 Starring: Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Evan C. Kim
Director: Buddy Van Horn
Year Of Release: 1988
Plot: The fifth and final Dirty Harry movie sees the San Francisco cop finding unwanted fame after a high profile bust and then investigating after a rock star dies while working on a video. Harry and his partner locks horns with the video’s director, Peter Swan, who plays a strange game called The Dead Pool, where people bet on which celebrities they think will die before the game ends. Someone seems to be targeting the people on Swan’s list for death, and worst of all, Harry is amongst the celebrities in the Dead Pool. |
Although certainly not the best of the series (although it does feature a very early Jim Carrey cameo), The Dead Pool was the final entry in one of the most iconic franchises in cinema history – Dirty Harry. Although with Sergio Leone westerns, the film series has cemented Clint Eastwood’s reputation as one of cinema’s greatest stars. Something he’s since supplemented by becoming one of the top directors in the world.
However Eastwood, who will be 80-years-old next month, is a bit of an enigma. Rather like many of his characters, he seems to wander around with no past, except of course for a body of work stretching back over four decades. When you do hear anything the real Clint, it tends to range from his being a selfish womaniser who will only surround himself with yes-men, to being just about the most gracious man on the planet. In fact, both these things seem to be true and they have served him well in becoming one of the most enduring stars, and now directors ever to grace the silver screen.
He was born Clinton Eastwood Jr. on May 31st 1930 in Piedmont, near San Francisco. Even here Clint’s tendency to blur his past is apparent as he always claimed to come from the more blue-collar Oakland next door. Actually Piedmont was rather genteel, and although the family left the area during the Depression when Clint’s father had trouble finding steady work, by the age of 10, Clint was back among the well-to-do Piedmonters in a nice house, with a stable family.
One thing Clint didn’t like was school and by his teenage years he had developed a rebellious streak which eventually led to him being asked to leave Piedmont High and go Oakland Technical High School instead. After graduation he became a bit of a drifter, always intending to go to college but never quite managing it. This meant that when the draft came for the Korean War, he was called up and spent two years at Fort Ord in Northern California. Luckily, as he was a qualified lifeguard, he was assigned to be a swimming teacher rather than go on active service. It was also while in the armed forces that he first started dating Maggie, who was later to become his wife.
The story of how Clint got to Hollywood has become surrounded in myth. Early Universal Studios publicity says that while at Ford Ord, director Arthur Lubin was filming there and spotted Clint as a potential star. However some say this isn’t true, as Lubin didn’t go to Fort Ord until after Clint had finished his stint in the army. According to some the real story behind Clint’s move to LA is far less glamorous. After he left the army, he went back to see his parents for the summer. There he’s alleged to have got a girl pregnant, and after she lost the baby Clint left town, going back to Maggie in LA who had no idea what had transpired in Piedmont.
Arthur Lubin was important to Clint’s career though. Partially because the director was rather attracted to the handsome young actor, he got Clint into the actor’s programme at Universal in April 1955. Clint had no acting experience and though he had had plenty of opportunity to flex his acting muscles, he had never bothered. It seems that much of his early acting motivation was because he simply couldn’t believe he could get paid $100 a week for just pretending. The acting programme was like a drama school on the Universal lot and students were also contract players who took small parts in films. Although everyone agreed Clint was very enthusiastic, his acting was wooden and as a result Universal let his contract expire.
Then after four years in a total acting wilderness, he landed the part of Rowdy Yates, the second lead in a new TV series called ‘Rawhide’. Although it initially looked like the programme would never be shown, it was eventually put out on CBS, where it grew a loyal following and became a major hit by its second series. ‘Rawhide’ was the tale of a group of cowboys on a seemingly endless cattle drive across America, and while it may have not been a major work of art, it gave Clint massive amounts of the practical acting experience he severely lacked.
