Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
a hired hand who tends cattle and performs other duties on horseback
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
United States saxophonist and leader of the bop style of jazz (1920-1955)
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
someone who murders more than three victims one at a time in a relatively short interval
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
United States film actor who played tough heroes (1907-1979)
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
tightly stretched rope or wire on which acrobats perform high above the ground
If someone else is supposed to direct, then falters or becomes too slow or indecisive for his taste—as did Philip Kaufman on “Josey Wales,” and the writer Richard Tuggle on “Tightrope”—he pushes him aside and takes over.
an early form of modern jazz (originating around 1940)
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
a bloody and prolonged operation on the island of Iwo Jima in which American marines landed and defeated Japanese defenders (February and March 1945)
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
showing or motivated by sympathy and understanding and generosity
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
United States film actor who played tough heroes (1907-1979)
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
untanned hide especially of cattle; cut in strips it is used for whips and ropes
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a police group to enforce laws against gambling and prostitution
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
United States film actor noted for his portrayals of strong silent heroes (1901-1961)
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
With that ideal in mind, he and the cinematographer, Jack N. Green, miscalculated; they used too little light for color film, and some of the movie is very dark.
United States film maker born in the United States but an Irish citizen after 1964 (1906-1987)
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
one whose job it is to execute unpleasant tasks for a superior
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
of or related to the Hmong people or their language or their culture
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
interpret (a text or an artwork) by the method of deconstructing
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
United States jazz trumpeter and exponent of bebop (1917-1993)
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
the concentration of attention or energy on something
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
a swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to buy worthless property
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
a time period during which something occurs or is expected to occur
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
a war between the Allies (Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iran, Iraq, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, USSR, Yugoslavia) and the Axis (Albania, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Rumania, Slovakia, Thailand) from 1939 to 1945
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a mountain peak in the St. Elias Range in the southwestern Yukon Territory in Canada (19,850 feet high)
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
United States film actor who frequently plays tough characters (born 1943)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
a count of troops killed in an operation or time period
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
a word or phrase that particular people use in particular situations
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
United States actor (born in England) who was the elegant leading man in many films (1904-1986)
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
Eastwood didn’t have the largeness of spirit to play Huston, but he let us know—as if we had any doubt—that reckless flamboyance was an egotistical diversion that he couldn’t afford.
characteristic of those having an inflated idea of their own importance
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
United States film actor who appeared in many films with Katharine Hepburn (1900-1967)
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
a horse used for plowing and hauling and other heavy labor
Universal may have thought that he would be a workhorse on the lot, but he switched to Warner Bros., where he made, among other movies, more Westerns, but only his own, eccentric kind of Westerns.
a woman with whom you are in love or have an intimate relationship
One can remember Verna Bloom’s tenderness in supporting roles, and, in the late seventies and early eighties, a few sassy performances by Sondra Locke, who was then Eastwood’s inamorata.
a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
With that ideal in mind, he and the cinematographer, Jack N. Green, miscalculated; they used too little light for color film, and some of the movie is very dark.
causing an irritating cutaneous sensation; being affect with an itch
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
pertaining to or occurring in or producing a series
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
an injury to the neck (the cervical vertebrae) resulting from rapid acceleration or deceleration (as in an automobile accident)
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
United States film maker born in the United States but an Irish citizen after 1964 (1906-1987)
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
an exceptional interest in and admiration for yourself
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
United States saxophonist and leader of the bop style of jazz (1920-1955)
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
United States actor and filmmaker who starred with Paul Newman in several films (born in 1936)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
pertaining to or of the nature of a normal tuberosity or tubercle
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
hairy aromatic perennial herb having whorls of small white purple-spotted flowers in a terminal spike; used in the past as a domestic remedy; strongly attractive to cats
someone with a sociopathic personality; a person with an antisocial personality disorder (`psychopath' was once widely used but has now been superseded by `sociopath')
He sleeps with her a few times, only to discover that she’s a knife-wielding psychopath who won’t let go.
a person who announces and plays popular recorded music
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
a culture with lifestyles and values opposed to those of the established culture
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
a melody used to identify a performer or a dance band or radio/tv program
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
United States film actor who frequently plays tough characters (born 1943)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
a state of political hostility that existed from 1945 until 1990 between countries led by the Soviet Union and countries led by the United States
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
a film about life in the western United States during the period of exploration and development
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
a conservative who advocates only minor reforms in government or politics
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
capital city of the Piemonte region of northwestern Italy
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
a member of the Union Army during the American Civil War
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
a career in industrial or commercial or professional activities
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
studies of the rules for forming admissible sentences
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
South African statesman who was released from prison to become the nation's first democratically elected president in 1994 (born in 1918)
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
creating an unfavorable or neutral first impression
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a large coach-and-four formerly used to carry passengers and mail on regular routes between towns
Then, suddenly, looks, temperament, and role all come together—as they did for Wayne, in “Stagecoach” (1939), and for Bogart, in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)—and the public sees the actor, sees what it desires.
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
a form of entertainment that enacts a story by sound and a sequence of images giving the illusion of continuous movement
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
Englishman and Quaker who founded the colony of Pennsylvania (1644-1718)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
Shot in black-and-white, the two movies, neither of them great but both intelligent and stirring, were placed in conversation with each other as profiles of national character—dialectical partners in an imaginary but potent debate.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
a fight involving shooting small arms with the intent to kill or frighten
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
having existed from the beginning; in an earliest or original stage or state
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
One can remember Verna Bloom’s tenderness in supporting roles, and, in the late seventies and early eighties, a few sassy performances by Sondra Locke, who was then Eastwood’s inamorata.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; during Roman times the region was known as Cambria
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
German dramatist and poet who developed a style of epic theater (1898-1956)
From the beginning, going back to his performance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood had shown a penchant for irony, but the end of “Mystic River” was a perverse twist worthy of a sardonic modern artist like Brecht or Fassbinder.
the kinship relation between an offspring and the father
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
a raised mark on the skin (as produced by the blow of a whip); characteristic of many allergic reactions
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
Eastwood transferred his love of open country to a peculiarly tight urban spot, a studio-built Fifty-second Street, at the late-forties height of bebop.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
French film maker influenced by surrealism; early work explored the documentary use of film; noted for innovative techniques (born in 1930)
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
used of men; markedly masculine in appearance or manner
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
“Unforgiven” ends with him gunning down Little Bill and his friends and then riding away, in a return to the kind of familiar myth that the rest of the movie seems to reject.
