Bluesky

Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is a movie filled with men whose ornery, world-beating reputations precede them. One of these is the braggadocious gunslinger English Bob, a self-promoter who arrives in the one-horse town of Big Whiskey by train with his pet bard, a biographer named W.W. Beauchamp, in tow. Eventually, it’s revealed that English Bob is not, as he claims, “the Duke of Death” but a coward who caught a lucky break during a standoff when his rival’s pistol jammed. He has been dining out on his supposed reputation for decades, but soon enough, English Bob is jailed by the local sheriff—who knows the truth of the situation—and Beauchamp watches in horror as his meal ticket is beaten, humiliated, and finally dispatched. Only then does he realize his complicity in printing a phony legend. Meanwhile, Eastwood’s own character in Unforgiven, William Munny, is the real deal: a stone-cold killer, a real duke of death, no tall tales required. His fondest wish: to be left the hell alone.

Biographers as well as journalists are not really Clint Eastwood’s preferred demographic. Of all the genres the now-95-year-old filmmaker has tackled over the years—from westerns and thrillers to biopics and stranger-than-fiction melodramas, with the odd showbiz fable, ghost story, or two-fisted orangutan showcase dropped in between—the crusading newsroom drama is not one of them. This reticence has not kept several generations of potential Beauchamps from proliferating in Eastwood’s orbit. “There is already a shelf of books about Clint Eastwood, including several full-length biographies, coffee-table books, academic studies, collections of interviews, and such irresistible oddities as Clint Eastwood: Sexual Cowboy and Clint Fucking Eastwood,” writes Shawn Levy in the introduction to his own late-arriving entry into the canon, a hefty study titled Clint: The Man and the Movies.

This is the problem with trying to write about monumental figures: It’s hard to get in on the ground floor. Levy knows this and tries to make hay out of his own late publication, surveying the field and selecting a pair of his predecessors’ works whose flaws are tidily dialectical and duly contextualize his own evenhanded approach. First, Richard Schickel’s Clint Eastwood: A Biography, written in collaboration with Eastwood himself, gets dinged for being too nice: “a fawning, gentlemanly book.” Meanwhile, Patrick McGilligan’s Clint: The Life and the Legend is deemed too nasty, an accusation supported by the protracted legal battle over its publication.

There is something to these observations. “If, as Shaw said, loyalty in a critic is corruption, then Richard Schickel is rotten,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Allen Barra in 1996, slamming Schickel for sycophantically depicting Eastwood as a paragon of virtue. (Schickel would go on to help produce a documentary about Eastwood’s career, narrated by Morgan Freeman.) As for McGilligan, he’s an assiduous—and professionally polarizing—film historian who exults in raising the hackles of auteurists (as when he implied that Fritz Lang murdered his first wife). He doesn’t so much place his subjects under a microscope as in the line of fire, and Eastwood comes in for his share of cheap shots. “He’s a right-wing subject,” McGilligan said of Eastwood in 2015, “[and] you can’t approach that factually unless you concede that about him politically.” There’s a difference, though, between parsing a director’s worldview (and how it plays out in his films) and positioning one’s objections as a form of public service, and McGilligan’s refusal to concede anything about Eastwood as an artist suggests a critic in thrall to his own agenda: For him, being on the receiving end of a lawsuit was a “badge of honor.”

Levy didn’t get access to Eastwood for Clint, and he is not likely to get sued, either. Nor is he the type of writer to take his badge of honor and throw it in the river, Dirty Harry–style. He comes neither to praise Eastwood nor to bury him, just to stake out the middle ground—what he calls being at “a cool remove,” although at times the prose itself could benefit from a bit more chill (as when the chapter on Million Dollar Baby pauses for an all-caps spoiler warning). Early on in the book, Levy proposes that Eastwood, more than any other American movie star turned filmmaker of his era—an extended period of extreme visibility dating back to the mid-1960s, with Eastwood’s star-making prime-time role as a lanky ramrod on Rawhide—reflects the complexities of American society: a different take, surely, than that of McGilligan, who sees only a rigid ideological impasse. Ideally, Clint would subject that thesis to a genuine stress test, but the flip side of Levy’s industriousness is a certain lack of focus. Even while duly excavating the various strata of dirt flung and muck raked around Eastwood’s life and career, Levy doesn’t dig particularly deep.

In the book’s broad outlines, Eastwood’s story—starting with his Depression-era childhood in California through his stint as an Army lifeguard and his success in Hollywood and as an unrepentant ladies’ man—is that of a handsome cipher growing, slowly and gradually, into his talent, which initially had to do with embracing certain limitations. The old joke about Eastwood’s drama teacher—who told him, “Don’t just do something, stand there”—compresses plenty about his on-screen persona, with its steely mask of impassivity, but also his patience. (“I worked half my life to be an overnight success,” Eastwood has joked.)

