CLINT: The Man and the Movies, by Shawn Levy
A movie lover prone to nostalgia — a description that fits me sometimes — might look at the cover of “Clint” and think, they sure don’t make ’em like that anymore. But the truth is that they only ever made the one.
Clint Eastwood, who turned 95 in May, is a category unto himself. Hollywood used to be more solidly in the business of minting global stars and world-class auteurs, but nobody else since the advent of sound has succeeded so completely, or lasted so long, in both roles.
To contemplate Eastwood’s career, with the help of Shawn Levy’s brisk and capable new biography, is to marvel anew at the man’s uniqueness. It’s as if John Ford were also John Wayne, or Tom Cruise had a side gig as Steven Spielberg.
Thanks to his clean, economical filmmaking style, Eastwood, who has directed 40 features so far, has been embraced by critics as the last paladin of the classical American cinema. A thrifty craftsman tackling sturdy old genres with gravity, originality and wit, he has won Oscars for directing and best picture twice, for “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby.” Meanwhile, just about anyone who has gone to the movies in the last 60 years knows Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name, the terse catchphrases (“Go ahead, make my day”) and, of course, the squint.
Observers of American politics may remember Ronald Reagan quoting Dirty Harry, Eastwood’s single term as the mayor of Carmel, Calif., or his debate with an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention. A walking rebuttal to the myth of a monolithically liberal Hollywood, Eastwood, a self-described libertarian, has been among the most enthusiastic exponents of the American style of violence and a rigorous critic of its consequences.
Levy, a former reviewer who has written biographies of Paul Newman and Jerry Lewis and books about the Rat Pack and the movie scene in 1950s Rome, declares at the outset that “the man and his movies are one and the same.” More than that, he claims that “no Hollywood figure has so complexly represented the cultural and political climates of contemporary America” as Eastwood.
Luckily, these statements serve less as theses to be argued than as prompts for an intelligent and energetic chronicle that encompasses high-flown critique, lowdown tabloid gossip and savvy show-business reportage. Attention is paid to deals and box-office grosses, to Eastwood’s history with women — including the ugly aftermath of his relationship with the actress Sondra Locke, who sued him for palimony and fraud — to his diet and his political views. Mostly, thankfully, Levy concentrates on the movies.
This isn’t the first attempt at an Eastwood biography, and it’s unlikely to be the last. Compared with Richard Schickel’s chummy authorized life from 1996 and Patrick McGilligan’s scolding 2002 anti-hagiography, Levy’s “Clint” tries for balance, acknowledging its subject’s creative and personal lapses while affirming his status as “an honest-to-Pete American icon.”
Eastwood didn’t grant Levy an interview for the book, so there’s nothing revelatory or revisionist here. The story of Eastwood’s rise may be familiar to some fans, but Levy relates it with relish and insight.
A middle-class Depression baby who grew up mainly in the Bay Area, Eastwood appeared in a handful of forgettable movies before being cast as the youthful sidekick in a second-tier television western. His Hollywood ascendance came by way of Italian cinema: the three spaghetti westerns he made in the mid-1960s with Sergio Leone.
Those movies — “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More” and, of course, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” — were dismissed as schlock by most American critics. The American movies that followed, directed by Don Siegel and including the first “Dirty Harry” installment, didn’t fare much better. Audiences felt differently, and in time Leone and Siegel found their way into the pantheon. Eastwood would secure his own status partly by absorbing their influences, mastering a lean, expressive style capable of finding psychological nuance and thematic depth in pulpy material.
Levy’s method of dealing with individual films is to follow a brief production history with quotes from representative reviews (including several of mine), a box-office post-mortem and his own assessment of the movie’s place in the canon.
His judgments mostly follow the critical consensus, but the mini-reviews embedded in the narrative are among the most amusing and illuminating parts of the book. He can be witheringly succinct: “Ew. Just ew,” sums up his view of “Breezy,” Eastwood’s little remembered third feature as a director. (It’s about a middle-aged man’s sexual awakening with a 17-year-old flower child.) On “City Heat,” a misbegotten period caper (directed by Richard Benjamin) pairing Eastwood with Burt Reynolds at the height of their mid-80s stardom: “Good lord, what a lousy picture!”
Levy writes well about the themes that thread through Eastwood’s mature work, and the ways his onscreen persona becomes increasingly layered and contradictory over time. Of “Unforgiven,” Eastwood’s undisputed 1992 masterpiece, he notes that it is, in the annals of the western, uniquely “frank about the cost paid for the taking of a life by the person doing the taking.”
That movie has a wintry, end-of-the-line feeling to it, but in some ways Eastwood was just getting started. It’s good to have a book that takes stock of the last 25 years of his career. Since he turned 70, he has directed 19 films and starred in six of those — three of them flat-out great, at least a half dozen close to that level and a handful that seem to have been made just to defy expectations. A New Age ghost story? A jukebox musical? “The 15:17 to Paris”? Why not?
Eastwood’s later films — which amount to nearly half his oeuvre as a director — deepen a vision that was there from the start. In his moral universe, evil is absolute but decency is relative. The bad guys are unambiguously bad, while the good guys are shadowed by cynicism and tainted by bad faith. Violence may be necessary, but its consequences are rarely other than tragic. A hero, especially when Eastwood plays him, is never perfect and rarely even all that likable.
Eastwood himself, in Levy’s account, hasn’t always been. Finishing the book, I wasn’t sure what I thought of him. But then again, having lived with his work for all of my moviegoing life, I have to say it: I feel lucky.
CLINT: The Man and the Movies | By Shawn Levy | Mariner | 537 pp. | $37.50
A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023.
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