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
United States actor and filmmaker who starred with Paul Newman in several films (born in 1936)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
Russian dramatist whose plays are concerned with the difficulty of communication between people (1860-1904)
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
(often used in combination) having a specified direction
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
If someone else is supposed to direct, then falters or becomes too slow or indecisive for his taste—as did Philip Kaufman on “Josey Wales,” and the writer Richard Tuggle on “Tightrope”—he pushes him aside and takes over.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a United States youth subculture of the 1950s; rejected possessions or regular work or traditional dress; for communal living and psychedelic drugs and anarchism; favored modern forms of jazz (e.g., bebop)
In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor.
Eastwood didn’t have the largeness of spirit to play Huston, but he let us know—as if we had any doubt—that reckless flamboyance was an egotistical diversion that he couldn’t afford.
someone who causes the death of a person or animal
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
direct in spatial dimensions; proceeding without deviation or interruption; straight and short
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a turbulent state resulting in injuries and destruction etc.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
The movie was a whimsically daft spectacle, but Eastwood did one thing straight: he embraced the noble American pictorial ideal—a man on a horse, traversing vast open spaces.
causing or capable of causing bewilderment or shock or insensibility
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
the activity of exerting your muscles in various ways to keep fit
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
of or relating to the island or republic of Malta or its inhabitants
Then, suddenly, looks, temperament, and role all come together—as they did for Wayne, in “Stagecoach” (1939), and for Bogart, in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)—and the public sees the actor, sees what it desires.
The movie was a whimsically daft spectacle, but Eastwood did one thing straight: he embraced the noble American pictorial ideal—a man on a horse, traversing vast open spaces.
a juvenile between the onset of puberty and maturity
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
(astronomy) a celestial body of hot gases that radiates energy derived from thermonuclear reactions in the interior
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
the cardinal number that is the sum of eighteen and one
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
a performance given extempore without planning or preparation
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
the attribute of accepting the facts of life and favoring practicality and literal truth
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
United States jazz trumpeter and exponent of bebop (1917-1993)
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
someone who has committed a crime or has been legally convicted of a crime
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
a message whose ingenuity or verbal skill or incongruity has the power to evoke laughter
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
having shoulders or shoulders as specified; usually used as a combining form
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the present, the grownup victim (Tim Robbins), and the two friends who watched years ago as he was driven away (Sean Penn and Bacon), are held together by a bond of shame and contempt.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
From the beginning, going back to his performance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood had shown a penchant for irony, but the end of “Mystic River” was a perverse twist worthy of a sardonic modern artist like Brecht or Fassbinder.
overcome or cause to waver or submit by (or as if by) staring
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
the act of reassuring; restoring someone's confidence
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
a characteristic property that defines the apparent individual nature of something
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
to render motionless, as with a fixed stare or by arousing terror or awe
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
a house that is one of a row of identical houses situated side by side and sharing common walls
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
someone who rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
a Hindu or Buddhist religious leader and spiritual teacher
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
United States playwright who collaborated with many other writers including Moss Hart (1889-1961)
If someone else is supposed to direct, then falters or becomes too slow or indecisive for his taste—as did Philip Kaufman on “Josey Wales,” and the writer Richard Tuggle on “Tightrope”—he pushes him aside and takes over.
speak (about unimportant matters) rapidly and incessantly
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
a city in northwest Indiana on Lake Michigan; steel production
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
In the lovely movie that followed, “A Perfect World” (1993), Kevin Costner’s escaped convict and murderer, having lost his desire to kill, yet unable to outrun his past, dies without a fight in an open meadow.
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and seven
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies.
South African statesman who was released from prison to become the nation's first democratically elected president in 1994 (born in 1918)
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
a skilled worker who practices some trade or handicraft
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
a happening that is distinctive in a series of related events
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
showing clearly the outline or profile or boundary
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
the power or right to give orders or make decisions
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
working for hourly wages rather than fixed (e.g. annual) salaries
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
(law) the unlawful act of capturing and carrying away a person against their will and holding them in false imprisonment
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
United States choreographer who brought human emotion to classical ballet and spirited reality to Broadway musicals (1918-1998)
In the present, the grownup victim (Tim Robbins), and the two friends who watched years ago as he was driven away (Sean Penn and Bacon), are held together by a bond of shame and contempt.
English scientist and Franciscan monk who stressed the importance of experimentation; first showed that air is required for combustion and first used lenses to correct vision (1220-1292)
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
By giving the Western extra dimensions, and by pushing the moral issues to extremes, Eastwood had exposed (inadvertently, perhaps) the limits of the genre.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
marked by elaborate rhetoric and elaborated with decorative details
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
engage in recreational activities rather than work; occupy oneself in a diversion
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
the act of holding back or keeping within your possession or control
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
living by preying on other animals especially by catching living prey
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
a digital recording (as of a movie) on an optical disk that can be played on a computer or a television set
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
a film of impurities or vegetation that can form on the surface of a liquid
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
a woman who engages in sexual intercourse for money
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and eight
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
We are what the past has made us, and Sean Penn’s Jimmy, a neighborhood store owner and thug whose earlier life has been marked by acts of vengeance, loses his daughter and is forced to ask if, in some way, he’s responsible for her death.
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
the killing of a human being by another human being
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
disdainfully or ironically humorous; scornful and mocking
From the beginning, going back to his performance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood had shown a penchant for irony, but the end of “Mystic River” was a perverse twist worthy of a sardonic modern artist like Brecht or Fassbinder.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
The question became one of Eastwood’s signature lines; he repeats it at the end of the film, when he has the serial killer under his gun, and this time the question is lethal.
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
having an import not apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence; beyond ordinary understanding
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
the countries of (originally) Europe and (now including) North America and South America
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
a gambling card game in which chips are placed on the ace and king and queen and jack of separate suits (taken from a separate deck); a player plays the lowest card of a suit in his hand and successively higher cards are played until the sequence stops; the player who plays a card matching one in the layout wins all the chips on that card
In a drolly violent prelude, Callahan stops a bank robbery at lunchtime, crossing the street and blazing away with his .44
someone who has committed a crime or has been legally convicted of a crime
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
United States novelist noted for his stories of American Indians and the frontier life (1789-1851)
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
a keyboard instrument that is played by depressing keys that cause hammers to strike tuned strings and produce sounds
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
United States labor leader who organized the longshoremen (1901-1990)
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
The movie was a whimsically daft spectacle, but Eastwood did one thing straight: he embraced the noble American pictorial ideal—a man on a horse, traversing vast open spaces.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
at or near the beginning of a period of time or course of events or before the usual or expected time
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
a person whose creative work shows sensitivity and imagination
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
give a beating to; subject to a beating, either as a punishment or as an act of aggression
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
made from residue of grapes or apples after pressing
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
Then, a few months later, he brought out “Letters from Iwo Jima,” a portrait of the Japanese, particularly the island’s military commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), as supremely dutiful, and honorable in defeat.
applicable to or common to all members of a group or set
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
relating to or concerned with a city or densely populated area
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
announce one's arrival, e.g. at hotels or airports
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
an account of the series of events making up a person's life
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
willingly obedient out of a sense of duty and respect
Then, a few months later, he brought out “Letters from Iwo Jima,” a portrait of the Japanese, particularly the island’s military commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), as supremely dutiful, and honorable in defeat.