Levy does well in the sections detailing Eastwood’s two crucial breakthroughs—first by landing Rawhide and then by leaving it, decamping to Italy to shoot an unheralded little western with the working title Il Magnifico Straniero, better known today as A Fistful of Dollars. By so vividly embodying Sergio Leone’s version of a western hero, Eastwood cultivated a mystique adjacent to (but different from) that of John Wayne. For all his rough edges, Wayne was noble, and also knowable; Eastwood, by contrast, was cold, remote, and in his way deeply seductive, clutching that fistful of dollars with a mercenary’s resolve.

It is around this point in Clint’s chronology—after the migration toward spaghetti westerns but before genuine superstardom—that we get the first whispers of Eastwood’s ambivalence toward his own celebrity, and the tight grip he kept on his image. Such tetchiness is a logical complement to the methodology he would later adopt during his career as a director, whose longevity is largely a byproduct of keeping his head (and his budgets) down: Having earned the right to have the final cut on his movies, Eastwood did his best to achieve a similar control over the public narrative of his own life.

He did not always succeed. In 1997, in the midst of a pitched legal battle centered on a much-publicized palimony suit, Eastwood’s ex-wife (and regular costar) Sondra Locke published a memoir called The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey, in which she characterized Eastwood as “a completely evil, manipulating, lying excuse for a man.” (Locke received a warning letter from Eastwood’s lawyer, though no slander charges were filed.) Levy has evident sympathy for Locke’s position—he’s critical of the way that Eastwood maneuvered behind the scenes to undermine her career—and he has no illusions in general about the ways that A-listers cultivate and wield power. (One of his other recent projects is a podcast on the Hollywood power broker Lew Wasserman, who greenlighted Eastwood’s directorial debut on Play Misty for Me.)

Clint is not intended as an academic study, though it does feature analyses of every one of Eastwood’s directorial efforts as well as his starring roles. But these are too often wanting: Given the opportunity to stake out new interpretive terrain beyond that covered by Schickel, McGilligan, et al.—the conceptually rich, thematically fertile string of movies comprising Eastwood’s late-late period in the 2010s and ’20s—Levy takes the path of least resistance. How any critic could dismiss 2018’s The 15:17 to Paris—a movie that almost makes a fetish of its own ontological wonkiness by casting three real-life servicemen in a replay of a foiled real-life hijacking—as an “an ordinary and dull film” is beyond me, as is reducing Richard Jewell, which is almost crystalline in its contempt for the fourth estate, to a “TV movie of the week.” It would be wrong to characterize these movies as merely boring, but Levy is content to dismiss them.

Beyond his own assessments of Eastwood’s films, Levy gives us a sense of the larger critical dustups around them, including some of the same concerns about Eastwood’s political values cultivated in McGilligan’s study. Such rhetoric dates back to the heyday of the film critic Pauline Kael, who sized up Clint as a pernicious influence on American movies and their audiences. “The action genre has always had a fascist potential and it has finally surfaced,” she wrote of Dirty Harry, a movie she admired for its craft (the director was Don Siegel) and detested for the way it stoked the audience’s bloodlust, with Eastwood’s loose-cannon lawman as the silent, grimacing avatar. Kael’s animus toward Eastwood was total to the point of seeming pathological, and Levy documents their feud in vituperative detail. Wondering what he had done to incur Kael’s wrath, Eastwood consulted a psychologist, who told him that her reviews were a bizarrely flirtatious form of projection—evidence of a schoolgirl crush. Kael was appalled by the idea, but Eastwood apparently took it semiseriously, as an occupational hazard of his status as a sexual cowboy.

This sort of stuff is entertaining, and Clint supplies a nice, steady drip of gossip. Unfortunately, Levy is mostly hesitant to draw out the deep, compelling links between the man and his movies. There’s no mention, for instance, of how clearly Sondra Locke’s presence haunts a “breezy” film like The Mule, about an elderly womanizer reckoning with his myriad betrayals of his wife and daughter, the latter played by Eastwood’s real-life daughter, Alison. It’s telling that the quality Levy reveres most in Eastwood is his work ethic, a quality that functions rhetorically as a mirror for the author’s own stick-to-itiveness over what must have been a grueling 15-year project. Hence the winning humility of his parting words, with their tacit acknowledgment that whatever spot Clint ultimately ends up occupying on the shelf of Eastwood studies, it will eventually have to move over to accommodate newcomers.