People who have worked with Clint Eastwood invariably talk about the first time he rang and the effect of his creaky, whispery voice on their nervous system. In a studio on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California, his arrival is counted down in paces between the coffee urn and the biscuit tray, while outside people queue for a chatshow next door and executives glide to lunch in their golf buggies. Eastwood enters with an awkward, loping gait, as from another era. He has made films of every stripe in the past 10 years, but for most of us he will always be that man: who starts a fight in a saloon, who defends a lady’s honor, who, now that Paul Newman is gone, is one of the last American heroes. Or, as he puts it with conscientious self-mockery and a flash of his green, green eyes, “the jerk from the plains.”
Longevity in Hollywood can inspire embarrassing devotion and Eastwood, heading towards 80, finds much of what comes his way unseemly. Men have a hard time comporting themselves in his presence; women make regrettable observations about his green eyes. The myth is so established, one forgets that in the 1960s and early 1970s, he made a lot of schlocky, forgettable westerns as well as classics such as The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The cowboy, marshal or gunslinger whose idea of showing emotion is to shift a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other is a heroic type we are supposed to have outgrown. And yet the glamour persists, entwined as it is with ideas of what it is to be American and a nostalgia, perhaps, for less officious eras.
Eastwood didn’t say much in those films, but what he did say — “You didn’t hear the lady, did you, boy?” “Cool it, cowboy,” “Next time I’ll knock your damn head off” — compacted over time into legend. Even the most banal line — “Put your pants on, chief” — was transformed by Eastwood’s growl into something sounding like wisdom.
Today he settles in his director’s chair with the cool, polite detachment he reserves, one imagines, for outlaws and journalists. There are spots of high color on his cheeks that make him look, oddly, rather vulnerable and take the menace out of his pointy incisors. Eastwood’s tough-guy image was always leavened by something soft at the edges, the beauty spot above his lip, the fact that he was, throughout the 1960s, very obviously a man who got as much use out of his hairdryer as Warren Beatty. He worked hard to break the mould of that early career in a way he now jokes about. Eastwood is about to cast for a film about Nelson Mandela, adapted from John Carlin’s book, and when I ask who will play him, he looks devilish and says, “I’m going to play him. I’m going to show you my versatility.” (It will actually be Morgan Freeman. “Perfect casting for Mandela.”)
One way or another, Eastwood’s interests always seem to come back to the issue of heroism, particularly to the unsympathetic hero. In his new film, Gran Torino, he plays Walt Kowalski, a trigger-happy, cantankerous old bigot (imagine if Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond had been armed) who learns over time to love his Asian neighbors more than his petulant family and to make a great sacrifice for them. It sounds corny, but it’s a better film than Million Dollar Baby, the sentimental Oscar-winner he directed in 2004 and in which he played a similar role. Once Eastwood stops snarling and overacting — a pitfall of directing oneself — he turns in a touching performance and the film is funny and moving and unexpectedly shocking. Did he want to play Walt from the off?
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