United States filmmaker who with his brothers founded the movie studio that produced the first talking picture (1881-1958)
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
the power of making free choices unconstrained by external agencies
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
But Eastwood, by experimenting with new forms and moods, both light and dark, and by constantly altering his early self as a star, achieved both as he got older, and without becoming a stiff.
device for converting sound waves into electrical energy
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
in such a manner that death ensues (also in reference to hatred, jealousy, fear, etc.)
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
The question became one of Eastwood’s signature lines; he repeats it at the end of the film, when he has the serial killer under his gun, and this time the question is lethal.
United States film actor who appeared in many films with Katharine Hepburn (1900-1967)
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
of or relating to or characteristic of California or its inhabitants
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
the western seaboard of the United States from Washington to southern California
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
come near or verge on, resemble, come nearer in quality, or character
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something or someone
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
(behavioral attributes) the way a person behaves toward other people
His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
United States writer and humorist best known for his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1835-1910)
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
“Unforgiven” ends with him gunning down Little Bill and his friends and then riding away, in a return to the kind of familiar myth that the rest of the movie seems to reject.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
spend time in a certain location or with certain people
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
New Zealand mountaineer who in 1953 first attained the summit of Mount Everest with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay (born in 1919)
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
the quality of being honest and straightforward in attitude and speech
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
the particular occupation for which you are trained
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
deviating from what is considered moral or right or proper or good
From the beginning, going back to his performance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood had shown a penchant for irony, but the end of “Mystic River” was a perverse twist worthy of a sardonic modern artist like Brecht or Fassbinder.
diurnal birds of prey having long pointed powerful wings adapted for swift flight
Then, suddenly, looks, temperament, and role all come together—as they did for Wayne, in “Stagecoach” (1939), and for Bogart, in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)—and the public sees the actor, sees what it desires.
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
(computer science) a system of world-wide electronic communication in which a computer user can compose a message at one terminal that can be regenerated at the recipient's terminal when the recipient logs in
He has outlasted everyone.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
Early on, his outsider heroes operated with an unshakable sense of right.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
wreaking or capable of wreaking complete destruction
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
the period of time that it takes for a planet (as, e.g., Earth or Mars) to make a complete revolution around the sun
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
of or relating to the United States of America or its people or language or culture
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
English sociologist and economist and a central member of the Fabian Society (1859-1947)
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a composition that imitates or misrepresents somebody's style, usually in a humorous way
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
not moving quickly; taking a comparatively long time
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
the actions and activities assigned to or required or expected of a person or group
Then, suddenly, looks, temperament, and role all come together—as they did for Wayne, in “Stagecoach” (1939), and for Bogart, in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)—and the public sees the actor, sees what it desires.
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
a communist state in Indochina on the South China Sea; achieved independence from France in 1945
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
collection of records especially about an institution
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
English empiricist philosopher who believed that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience (1632-1704)
One can remember Verna Bloom’s tenderness in supporting roles, and, in the late seventies and early eighties, a few sassy performances by Sondra Locke, who was then Eastwood’s inamorata.
someone who plays a musical instrument (as a profession)
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
Scottish bacteriologist who discovered penicillin (1881-1955)
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
the act of leaving secretly or without explanation
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
the social force that binds you to the courses of action demanded by that force
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
a period of time sufficient for factors to work themselves out
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
United States biologist who formulated the chromosome theory of heredity (1866-1945)
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
a soldier of the American Revolution whose troops helped capture Fort Ticonderoga from the British (1738-1789)
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
gymnastic apparatus consisting of two parallel wooden rods supported on uprights
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
the human beings of a particular nation or community or ethnic group
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
having or causing a whirling sensation; liable to falling
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
a thoroughfare (usually including sidewalks) that is lined with buildings
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
The movie was a whimsically daft spectacle, but Eastwood did one thing straight: he embraced the noble American pictorial ideal—a man on a horse, traversing vast open spaces.
talk or behave amorously, without serious intentions
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
the activity of exerting your muscles in various ways to keep fit
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
English poet remembered primarily for his free translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam (1809-1883)
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
the act of taking revenge (harming someone in retaliation for something harmful that they have done) especially in the next life
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
a system that provides quantitative information about finances
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
a woman who engages in sexual intercourse for money
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
(Old Testament) the first king of the Israelites who defended Israel against many enemies (especially the Philistines)
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
the high-pitched continuing noise made by animals (birds or monkeys)
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
(according to Marxist thought) being of the property-owning class and exploitive of the working class
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and five
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
a depository containing historical records and documents
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Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
pleasing in appearance especially by reason of conformity to ideals of form and proportion
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
`Johnny' was applied as a nickname for Confederate soldiers by the Federal soldiers in the American Civil War; `greyback' derived from their grey Confederate uniforms
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
Then, suddenly, looks, temperament, and role all come together—as they did for Wayne, in “Stagecoach” (1939), and for Bogart, in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)—and the public sees the actor, sees what it desires.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
something with a round shape resembling a flat circular plate
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
a native or resident of New York (especially of New York City)
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Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
used of the older of two persons of the same name especially used to distinguish a father from his son
But Eastwood, by experimenting with new forms and moods, both light and dark, and by constantly altering his early self as a star, achieved both as he got older, and without becoming a stiff.
the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up
His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies.
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
a person hired to fight for another country than their own
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
art that is a product of one of the fine arts (especially a painting or sculpture of artistic merit)
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
to move or force, especially in an effort to get something open
We are what the past has made us, and Sean Penn’s Jimmy, a neighborhood store owner and thug whose earlier life has been marked by acts of vengeance, loses his daughter and is forced to ask if, in some way, he’s responsible for her death.