Then in 1964 he was asked to go to Italy to make a cheap ‘Spaghetti Western’ for the unknown (at least in America) director Sergio Leone. The money wasn’t bad, and seeing as he was on a break from ‘Rawhide’ he went to Rome and made the movie, thinking nothing much of it. The film was A Fistful of Dollars, which became a massive hit across Europe. Oddly that film and its two sequels, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly didn’t open in America until 1967 because of a lawsuit involving legendary Japanese director Akira Kurowsawa, who correctly claimed that the plot for A Fist Full of Dollars had been stolen from his Yojimbo. This delayed his Hollywood breakthrough, but as soon as the film opened in the US, he was catapulted up the star rankings.
His private life at this time was publicly perfect and the studios portrayed him as the archetypal happily married man. However come claim his desire to be able to do whatever he wanted got the better of him and he had a string of affairs. One lover, Roxanne Tunis, even had Clint’s child, although it wasn’t until many years later that the star actually admitted this.
With the Spaghetti Western trilogy under his belt, Clint was suddenly in demand. The character of the ‘man with no name’, a laconic and fearless gunfighter who seemed to embody masculinity, was a boon for Clint, even if there was a hint of parodying the traditional Western in the films. Although many wanted him to continue playing cowboys, he cleverly took roles in a variety of projects, ranging from the World War II film Where Eagles Dare, to his first contemporary role in Coogan’s Bluff. He still kept his hand in with Westerns though. In fact he was the only Western star to survive into the 1960s. However Leone’s films had changed the genre forever, and Clint’s later entries were far more contemplative and fable-like than ever before.
Then in 1971 he hit upon the other character with which he would always be associated, Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry. Clint had developed a close working relationship with director Don Siegel and together they made a movie about a hard-bitten cop who was more than ready to shoot criminals. The movie was an absolute smash, but many critics were appalled with the film, calling it a fascist anti-left wing diatribe. Oddly, director Siegel was very liberal, and both he and Clint claimed to have no political motives when making the film.
The film made Clint the biggest star on the planet and for a few years after that, everything he touched turned to gold. It was also the year he made his directing debut with Play Misty For Me. Although the film had many Clint trademarks such as his character’s manliness and a complete ‘saint or whore’ attitude towards women, it showed a surprising amount of thought and subtlety from a man who wasn’t particularly known for either.
1975 marked two important moments in Clint’s life. The first was that he got an almost unparalleled level of independence from the studios, something he had always wanted. Smelling money, Warner Brothers offered to allow his production company ‘Malpaso’ a relatively free rein on their Burbank backlot. Clint could pick and choose his stars, directors, crews and projects with minimal interference from the executives. It was a dream come true and marked the beginning of a virtually unique relationship which has lasted over 35 years. The second major event was the beginning of an intense relationship with Sondra Locke, whom he had directed in Breezy. She was younger than Clint and both of them were already married (Sondra never actually divorced, even though she was with Clint until 1988).
Clint’s wife Maggie seemed resigned to her husband’s constant philandering, as long as it was private, but the end came when People magazine went public about Clint and Sondra. Maggie, a devoted woman who had always stood by her husband, couldn’t stand it any longer and filed for divorce. Clint moved in with Sondra, although even this transition wasn’t enough to stop his womanising and he continued to have affairs.
At Malpaso the situation was remarkably similar, with even the longest standing and most trusted members of the crew being casually dropped if they didn’t do as Clint wanted. On the other hand, he did appear constantly gracious and good-natured, as he always managed to avoid genuine conflict and if there ever were an unavoidable problem, he would invariably turn on the charm to get out of it. It also allowed him to run one of the most efficient operations in Hollywood, with his tight crew working ridiculously quickly, and normally bringing in films ahead of schedule and under budget.
