Profile/Clint Eastwood:He has a reputation for being conservative, but the legendary actor and director consistently comes up with work that defies expectations, writes Donald Clarke
Two years ago, while Oscar-watchers were all chattering about Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, Clint Eastwood ambled quietly into town with a modest, discreetly promoted melodrama in his saddlebags. Before going on to win the Academy Award for best picture, Million Dollar Baby, the tale of a female boxer who suffers paralysis following a particularly savage fight, he managed to enrage legions of right-wing blowhards. Eastwood's film, the fulminators argued, excused euthanasia and, in so doing, offered succour to pro-choice, flag-burning, liberal pantywaists throughout the nation.
Hang on. Wasn't Clint supposed to be a conservative?
This Thursday Eastwood managed the extraordinary feat of receiving two separate nominations for best director at the annual Golden Globe awards.
Ever since he announced his intention to direct Flags of Our Fathers, an examination of the myths surrounding the United States Marines' victory at the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, it seemed likely he would receive at least one nod. News that Eastwood, having been moved by the letters of Japanese soldiers who died in such terrifying numbers on the island, was to deliver a companion piece examining the conflict from the opposition's perspective did not excite observers quite so much. The project sounded so worthy. It sounded like an exercise in public relations. Heck, it even sounded a little politically correct. Wasn't Clint supposed to be a conservative?
Yet Letters from Iwo Jima, sombrely shot with dialogue entirely in Japanese, has been greeted with even better reviews than those accorded the admired Flags of our Fathers. Two weeks ago, Letterswon the first major award in the interminable Oscar preamble when it was named best film by the National Board of Review. Last Thursday it sat proudly beside Pedro Almodóvar's Volverand Mel Gibson's Apocalyptoin the list of nominees for best foreign-language film at the Golden Globes. Meanwhile, its sister picture, punished perhaps for its comparative commercial underperformance, failed to receive a best film nod. So Clint has already outpaced Clint in the awards derby. Martin Scorsese, beaten to the statuette in 2004 by the older man, lauded everywhere this year for The Departed, could be forgiven for feeling a sickening sense of deja vu.
There has not, so far, been any great outcry from the right about Eastwood's gripping brace of war films. Flags of our Fathers, which juxtaposes scenes from the battle with the sad later experiences of the men who erected the flag on Iwo Jima, could, it is true, be viewed as a sceptical dismantling of the myth of heroism. The soldiers, whose exploits were later restaged for the most iconic of war photographs, are shown suffering from survivors' guilt and being misused by those promoting war bonds. But the film still works as a celebration of the American fighting man.
Letters From Iwo Jima, a largely sympathetic treatment of an army previously depicted in American films as comprising bloodthirsty psychotics, goes to some more surprising places still. It looks like the work of a conciliator, a mediator, maybe even a liberal. Wasn't Clint supposed to be a conservative?
"You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends," Eastwood said at the time of the Million Dollar Babycontroversy. "Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot."
It would seem more accurate to describe Eastwood's politics as those of the libertarian individualist. True, he supported Richard Nixon's run for the presidency in 1972 and has, from time to time, declared himself a registered Republican. But, sensing an unseemly political ambush, he assisted Gray Davis, the embattled Democrat incumbent, in his 2003 gubernatorial campaign against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tim Robbins, the aggressively liberal star of Eastwood's Mystic River, told this writer that he received more public support for his right to speak out against George W Bush from Eastwood than from many supposed left-wingers. Indeed Eastwood has made it clear that he regards the war in Iraq as a "big mistake". In a time of stark black-and-white (or red-and-blue) politics, such individualism tends to confuse people.
CLINTON EASTWOOD JR was born on May 31st, 1930 in San Francisco, but spent most of his early childhood, the years of the Great Depression, being dragged around the nation by a blue-collar father desperate to find work.