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
a natural object consisting of a dead animal or person
If Leone emptied the West in his early movies, making Westerns that were mainly syntax and dead bodies, Eastwood, working in long paragraphs, put meaning back into the genre.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
British poet (born in the United States) who won the Nobel prize for literature; his plays are outstanding examples of modern verse drama (1888-1965)
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
the internal supporting structure that gives an artifact its shape
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
an itemized statement of money owed for goods shipped or services rendered
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
a tangible symbol signifying approval or distinction
In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor.
concerning or characterized by an appreciation of beauty or good taste
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
the subject matter of a conversation or discussion
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
an area within a city or town that has some distinctive features (especially one forming a community)
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
something or someone seen (especially a notable or unusual sight)
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
a port in western California near the Golden Gate that is one of the major industrial and transportation centers; it has one of the world's finest harbors; site of the Golden Gate Bridge
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
force to go away; used both with concrete and metaphoric meanings
In the present, the grownup victim (Tim Robbins), and the two friends who watched years ago as he was driven away (Sean Penn and Bacon), are held together by a bond of shame and contempt.
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor.
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
having or showing knowledge and skill and aptitude
As a professional code, this seems obvious enough, but, in recent years, who else in big-time American filmmaking but Eastwood, Allen, and, more lately, the Coen Brothers has practiced it?
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
the continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present to the past
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
the activity of exerting your muscles in various ways to keep fit
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
(comparative of `near' or `close') within a shorter distance
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
take away to an undisclosed location against their will and usually in order to extract a ransom
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
in some unspecified way or manner; or by some unspecified means
We are what the past has made us, and Sean Penn’s Jimmy, a neighborhood store owner and thug whose earlier life has been marked by acts of vengeance, loses his daughter and is forced to ask if, in some way, he’s responsible for her death.
at or toward an end or late period or stage of development
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies.
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
follow stealthily or recur constantly and spontaneously to
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
anything (straws or pebbles etc.) taken or chosen at random
As an actor in training at Universal, Eastwood had roamed all over the lot, asking questions about different aspects of filmmaking, and, during his “Rawhide” years, he made several requests, without success, to direct an episode.
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
(of quantities) imprecise but fairly close to correct
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Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
a golf course that is built on sandy ground near a shore
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
combining clever conception and facetious expression
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
a formal association of people with similar interests
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
youngest son of Henry II; King of England from 1199 to 1216; succeeded to the throne on the death of his brother Richard I; lost his French possessions; in 1215 John was compelled by the barons to sign the Magna Carta (1167-1216)
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual
Universal may have thought that he would be a workhorse on the lot, but he switched to Warner Bros., where he made, among other movies, more Westerns, but only his own, eccentric kind of Westerns.
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
make a snarling noise or move with a snarling noise
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
He becomes not only a star but a myth, as Garry Wills defined it in his 1997 book “John Wayne’s America”—something that was true for the people who needed it to be true.
a state in southwestern United States; site of the Grand Canyon
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
(physics) the influence that produces a change in a physical quantity
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
having a robust muscular body-build characterized by predominance of structures (bone and muscle and connective tissue) developed from the embryonic mesodermal layer
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
North America and South America and Central America
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
a member of a secret order of Muslims (founded in the 12th century) who terrorized and killed Christian Crusaders
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
a turning aside (of your course or attention or concern)
Eastwood didn’t have the largeness of spirit to play Huston, but he let us know—as if we had any doubt—that reckless flamboyance was an egotistical diversion that he couldn’t afford.
producing or capable of producing (especially abundantly)
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
blockage consisting of an object designed to fill a hole tightly
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
behave in a certain manner; show a certain behavior; conduct or comport oneself
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
violent or severe weather (viewed as caused by the action of the four elements)
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
an outline of something (especially a human face as seen from one side)
Shot in black-and-white, the two movies, neither of them great but both intelligent and stirring, were placed in conversation with each other as profiles of national character—dialectical partners in an imaginary but potent debate.
the faculty through which the external world is apprehended
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
a constellation on the equator to the east of Taurus; contains Betelgeuse and Rigel
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
(genetics) a segment of DNA that is involved in producing a polypeptide chain; it can include regions preceding and following the coding DNA as well as introns between the exons; it is considered a unit of heredity
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
squeeze (someone) tightly in your arms, usually with fondness
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
the small unused part of something (especially the end of a cigarette that is left after smoking)
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
showing the way by conducting or leading; imposing direction on
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
a humorous anecdote or remark intended to provoke laughter
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
extending out above or beyond a surface or boundary
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from nonliving ones
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
connected with or engaged in or sponsored by or used in commerce or commercial enterprises
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
move about aimlessly or without any destination, often in search of food or employment
As an actor in training at Universal, Eastwood had roamed all over the lot, asking questions about different aspects of filmmaking, and, during his “Rawhide” years, he made several requests, without success, to direct an episode.
(comparative of `much' used with mass nouns) a quantifier meaning greater in size or amount or extent or degree
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Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
capital of the state of Wisconsin; located in the southern part of state; site of the main branch of the University of Wisconsin
In “Tightrope,” Geneviève Bujold projected a taut intelligence, and Meryl Streep had a never-met-the-right-man wistfulness in “The Bridges of Madison County.”
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
As an actor in training at Universal, Eastwood had roamed all over the lot, asking questions about different aspects of filmmaking, and, during his “Rawhide” years, he made several requests, without success, to direct an episode.
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
Now, returning to elements from “Josey Wales,” he began to notice and even to celebrate true outsiders, people who had much less power than his own characters did.
a characteristic (habitual or relatively temporary) state of feeling
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
an interval during which a recurring sequence of events occurs
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and three
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs
From the beginning, going back to his performance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood had shown a penchant for irony, but the end of “Mystic River” was a perverse twist worthy of a sardonic modern artist like Brecht or Fassbinder.
a joyful occasion for special festivities to mark some happy event
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
an event (or the result of an event) that completely destroys something
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
learn belatedly; find out about something after it happened
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
United States parliamentary authority and author (in 1876) of Robert's Rules of Order (1837-1923)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
the psychological state of being irritated or annoyed
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
(Old Testament) the guardian archangel of the Jews
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
find the solution to (a problem or question) or understand the meaning of
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
belonging to or on behalf of a specified person (especially yourself); preceded by a possessive
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
By giving the Western extra dimensions, and by pushing the moral issues to extremes, Eastwood had exposed (inadvertently, perhaps) the limits of the genre.
an ordered list of times at which things are planned to occur
If Eastwood likes a story, he buys or commissions the script, moves rapidly into production, shoots the film on a short schedule and, until recently, on a modest budget.
