What happend to Clint Eastwood

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“I’M NEVER GOING to be a Laurence Olivier,” Clint Eastwood said, back in 1971. “With my physical type and legato personality, I’ll never play certain parts. But I still can do things that have some quality.”

That he could. There have been numerous new Oliviers over the years, but there has only been one Eastwood. Born during the Great Depression, this California native would work his way though odd jobs and a stint in the army (as a lifeguard) before becoming a contract player at Universal. After a series of tiny parts and walk-ons, Eastwood nabbed a plum role as Rowdy Yates in the TV show Rawhide. And then, after a fateful trip to Europe to shoot a few Italian Westerns he assumed no one would ever see, Clint would soon turn into the person that Pauline Kael described as “six feet four of lean, tough saint, blue-eyed and shaggy-haired, with a rugged, creased, careworn face that occasionally breaks into a mischief-filled grin.” The rest is film history. He is, in so many ways, the last movie star standing.

In honor of Eastwood’s 90th birthday, we’ve picked 25 of his essential movies, both as an actor and a director. (In a few cases, solely as a director.) The gunfighters, the cops, the brawlers, the soldiers, the lovers, the lion-in-winter roles, the strong, silent types and the comic turns — these are the highlights of a singular, prolific career in front of and behind the camera.

‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964)

In search of an actor to headline his Western “homage” to the Japanese movie Yojimbo, Italian director Sergio Leone wanted Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Charles Bronson. When somebody showed him an episode of Rawhide and suggested the 34-year-old Eastwood, the filmmaker scoffed: This guy? But the price was right, Leone was desperate … and a movie star was born. From the moment the Man With No Name appears onscreen, rocking a pancho and chewing on a cheroot, you can sense that this is not a gent you want to mess with. He quickly sells himself as a hired gun to two different warring factions in a small frontier town; that way, he can get twice the money and watch them destroy each other to boot. Just don’t laugh at his horse or you’ll be eating hot lead. So much of what would become the classic Eastwood persona — the stoic expression, the tough-guy squint, those terse replies and lockjaw-friendly line readings — starts right here. It wouldn’t make its way to the United States until 1967, along with the rest of the “Dollars” trilogy, but it established him immediately as a perfect screen antihero. “When Michelangelo was asked why he chose a particular block of marble, he answered that he saw Moses in it,” Leone would recall many years later. “When I saw in Clint Eastwood, simply, was a block of marble. And that was I wanted.”

‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964)

JOLLY/CONSTANTIN/OCEAN/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

In search of an actor to headline his Western “homage” to the Japanese movie Yojimbo, Italian director Sergio Leone wanted Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Charles Bronson. When somebody showed him an episode of Rawhide and suggested the 34-year-old Eastwood, the filmmaker scoffed: This guy? But the price was right, Leone was desperate … and a movie star was born. From the moment the Man With No Name appears onscreen, rocking a pancho and chewing on a cheroot, you can sense that this is not a gent you want to mess with. He quickly sells himself as a hired gun to two different warring factions in a small frontier town; that way, he can get twice the money and watch them destroy each other to boot. Just don’t laugh at his horse or you’ll be eating hot lead. So much of what would become the classic Eastwood persona — the stoic expression, the tough-guy squint, those terse replies and lockjaw-friendly line readings — starts right here. It wouldn’t make its way to the United States until 1967, along with the rest of the “Dollars” trilogy, but it established him immediately as a perfect screen antihero. “When Michelangelo was asked why he chose a particular block of marble, he answered that he saw Moses in it,” Leone would recall many years later. “When I saw in Clint Eastwood, simply, was a block of marble. And that was I wanted.”