After a spell serving as a swimming instructor in the army, Eastwood availed of the GI Bill to study drama and business administration at Los Angeles City College. He decided to have a crack at acting and can be seen in a few diverting B-movies such as Revenge of the Creatureand Tarantula.His big break came, however, on the small screen when he was cast as Rowdy Yates on the long-running cowboy series Rawhide.
Eastwood was one of the first actors to make the move successfully from television to big-screen stardom. He was forced, however, to travel that journey by a most unusual route. In 1964 he received a barely coherent script, poorly bound and laid out in nothing that even vaguely resembled proper screenplay formatting, for an Italian western entitled A Fistful of Dollars. The film, to be directed cheaply in Europe by the hard-working, though then largely unknown Sergio Leone, featured the character later dubbed - erroneously, as it happens, for he is here called Joe - The Man With No Name.
Reaching America in the swinging year that was 1967, Eastwood's cynical drifter, his movements syncopated to Ennio Morricone's weird, abstract score, immediately restored the credibility of a genre viewed as moribund for close to a decade. A Few Dollars More and The Good, T he Bad and the Uglyconfirmed Eastwood as the last great western hero.
In 1971, Don Siegel's Dirty Harrysaw Eastwood's ill-tempered Californian cop shunning the principles of community policing for a more hands-on approach to law enforcement. The occasional media caricature of Eastwood as a bluff right-winger may stem in part from an insecure assumption that the actor shares his creation's robust attitude towards crime and punishment.
Play Misty for Me, Eastwood's debut as a director, was released in the same year as Dirty Harry and marked the start of a career which has, by any measure, been quite remarkable. Reports concerning Eastwood's demeanour on set tell us much about the man's attitude to cinema and life in general. A working man through-and-through, he shoots from nine-to-five, says little to the actors and never indulges in two takes when one will do.
"As long as the camera doesn't fall over, the shot will do for Eastwood," Kenneth Turan, the veteran critic, once said.
This casual attitude perhaps explains the extraordinarily variable quality of Eastwood's output over the past three and half decades. He has directed films as head-spinningly dreadful as Absolute Power, Blood Work, Firefoxand Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Yet he has also made undeniable, copper- bottom classics such as The Outlaw Josey Wales, High Plains Drifter, Unforgivenand Million Dollar Baby. He is, indeed, one of only three living directors to have won two Academy Awards and unlike the others - Francis Ford Coppola and Milos Forman - still seems to be at the top of his game.
WE MIGHT, IF we were being unkind, venture to suggest that he has had similarly erratic experiences in his love life. He has been married twice and has seven children by five different women, though he lived with Sondra Locke, frequently a co-star, for 12 whole years without producing any offspring.
When grim rumours surrounding that last relationship led Eastwood to sue a biographer in 2002, there was a palpable tone of unease and regret in the media coverage. Americans may not be all that sure what kind of man Clint Eastwood is, but they are, for the most part, united in their affection for him.
"Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz," Eastwood, an enthusiast for both, once said. Those two art forms are united by an inclination towards freedom, lack of inhibition and informality. Clint Eastwood, in his attitude to life, politics and art, shares that inclination and Americans - though not just Americans - love him for it.
If he would only allow the Smithsonian to pickle him in formaldehyde and display him in a tank then he could be set alongside the cowboy film and improvised African-American music as his nation's third great example of original art.
The Eastwood File
Who is he?Actor. Director. The Man With No Name. Dirty Harry. A universally adored 76-year-old institution.
Why is he in the news?On Thursday he was nominated as best director at the Golden Globes for both Flags of our Fathersand Letters from Iwo Jima. The first film, the story of the battle for Iwo Jima from the American perspective, opens here next week.
Most appealing characteristic:Utter lack of pretension on set. Actors can do whatever the hell they like. If there is film in the camera the shot will do. Clint is, in this sense, the anti-Kubrick.
Least appealing characteristic:Utter lack of control on set, which can result in such unlovely scenery-chewing performances as Sean Penn's in Mystic River.
Most likely to say:Very little indeed.
Least likely to say:"We are going to stay here and do it until we get it right! I can wait all night, young man."