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
Eastwood transferred his love of open country to a peculiarly tight urban spot, a studio-built Fifty-second Street, at the late-forties height of bebop.
full of or characterized by loud and nonmusical sounds
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
be a delegate or spokesperson for; represent somebody's interest or be a proxy or substitute for, as of politicians and office holders representing their constituents, or of a tenant representing other tenants in a housing dispute
Whatever else it is, “Unforgiven” is an argument about how to represent violence, an argument about movies.
lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
the idea of something that is perfect; something that one hopes to attain
The movie was a whimsically daft spectacle, but Eastwood did one thing straight: he embraced the noble American pictorial ideal—a man on a horse, traversing vast open spaces.
Shot in black-and-white, the two movies, neither of them great but both intelligent and stirring, were placed in conversation with each other as profiles of national character—dialectical partners in an imaginary but potent debate.
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
English statesman who opposed Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and was imprisoned and beheaded; recalled for his concept of Utopia, the ideal state
Eastwood in “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), one of the three Westerns that he made with Sergio Leone.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
If someone else is supposed to direct, then falters or becomes too slow or indecisive for his taste—as did Philip Kaufman on “Josey Wales,” and the writer Richard Tuggle on “Tightrope”—he pushes him aside and takes over.
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
The question became one of Eastwood’s signature lines; he repeats it at the end of the film, when he has the serial killer under his gun, and this time the question is lethal.
marked by defiant disregard for danger or consequences
Eastwood didn’t have the largeness of spirit to play Huston, but he let us know—as if we had any doubt—that reckless flamboyance was an egotistical diversion that he couldn’t afford.
a high steep bank (usually formed by river erosion)
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
a republic at the southernmost part of Africa; achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1910; first European settlers were Dutch (known as Boers)
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
one of several distinct subdivisions of a text intended to separate ideas; the beginning is usually marked by a new indented line
If Leone emptied the West in his early movies, making Westerns that were mainly syntax and dead bodies, Eastwood, working in long paragraphs, put meaning back into the genre.
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
advanced in years; (`aged' is pronounced as two syllables)
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
talk socially without exchanging too much information
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
United States film actor who portrayed incorruptible but modest heros (1908-1997)
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
look at, interpret, and say out loud something that is written or printed
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
state of sorrow over the death or departure of a loved one
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
not of long duration; having just (or relatively recently) come into being or been made or acquired or discovered
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
logical or comprehensible arrangement of separate elements
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
the cardinal number that is the product of ten and nine
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
a practical method or art applied to some particular task
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
United States author who wrote the stories about Uncle Remus (1848-1908)
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
(of a surface or shape); not level or flat or symmetrical
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
But Eastwood, by experimenting with new forms and moods, both light and dark, and by constantly altering his early self as a star, achieved both as he got older, and without becoming a stiff.
In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor.
(comparative of `much' used with mass nouns) a quantifier meaning greater in size or amount or extent or degree
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
an injury to living tissue (especially an injury involving a cut or break in the skin)
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
the body of people who are citizens of a particular government
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
a string of words satisfying the grammatical rules of a language
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
a weapon that discharges a missile at high velocity (especially from a metal tube or barrel)
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
United States general and traitor in the American Revolution; in 1780 his plan to surrender West Point to the British was foiled (1741-1801)
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
warn or arouse to a sense of danger or call to a state of preparedness
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
a port and largest city in Louisiana; located in southeastern Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi river; a major center for offshore drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico; jazz originated here among black musicians in the late 19th century; Mardi Gras is celebrated here each year
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
thorny Eurasian shrub of small tree having dense clusters of white to scarlet flowers followed by deep red berries; established as an escape in eastern North America
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
the act of creating something by casting it in a mold
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
neither warm nor very cold; giving relief from heat
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
being effective without wasting time or effort or expense
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
the action of taking part in a game or sport or other recreation
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
someone in an official position of authority who can command or control others
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
(botany) the usually underground organ that lacks buds or leaves or nodes; absorbs water and mineral salts; usually it anchors the plant to the ground
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
make (someone) agree, understand, or realize the truth or validity of something
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
United States jurist who served as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court (1891-1974)
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
a friend who is frequently in the company of another
“Unforgiven” ends with him gunning down Little Bill and his friends and then riding away, in a return to the kind of familiar myth that the rest of the movie seems to reject.
formal attendance (in court or at a hearing) of a party in an action
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
One can remember Verna Bloom’s tenderness in supporting roles, and, in the late seventies and early eighties, a few sassy performances by Sondra Locke, who was then Eastwood’s inamorata.
of the immediate past or just previous to the present time
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
in or near a center or constituting a center; the inner area
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
come into the possession of something concrete or abstract
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
a thief who steals from someone by threatening violence
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
suffering from physical injury especially that suffered in battle
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
talk socially without exchanging too much information
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
any of the more than 100 known substances (of which 92 occur naturally) that cannot be separated into simpler substances and that singly or in combination constitute all matter
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
control consisting of a mechanical or electrical or electronic device for making or breaking or changing the connections in a circuit
Universal may have thought that he would be a workhorse on the lot, but he switched to Warner Bros., where he made, among other movies, more Westerns, but only his own, eccentric kind of Westerns.
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
the cardinal number that is the sum of one and one or a numeral representing this number
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a dime novelist, appears in the nearby town of Big Whiskey with one of his fabled heroes, the raffishly ornate outlaw known as English Bob (Richard Harris).
concerned chiefly or only with yourself and your advantage to the exclusion of others
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
Shot in black-and-white, the two movies, neither of them great but both intelligent and stirring, were placed in conversation with each other as profiles of national character—dialectical partners in an imaginary but potent debate.
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
perceive by sight or have the power to perceive by sight
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
not private; open to or concerning the people as a whole
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
the posterior part of a human (or animal) body from the neck to the end of the spine
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Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T. Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
a motor vehicle with four wheels; usually propelled by an internal combustion engine
He didn’t revive Dirty Harry, who would have been a grimly witty old party, but Walt Kowalski, the irascible retired auto worker in “Gran Torino” (2008), is a variation on Callahan.
United States explorer who (with Meriwether Lewis) led an expedition from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River; Clark was responsible for making maps of the area (1770-1838)
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
the act of applying force in order to move something away
By giving the Western extra dimensions, and by pushing the moral issues to extremes, Eastwood had exposed (inadvertently, perhaps) the limits of the genre.
Then, a few months later, he brought out “Letters from Iwo Jima,” a portrait of the Japanese, particularly the island’s military commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), as supremely dutiful, and honorable in defeat.
a person who is under the protection or in the custody of another
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
an area that is approximately central within some larger region
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
the United States (especially the northern states during the American Civil War)
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
a criminal who commits homicide (who performs the unlawful premeditated killing of another human being)
In the lovely movie that followed, “A Perfect World” (1993), Kevin Costner’s escaped convict and murderer, having lost his desire to kill, yet unable to outrun his past, dies without a fight in an open meadow.
make a request or demand for something to somebody
Related Links Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor.
