwood returned to directing himself in 1973 with the offbeat and supernatural western High Plains Drifter but he surpassed this with one of the best westerns of the 1970s with The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).

Here he played a Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Union militia during the Civil War. Driven to revenge, he joins a Confederate guerrilla band and makes a name for himself as a feared gunfighter. After the war, all the fighters in Wales’ group except for him surrender to Union soldiers, but the Confederates end up being massacred. Wales becomes an outlaw and is pursued by bounty hunters and Union soldiers as he tries to make a new life for himself. 

This is another classic Eastwood role, relating it with much of America’s ancestral past and the destiny of the nation after the American Civil War.

The 1970s also saw Eastwood starring in films Thunderbolt And Lightfoot (1974), The Eiger Sanction (1976), The Gauntlet (1977) and the superb Don Siegel directed prison drama Escape From Alcatraz (1979) where Eastwood played Frank Morris who led the 1962 escape attempt from Alcatraz.

In 1978 Eastwood had a change of pace in appearing in the offbeat comedies Every Which Way But Loose and its’ sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980) in which he played a bare knuckle fighter with a pet orangutan. They were both huge hits and even today remain enjoyably entertaining.

Entering in the 1980s Eastwood’s films had a bit of a lull in quality but he returned to top form as both director and actor in the superlative western Pale Rider (1985). 

Playing Preacher he quietly appears to aid independent gold prospectors against a mining baron. The movie’s title is taken from the Book of Revelation, chapter 6, verse 8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” The reading of the biblical passage describing this character is neatly choreographed to correspond with the sudden appearance of Preacher.

For me it’s the best western of the 1980s.

Well for next week I’ll cover his career from the faltering late 1980s, to a resurgence in the 1990s including universal critical claim and Academy Awards to an unparalleled run of superlative films in the 2000s.

Enjoy.