Perhaps a better title for this post would have been “A Tale of Two Clint Eastwoods,” but I’m no Eastwood expert. I know he’s done quite a bit of directing as well as acting over recent decades, and I haven’t kept up with his work. That’s because I rarely watch modern films, since Hollywood has gone progressively so dark.
I also acknowledge that some people will bitterly disagree with this article. Tastes vary widely, and that’s why any almost any movie or product on Amazon will have reviews that span the full range of one to five stars. This article is something I would have liked to have written over 30 years ago, but I didn’t have a blog back then—in fact, neither did anyone else.
The post isn’t really just about Clint Eastwood; it’s about the Oscar ceremonies, a topic I’ve written about before—e.g., why James Stewart and It’s a Wonderful Life were snubbed as Best Actor and Picture of 1946; why a dull, lifeless story was named Best Picture of 1947; and the remarkable discrepancies in the way Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur were treated at the Academy Awards for 1951 and 1959. The reasons were always political.
Clint turned 95 this year. If you’d like to see him at 25, here he is in an episode of Highway Patrol.
From 1959 to 1965, he starred in Rawhide, a show my family never happened to watch.
His star status continued to rise, of course, with his appearances in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns of the mid-60s; I didn’t watch them until they appeared on TV, but wasn’t all that impressed.
My outlook on Clint changed dramatically, however, in 1972 when one of my apartment roommates told me, “Hey, if you liked The French Connection and Shaft, you’re gonna love Dirty Harry.” I watched it, and definitely became an Eastwood fan. Mixed in with successes like The Eiger Sanction, I enjoyed watching the “Dirty Harry” sequels of the mid-70’s, Magnum Force and The Enforcer.
I think most of Eastwood’s appeal was his masculinity, blended with right-leaning politics. I graduated from Boston University in 1975, and one night a campus dorm was playing an Eastwood double feature. I watched the movies with a roommate, and when the showing ended, and the lights turned on, I looked around and laughed. There was a huge audience, but not one girl. Clint was definitely a man’s man. I‘m not suggesting that Clint wasn’t appealing to girls; it’s just that his films were too violent to attract many women, at least in that era.
In this scene from the Enforcer, Eastwood, as Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, opposes DEI hires in the San Francisco Police Department. One got the impression that Eastwood believed what his character was saying, and the scene is every bit as relevant today. (I don’t own rights to this clip; I’ve just linked it from YouTube.)
For me, Eastwood reached his peak with The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Gritty, authentic, and the most pro-Confederate movie I’d ever seen, with the possible exception of Birth of a Nation. Here is one of several of Josey’s encounters with bad guys:
But the beginning of the end—for me—came with the release of The Gauntlet in 1977. When the film started, a man in the audience rose to his feet and cheered. That was the kind of icon Eastwood had become. But The Gauntlet was a disappointment. Sure, lots of violence, but not a particularly well-crafted or interesting script. Eastwood was apparently determined to make a star of his new girlfriend, Sondra Locke, making a string of movies with her—even his next “Dirty Harry” picture, Sudden Impact (1983), which was so poorly done, I walked out of the theatre without finishing it—something I’d never dreamed I’d do to Dirty Harry.
I think the final straw for me was Tightrope (1983). Eastwood played a cop into kinky sex. As I recall, in one of the early scenes, he has a woman give him a blow job—oral sex. And I was like “What? What’s happened to Clint Eastwood?” Why was that once-conservative icon now doing porno flicks that previously would have been restricted to back-alley theatres? I walked out on that one too. I was pretty much done with Clint Eastwood.
I’ve heard stories, of course, of stars in the film and pop music industry making “deals with the devil”—to achieve star status, they’re allowed to make a few movies or songs that reflect their personal propensities. But later, to “fulfill the contract,” they must degrade themselves in accordance with Deep State wishes. I don’t know who exactly has made these deals—their being negotiated in secret, of course—but I’ve seen enough stars take morally downward spins to have suspicions.
Then I learned that Eastwood’s 1992 western Unforgiven had earned nine Academy Award nominations, winning four, including “Best Picture” and “Best Director” (Eastwood himself, who also starred). Only two other westerns had previously won “Best Picture,” one back in 1931. Had Clint made a big comeback? I was encouraged to find the film included two of my other favorite actors—Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris, who had starred in many UK-produced films.
I’m going to offend lots of Eastwood fans here, but I have to say that this wasn’t just non-Oscar material—it was mediocre.
The plot begins in the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, when a whore laughs at a customer because he has a small “private.” Enraged, the john slashes the prostitute’s face and breasts with a knife, disfiguring her. Although this was a horrible deed, it was hard to believe a hooker would be dumb enough to ridicule a paying customer about his sex organ, and made her even less sympathetic as a character. When the woman and her fellow prostitutes fail to get justice from the corrupt local sheriff (Gene Hackman), they offer a bounty to anyone who would kill the slasher and his buddy. Thus the film’s take-charge heroines are hookers. It was a metaphor for feminism.