In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio.
marked by lack of attention or consideration or forethought or thoroughness; not careful
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
from a particular thing or place or position (`forth' is obsolete)
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
primarily spatial sense; of relatively great or greater than average spatial extension or extension as specified
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
(Old Testament) the 2nd king of the Israelites; as a young shepherd he fought Goliath (a giant Philistine warrior) and killed him by hitting him in the head with a stone flung from a sling; he united Israel with Jerusalem as its capital; many of the Psalms are attributed to David (circa 1000-962 BC)
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Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
This became definitive in “Mystic River,” from 2003, a movie in which all of Eastwood’s late obsessions—guilt, destruction, self-destruction, vengeance—merge into a completely satisfying work of art.
restless or short-tempered under delay or opposition
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
the largest city in Michigan and a major Great Lakes port; center of the United States automobile industry; located in southeastern Michigan on the Detroit river across from Windsor
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
a rigid piece of metal or wood; usually used as a fastening or obstruction or weapon
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
similar things placed in order or happening one after another
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
someone who believes and helps to spread the doctrine of another
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
of or occurring within the state or between or among citizens of the state
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
regarded with great favor, approval, or affection especially by the general public
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
unlawful premeditated killing of a human being by a human being
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
Then, a few months later, he brought out “Letters from Iwo Jima,” a portrait of the Japanese, particularly the island’s military commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), as supremely dutiful, and honorable in defeat.
English admiral who defeated the French fleets of Napoleon but was mortally wounded at Trafalgar (1758-1805)
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason
In the baleful pop-cult explosion “Dirty Harry” (1971), also directed by Siegel, Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan catches up with a serial killer terrorizing San Francisco and chooses to torture him instead of reading him his rights.
a perceptible indication of something not immediately apparent (as a visible clue that something has happened)
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
We are what the past has made us, and Sean Penn’s Jimmy, a neighborhood store owner and thug whose earlier life has been marked by acts of vengeance, loses his daughter and is forced to ask if, in some way, he’s responsible for her death.
not affected by a chemical substance (especially alcohol)
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
Like Bergman, Godard, and Woody Allen, he works hard and fast, an impatient man who likes calm and order, and relies on the same crew from picture to picture.
a city on the Loire river in north central France; site of the siege of Orleans by the English (1428-1429)
In “Tightrope” (1984), he was a cop again, this time a member of the vice squad in New Orleans, which, like San Francisco in “Dirty Harry,” is haunted by a serial killer.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
One can remember Verna Bloom’s tenderness in supporting roles, and, in the late seventies and early eighties, a few sassy performances by Sondra Locke, who was then Eastwood’s inamorata.
the part of the skull of a vertebrate that frames the mouth and holds the teeth
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
having or displaying qualities appropriate for heroes
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor.
the cardinal number that is the sum of twenty-four and one
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
move with force, "He pushed the table into a corner"
If someone else is supposed to direct, then falters or becomes too slow or indecisive for his taste—as did Philip Kaufman on “Josey Wales,” and the writer Richard Tuggle on “Tightrope”—he pushes him aside and takes over.
squeeze (someone) tightly in your arms, usually with fondness
The movie was a whimsically daft spectacle, but Eastwood did one thing straight: he embraced the noble American pictorial ideal—a man on a horse, traversing vast open spaces.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
being level or straight or regular and without variation as e.g. in shape or texture; or being in the same plane or at the same height as something else (i.e. even with)
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
declare to be true or admit the existence or reality or truth of
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
make an addition (to); join or combine or unite with others; increase the quality, quantity, size or scope of
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
Certainly, no one in American movies has ever done anything quite as openhearted as Eastwood’s 2006 feat of recounting the devastating battle of Iwo Jima from both points of view.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
a field where grass or alfalfa are grown to be made into hay
In the lovely movie that followed, “A Perfect World” (1993), Kevin Costner’s escaped convict and murderer, having lost his desire to kill, yet unable to outrun his past, dies without a fight in an open meadow.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
By giving the Western extra dimensions, and by pushing the moral issues to extremes, Eastwood had exposed (inadvertently, perhaps) the limits of the genre.
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
a set of rules or principles or laws (especially written ones)
As a professional code, this seems obvious enough, but, in recent years, who else in big-time American filmmaking but Eastwood, Allen, and, more lately, the Coen Brothers has practiced it?
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
organized opposition to authority; a conflict in which one faction tries to wrest control from another
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
If Leone emptied the West in his early movies, making Westerns that were mainly syntax and dead bodies, Eastwood, working in long paragraphs, put meaning back into the genre.
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
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Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
Eastwood’s detective, Wes Block, drawn to whores and kinky sex, scours the bars and clubs for a man who murders prostitutes, and mostly encounters his own desire.
a length (straight or curved) without breadth or thickness; the trace of a moving point
The question became one of Eastwood’s signature lines; he repeats it at the end of the film, when he has the serial killer under his gun, and this time the question is lethal.
the cardinal number that is the sum of three and one
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
The sheriff of Big Whiskey (Gene Hackman) quickly disarms and beats up the prating Bob, and then, sentence by sentence, he deconstructs the nonsense Beauchamp has written, explaining how shootouts really happen.
a language unit by which a person or thing is known
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
18th President of the United States; commander of the Union armies in the American Civil War (1822-1885)
Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Steve McQueen, and Sean Connery never directed a feature.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
the ultimate agency regarded as predetermining the course of events (often personified as a woman)
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
Then, a few months later, he brought out “Letters from Iwo Jima,” a portrait of the Japanese, particularly the island’s military commander, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), as supremely dutiful, and honorable in defeat.
a general name for alcoholic beverages made by fermenting a cereal (or mixture of cereals) flavored with hops
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
Callahan hates officials (he defies the mayor), and disdains regulations that slow him down, yet his rebellion would have been meaningless outside the system.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
marked by simplicity; having a humble opinion of yourself
If Eastwood likes a story, he buys or commissions the script, moves rapidly into production, shoots the film on a short schedule and, until recently, on a modest budget.
a person who is able to write and has written something
If someone else is supposed to direct, then falters or becomes too slow or indecisive for his taste—as did Philip Kaufman on “Josey Wales,” and the writer Richard Tuggle on “Tightrope”—he pushes him aside and takes over.
a state in New England; one of the original 13 colonies
The screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, adapting the novel by Dennis Lehane, worked with the elements of a police procedural: a girl has been murdered, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, sets about solving the crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
the aggregation of things (pedestrians or vehicles) coming and going in a particular locality during a specified period of time
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
formed or developed from something else; not original
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
One can remember Verna Bloom’s tenderness in supporting roles, and, in the late seventies and early eighties, a few sassy performances by Sondra Locke, who was then Eastwood’s inamorata.