Things were going well for Clint and with movies like the wonderful The Outlaw Josey Wales and Every Which Way But Loose, he seemed just about the luckiest man in Hollywood. The late 80s were less kind though. After being the top star of both 1984 and 1985, he suddenly found himself in the wilderness unable to get a hit. He did try his hand at politics though, winning the Mayorship of his beloved Carmel, California in 1986. Clint had sustained one of the longest continuous runs at the top in Hollywood history, but now films like Pink Cadillac were tanking. Even a final bid to resurrect ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan in 1988 with The Dead Pool failed. That year also marked the end of his relationship with Sondra Locke, who had been a promising actress until Clint allegedly became more and more possessive, allowing her career to atrophy because he didn’t want her do anything without his permission. It didn’t help either that he had fathered two children by Jacelyn Reeves before he and Locke finally split.
It was a startling revelation to Clint that he couldn’t just have whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. He had so consistently thought of himself as the underdog who was always going to triumph, that to suddenly realise audiences weren’t always going to stay with him and that women didn’t always do as they were told, was a big shock. He was also fast approaching 60, and his super tough guy persona was suddenly working against him, seeming outdated and increasingly less believable.
Clint was smart though and realised a lot of things from these experiences, not least the fact that his major talent as a director came from quieter, more contemplative work. Early in his career he was obsessed with big guns, big car crashes and always being a winner. Now he realised he could subtly invert this for a more modern audience. After making an acclaimed biopic of jazz legend Charlie Parker with Bird, he went to work on White Hunter, Black Heart, a film loosely based on John Huston’s time in Africa. It was an uneven movie, but showed Clint dallying with the idea of a character whose manly attitudes were at odds with the world around him.
It was his next film though that blew everyone away. That movie was Unforgiven, a revisionist Western which Clint had kept in a drawer for years. His friends and colleagues had tried to persuade him to make it years before, but it wasn’t it until his change of heart in the 90s that it became a viable option. Clint’s character of William Munny is in some ways an older, wiser version of ‘the man with no name’, a formerly fearless gunfighter who now realises how terrible it is to take another man’s life. Once more Clint had changed the face of the Western, and he was rewarded with Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and a nomination for Best Actor. Even though he had had one of the most successful careers of all time, it was, the first Academy recognition he’d ever had. He hadn’t even been nominated before.
Since then he’s continued in a relatively similar vein, playing with and subverting his traditional image in films like In the Line of Fire, A Perfect World and Absolute Power. He’s also turned his hand to romance with The Bridges of Madison County and Southern Gothic when directing Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. His private life meanwhile continued to be chaotic. A doomed affair with Unforgiven co-star Frances Fisher spawned a child but no long-term commitment. However in 1999 he married Diana Ruiz, a local television news anchorwoman.
In the last decade Eastwood has gone from being a virtual has-been to one of the most respected movie stars and directors on the planet. Characters like ‘the man with no name’ and Harry Callahan have not only become social icons, but also important points of reference when theorists talk about film. He won more Oscars for Million Dollar Baby, and huge plaudits for the likes of Letter From Iwo Jima, Changeling and Invictus, becoming one of the most respected directors in the world. While he appears on-screen less than he did (he’s only had four acting roles since 2000), he had a big hit with Gran Torino and behind the cameras he’s one of the busiest directors in the world. While many people take two to three years to make each movie, Clint has been averaging one a year over the last decade, despite the fact he’s about to head into his ninth decade on the planet.
As Sergio Leone said of ‘the man with no name’, he was “A man with no past, no future, just present,” and much the same can be said of Clint. So much of his past has been glossed over or completely changed by either himself or his publicity machine, that he’s one of the few modern Hollywood stars who’s managed to keep much of his private life private. Yet this publicly quiet, gracious, efficient, talented man, can also be an adulterous and selfish person. He has undoubtedly grown more thoughtful with age, realising with his newer characters that having a past is actually important, but it still seems that like Harry Callahan and ‘the man with no name’ he’s a man who’s quite happy to have little of his private life made public, and it’s perhaps for good reason.
TIM ISAAC
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