Enter Clint Eastwood. Clint plays a former gunslinger, a widower who now runs a pig farm. He has two young children (a boy and girl, who appear to be around ten years old). He rides off to ask an African-American neighbor (Morgan Freeman, a former gunslinging partner of his), to help his kids on his farm while he’s gone. However, Freeman decides to join him on his mission. It is never explained who will now look after Eastwood’s kids, a major plot omission that the screenwriter appeared to overlook.
While on their journey, Freeman speaks of Eastwood‘s abstinence caused by being a widower, and asks “You mean you don’t even use your hand?” (masturbate). Some versions have cut this reference, but I still remember it, and AI exactly reproduces it.
Eastwood also speaks of animal rights. He tells Freeman, “I ain’t gonna kill no more animals.” And earlier in the film, he tells his children about his past: “I was weak and given to mistreating animals. Your dear departed ma cured me of that.”
Somehow I don’t remember John Wayne, Randolph Scott or Alan Ladd talking in their westerns about feminism, animal rights, or masturbation. Is that how 19th-century cowpokes really talked?
One of the first gunslingers to arrive in Big Whiskey to collect the bounty is Richard Harris’s character, “English Bob.” I wondered how long it took the screenwriter to think up that name. Shall we say three seconds?
One of greatest weaknesses a screenplay can have is predictability. Richard Harris’s character travels around with a dime-novelist type biographer, who writes about “English Bob’s” exploits as they unfold. Watching the movie, I thought, “OK, I get it. Harris will fail in his mission; Eastwood will win in the end, and the dime novelist will then want to become Eastwood’s biographer.” Sure enough, it happened just that way.
Joining Eastwood and Freeman in their mission is a young man who calls himself “the Schofield Kid.” He brags and brags about all the gunfights he’s been in and the men he’s killed. I said to myself, “OK, I get it. In the end, it’ll turn out that he’s never killed anyone.” Sure enough, that’s how it winds up.
Please note: I’m not saying I’m a great predictor. I’m just saying the script sucked.
I want to draw a comparison about authenticity here. In The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood is riding with a fellow Confederate who is wounded. Arriving at a general store, he says needs a “boiled poultice for a bullet wound.” Granny Hawkins soon tosses them to him, saying “Now them poultices be laced with feather moss and mustard root. Mind you drop water on them occasional and keep them damp.”
Let’s compare this to Unforgiven. After Clint is nearly beaten to death by Gene Hackman and his henchman, he is cared for by Morgan Freeman and the whores. As the whores ride off, Freeman tells them to get “some medicine.” As a registered nurse myself, this immediately struck me as ludicrous. No one asks for “some medicine.” What kind of medicine? A pain-killer? An antiseptic? Something to soothe inflammation?
Josey Wales had been filled with archaic but original dialogue that seemed torn from the Old West, as in the scene reproduced above with lines such as “He’s as harmless as a heel hound,” and “I’ll whip you with a knotted plow line.”
While there is controversy about the Forrest Carter novel Josey Wales was based on (I read it at the time and enjoyed it), there is no doubt that the screenwriters had westerns experience, Phillp Kaufman’s last project having been The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, and Sonia Chernus having been a story assistant for Rawhide.
By contrast, Unforgiven seemed like a modern hipster’s fantasy about the Old West. I can find no evidence that scriptwriter David Webb Peoples ever worked on any other western, before or after Unforgiven. That didn’t stop him from getting a “Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen” nomination at the 1993 Oscars ceremony.
At the end of Unforgiven, having just killed Gene Hackman and four other bad guys on a rainy night, Clint exits the saloon saying: “All right. I’m coming out. Any man I see out there, I’m going to kill him. Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down.” How Eastwood, a stranger in town, would know where an unidentified nighttime shooter lived, let alone who all his friends were, is not explained.
He then mounts his steed and shouts those memorable closing words: “You better bury Ned right! You better not cut up nor otherwise harm no whores, or I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches!”
Ah, yes. “I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches!” Truly uplifting, inspirational words to leave the audience with. Classic verbiage that would resonate forever, like “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Life is like a box of chocolates,” “Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night,” “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” and “I coulda been a contender.”
Why did Unforgiven win all those Academy Awards, when Clint had clearly made better Westerns before that, which drew no Oscar attention? Because he had gone from political incorrectness—fighting for the Confederacy, and opposing DEI hires for women—to political correctness: feminism, animal rights, and even masturbation. It was Hollywood’s way of saying: “Welcome to the Dark Side, Clint.”
I was rather shocked in 2020 when Clint endorsed New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg for President. According to Microsoft Copilot (AI), “Mike Bloomberg ranks at the very top when it comes to financial influence in the gun control movement—no other individual has spent more. . . . Bloomberg isn’t just a donor—he’s the architect of the modern gun control movement’s infrastructure.” Thus Eastwood’s endorsement seemed very strange, especially after building his film reputation with a Magnum .44.
Let’s just say that, when it comes to Clint Eastwood, we can make no blanket generalizations—we’ll take each of his qualities for what they are or were—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