In the lovely movie that followed, “A Perfect World” (1993), Kevin Costner’s escaped convict and murderer, having lost his desire to kill, yet unable to outrun his past, dies without a fight in an open meadow.
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
an appeal to some supernatural power to inflict evil on someone or some group
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character.
closely constrained or constricted or constricting
Eastwood transferred his love of open country to a peculiarly tight urban spot, a studio-built Fifty-second Street, at the late-forties height of bebop.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
an environmentalist who belongs to the Green Party
With that ideal in mind, he and the cinematographer, Jack N. Green, miscalculated; they used too little light for color film, and some of the movie is very dark.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
Then, suddenly, looks, temperament, and role all come together—as they did for Wayne, in “Stagecoach” (1939), and for Bogart, in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)—and the public sees the actor, sees what it desires.
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
If Leone emptied the West in his early movies, making Westerns that were mainly syntax and dead bodies, Eastwood, working in long paragraphs, put meaning back into the genre.
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
the condition of belonging to a particular place or group by virtue of social or ethnic or cultural lineage
But within this familiar structure Helgeland and Eastwood created a shadowed way of life whose roots go back twenty-five years to another crime: the kidnapping and abuse of a young boy.
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
animal tissue consisting predominantly of contractile cells
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
a message that tells the particulars of an act or occurrence or course of events; presented in writing or drama or cinema or as a radio or television program
To work with such glum material without falling into middlebrow dreariness requires intellectual force and a steely grip on narrative.
used of physical heat; having a high or higher than desirable temperature or giving off heat or feeling or causing a sensation of heat or burning
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
As the Man with No Name, Eastwood established his early character as an angry enforcer of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge.
(usually followed by `with' or used as a combining form) generously supplied with
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
transfer possession of something concrete or abstract to somebody
As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake?
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
the capability of conscious choice and decision and intention
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash.
In one continuous shot, Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his new date, Chan (Diane Venora), cross the street talking, wending their way through traffic, and Parker stops to exchange half-voiced, half-intimated witticisms with two musicians, as Chan climbs the steps of her mother’s town house, a teeming jazz hangout.
a system of rules of conduct or method of practice
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
of or belonging to or constituting the hereditary aristocracy especially as derived from feudal times
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
having the capacity for thought and reason especially to a high degree
Shot in black-and-white, the two movies, neither of them great but both intelligent and stirring, were placed in conversation with each other as profiles of national character—dialectical partners in an imaginary but potent debate.
As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.
a small body of standing water (rainwater) or other liquid
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Eastwood transferred his love of open country to a peculiarly tight urban spot, a studio-built Fifty-second Street, at the late-forties height of bebop.
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
a war in which the major nations of the world are involved
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
to a complete degree or to the full or entire extent (`whole' is often used informally for `wholly')
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
In the present, the grownup victim (Tim Robbins), and the two friends who watched years ago as he was driven away (Sean Penn and Bacon), are held together by a bond of shame and contempt.
make ready or suitable or equip in advance for a particular purpose or for some use, event, etc
But many of the women were predatory or adoring, and none of them, even the strong ones, quite prepared us for Hillary Swank’s pugnacious jaw and wide smile in “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
after an unspecified period of time or an especially long delay
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
a city in southern California; motion picture capital of the world; most populous city of California and second largest in the United States
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
select something or someone for a specific purpose
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
As an actor in training at Universal, Eastwood had roamed all over the lot, asking questions about different aspects of filmmaking, and, during his “Rawhide” years, he made several requests, without success, to direct an episode.
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
descend in free fall under the influence of gravity
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
a ball-and-socket joint between the head of the humerus and a cavity of the scapula
A fitness nut, he was broad-shouldered by nature and muscular from the hours spent in his workout room, but not overly muscled—not a media joke like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
up to the immediate present; most recent or most up-to-date
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
This candor about intentions separated him from such idealized stars of the past as Gary Cooper, and brought the wised-up modern audience closer to him.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
cause (a plastic object) to assume a crooked or angular form
From the beginning, going back to his performance in “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood had shown a penchant for irony, but the end of “Mystic River” was a perverse twist worthy of a sardonic modern artist like Brecht or Fassbinder.
feeling hunger; feeling a need or desire to eat food
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
(used of count nouns) every one considered individually
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
in line with a length or direction (often followed by `by' or `beside')
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
By giving the Western extra dimensions, and by pushing the moral issues to extremes, Eastwood had exposed (inadvertently, perhaps) the limits of the genre.
connect, fasten, or put together two or more pieces
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
perceive with attention; direct one's gaze towards
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
take a short break from one's activities in order to relax
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
a person you know well and regard with affection and trust
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
the part of the human torso between the neck and the diaphragm or the corresponding part in other vertebrates
This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.”
a porch along the outside of a building (sometimes partly enclosed)
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
a device for creating a current of air by movement of a surface or surfaces
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Beatty has had a fascinating career as a producer and a hyperenergetic stimulator of persons and projects, but, along with his genuine achievements, the principal activity of his professional life for considerable stretches has been getting people excited about what he wants to do, rather than actually doing it.
Even outside the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s characters were tainted; they might be selfish and egotistical (though never cowardly), stupidly macho (though never weak), eagerly mercenary (though never bourgeois).
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
worthy of or requiring responsibility or trust; or held accountable
We are what the past has made us, and Sean Penn’s Jimmy, a neighborhood store owner and thug whose earlier life has been marked by acts of vengeance, loses his daughter and is forced to ask if, in some way, he’s responsible for her death.
cause to change; make different; cause a transformation
But Eastwood, by experimenting with new forms and moods, both light and dark, and by constantly altering his early self as a star, achieved both as he got older, and without becoming a stiff.
No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes.
(Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.)
Pointing the gun, which may or may not have a bullet left in its chamber, Callahan almost croons to a wounded robber who’s thinking of reaching for his own weapon, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’
detected by instinct or inference rather than by recognized perceptual cues
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
a discussion in which reasons are advanced for and against some proposition or proposal
Shot in black-and-white, the two movies, neither of them great but both intelligent and stirring, were placed in conversation with each other as profiles of national character—dialectical partners in an imaginary but potent debate.
any physical damage to the body caused by violence or accident or fracture etc.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
the social act of assembling for some common purpose
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
consisting of a haphazard assortment of different kinds
Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sean Penn have directed a few movies each, with mixed commercial and artistic success.
a quantity or amount or measure considered as a proportion of another quantity or amount or measure
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
being connected either logically or causally or by shared characteristics
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
the cardinal number that is the sum of four and one
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
at or within a short distance in space or time or having elements near each other
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away.