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

Having made A Fistful of Dollars and its follow-up, For a Few Dollars More (1965), Sergio Leone wanted Eastwood back for Round Three. The actor wasn’t sure he wanted to return to Europe for another one; Rawhide had just been canceled, the previous two hadn’t been seen in the U.S. yet and he was desperate to establish himself in Hollywood’s eyes as being more than a TV cowpoke. Leone flew out to California to pitch the lanky actor, and after negotiating a bigger payday, Eastwood signed on. Both men got their money’s worth. Roundly considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made, the third entry of the “Dollars trilogy” pairs the Man With No Name with Lee Van Cleef’s black-clad “Bad” and Eli Wallach’s charismatically amoral “Ugly”; Eastwood’s gunfighter is “the Good” only be default. All three of them are chasing down a missing cache of Confederate gold, and none of them are willing to let a little thing like the Civil War get in their way. It ends with the most protracted, close-up-filled showdown in film history. Eventually, American audiences belatedly got to see the entire trilogy in quick succession; by the time Ennio Morricone’s “ay-yay-yaaa” was released in January 1968 and was racking up huge box-office receipts, nobody in Hollywood considered Eastwood a TV star.

‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964)

JOLLY/CONSTANTIN/OCEAN/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

In search of an actor to headline his Western “homage” to the Japanese movie Yojimbo, Italian director Sergio Leone wanted Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Charles Bronson. When somebody showed him an episode of Rawhide and suggested the 34-year-old Eastwood, the filmmaker scoffed: This guy? But the price was right, Leone was desperate … and a movie star was born. From the moment the Man With No Name appears onscreen, rocking a pancho and chewing on a cheroot, you can sense that this is not a gent you want to mess with. He quickly sells himself as a hired gun to two different warring factions in a small frontier town; that way, he can get twice the money and watch them destroy each other to boot. Just don’t laugh at his horse or you’ll be eating hot lead. So much of what would become the classic Eastwood persona — the stoic expression, the tough-guy squint, those terse replies and lockjaw-friendly line readings — starts right here. It wouldn’t make its way to the United States until 1967, along with the rest of the “Dollars” trilogy, but it established him immediately as a perfect screen antihero. “When Michelangelo was asked why he chose a particular block of marble, he answered that he saw Moses in it,” Leone would recall many years later. “When I saw in Clint Eastwood, simply, was a block of marble. And that was I wanted.”

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

P E A/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Having made A Fistful of Dollars and its follow-up, For a Few Dollars More (1965), Sergio Leone wanted Eastwood back for Round Three. The actor wasn’t sure he wanted to return to Europe for another one; Rawhide had just been canceled, the previous two hadn’t been seen in the U.S. yet and he was desperate to establish himself in Hollywood’s eyes as being more than a TV cowpoke. Leone flew out to California to pitch the lanky actor, and after negotiating a bigger payday, Eastwood signed on. Both men got their money’s worth. Roundly considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made, the third entry of the “Dollars trilogy” pairs the Man With No Name with Lee Van Cleef’s black-clad “Bad” and Eli Wallach’s charismatically amoral “Ugly”; Eastwood’s gunfighter is “the Good” only be default. All three of them are chasing down a missing cache of Confederate gold, and none of them are willing to let a little thing like the Civil War get in their way. It ends with the most protracted, close-up-filled showdown in film history. Eventually, American audiences belatedly got to see the entire trilogy in quick succession; by the time Ennio Morricone’s “ay-yay-yaaa” was released in January 1968 and was racking up huge box-office receipts, nobody in Hollywood considered Eastwood a TV star.

‘Coogan’s Bluff’ (1968)

Deputy sheriff Walt Coogan knows the Arizona landscape like the back of sunburnt hands. When he’s sent to New York to bring back an escaped convict, however, the Southwestern lawman is a Stetson-wearing fish out of water. All Coogan has to do is apply a little bit of frontier justice and his signature take-no-shit tactics to these city folks, however, and he’ll get his man. Playing off his sagebrush antihero status, Eastwood gives his deputy an edge and then adds a sense of moral indignation about a society filled with hustlers, hookers, hippies and LSD-gobbling freaks (if there’s a funnier, more paranoid psychedelic-Sodom-and-Gomorrah look at ’60s counterculture than this, we’re unaware of it). Coogan is the missing link between his Western tough guys and the reactionary cops à la Harry Callahan he’d play throughout his career, and he ended up tapping into the same “law and order” demographic that would help Nixon become president. It was a hit, and more importantly, paired Eastwood with director Don Siegel for the first time, who’d play a big part in the actor’s career in front of and behind the camera. No less than Quentin Tarantino has declared that Coogan’s Bluff is more or less responsible for Eastwood establishing “a persona that would dominate action cinema for the next twenty-five years.”
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