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
the act of suspending something (hanging it from above so it moves freely)
As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies.
In these two pictures, the protagonists are imprisoned in the imperatives of character, exercising, they imagine, free will from moment to moment but governed at the same time by the sullen imprint of past crimes, injuries, mistakes.
Living in a house outside Detroit, next door to a family of Hmong refugees, Kowalski is indecently hostile—“gooks” and “slopes” are among his daily epithets—but, by degrees, he becomes impressed with the family’s insistence on discipline, and rouses himself to protect it.
“Unforgiven” ends with him gunning down Little Bill and his friends and then riding away, in a return to the kind of familiar myth that the rest of the movie seems to reject.
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
As a professional code, this seems obvious enough, but, in recent years, who else in big-time American filmmaking but Eastwood, Allen, and, more lately, the Coen Brothers has practiced it?
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
the shortest of the four Gospels in the New Testament
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
definitely or positively (`sure' is sometimes used informally for `surely')
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
used of a living language; being the current stage in its development
Related Links
Ask the Author: Join a live chat with David Denby about Clint Eastwood and more on Wednesday, March 3, at 3 P.M. E.T.
Back Issues: Stories about Clint Eastwood from The New Yorker’s archives.
British chemist who identified carbon dioxide and who formulated the concepts of specific heat and latent heat (1728-1799)
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
Back in 1993, with “In the Line of Fire,” he managed, in the midst of a first-rate thriller (directed by Wolfgang Petersen), to suggest that men his age compensate for perceived weakness by overly focussing on the task at hand—a fresh insight.
an extended social group having a distinctive cultural and economic organization
Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society.
But Eastwood himself turns out to be the butt: the bullheaded Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) breaks into this second-rate male province, trains as a fighter, and pulls the snarling old man out of emotional isolation into something like fatherhood and, finally, the full humanity of mourning.
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him.
spatially or metaphorically from a higher to a lower level or position
He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else.
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
a hostile meeting of opposing military forces in the course of a war
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
But a couple of years earlier, before he became a superstar, Eastwood set up his own production company, Malpaso, and from that time on if studios wanted him they had to negotiate with his company; this allowed him to exercise control over the script, the director, and major casting.
(quantifier used with mass nouns) great in quantity or degree or extent
The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do.
The working-class Boston neighborhood, with its wood-frame buildings, gray light, and tough, anxious women clinging to their men, has never recovered; it might be an ancient Greek city fallen under a curse.
His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies.
As the movie’s time frame goes back and forth through Parker’s life, and Whitaker and Venora flirt, banter, and fight in off-rhythm exchanges, the film attains a feeling of fleetingness and improvisation, in true jazz style.
move toward, travel toward something or somebody or approach something or somebody
Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
the sport of siting on the back of a horse while controlling its movements
“Unforgiven” ends with him gunning down Little Bill and his friends and then riding away, in a return to the kind of familiar myth that the rest of the movie seems to reject.
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors.
the act of conducting a controlled test or investigation
But Eastwood, by experimenting with new forms and moods, both light and dark, and by constantly altering his early self as a star, achieved both as he got older, and without becoming a stiff.
Wayne’s confidence, Wills says, made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood’s guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
a small area of ground covered by specific vegetation
Landscape as moral destiny, a miscellaneous community as the American way—these were the first signs in Eastwood of both a wider social sympathy and an incipient distaste for the conventions of genre plotting.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
Eastwood and the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, are the artificers here, but there’s a rival actually present in the movie, a hack writer who creates the kind of Western fictions that the Schofield Kid grew up reading.
Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.
In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates.
subsequently or soon afterward (often used as sentence connectors)
Initially a rooted man, Josey Wales is a Southern farmer who loses his family to Union marauders during the Civil War. He takes revenge and then heads West, passing among a Mark Twain gallery of bunco artists and opportunists, but he also acquires, as he moves, a new, irregular family (a talkative Indian, an elderly woman, a young girl).
(of actions or states) slightly short of or not quite accomplished; all but
The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil.
“A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism.
a vague unpleasant emotion that is experienced in anticipation of some (usually ill-defined) misfortune
Richard Tuggle wrote the script and was credited as the director, but Eastwood did most of the work and shot the movie in Don Siegel’s tawdry, urban-anxiety mode, slowed by episodes of rapt erotic stillness.
a painful emotion resulting from an awareness of inadequacy or guilt
In the present, the grownup victim (Tim Robbins), and the two friends who watched years ago as he was driven away (Sean Penn and Bacon), are held together by a bond of shame and contempt.
This time, Eastwood is a contemporary Western sheriff from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona searching for an escaped felon in a crowded, noisy New York filled with chattering neurotics, hippie scum, and hungry women.
a person who has achieved distinction and honor in some field
“The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), his first great movie as a director, is filled with one ravishing image after another of lonely figures searching for a resting place.
Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with.
Now, returning to elements from “Josey Wales,” he began to notice and even to celebrate true outsiders, people who had much less power than his own characters did.
In effect, the sheriff, known as Little Bill, shreds the way that violence is represented in most Westerns, which is a lot closer to Beauchamp’s rubbish than it is to the wrenching mess we’ve seen in the glen.
As an actor in training at Universal, Eastwood had roamed all over the lot, asking questions about different aspects of filmmaking, and, during his “Rawhide” years, he made several requests, without success, to direct an episode.
There were comic possibilities embedded in Eastwood’s mask, and the director Don Siegel (who became Eastwood’s mentor) exploited them in the coarsely conceived “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968).
a large and densely populated urban area; may include several independent administrative districts
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
In an odd turn, as if to ward off bad dreams, he made three films in this period about self-destructive artists, including “Honkytonk Man” (1982), in which he plays an alcoholic and tubercular country singer who drives through the Oklahoma dust during the Depression and gets a tryout at the Grand Ole Opry, only to expire in a cheap hotel room, and “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), in which he struggles with the role of a movie director, clearly modelled on John Huston, who neglects ...
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done sin...
As an actor in training at Universal, Eastwood had roamed all over the lot, asking questions about different aspects of filmmaking, and, during his “Rawhide” years, he made several requests, without success, to direct an episode.
temporal sense; intermediate between past and future; now existing or happening or in consideration
Siegel played off the country’s growing distaste for the big city and the counterculture by presenting a ruthless Western pragmatist as a true American hero.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has d...
genre
