The Man With No Name takes a break ... finally

[Mendalla]

At 96, the great actor-director Clint Eastwood has apparently hung up his spurs and six guns. He last acted in a movie in 2021, when he was 91, and last directed in 2024, at 94. I haven't seen a statement about it from Clint himself but his son Kyle talked about it in an interview so it is all over the Internet. Eastwood's career as an actor began with supporting roles in the 1950s before coming to prominence, and establishing his longstanding connection to the Western genre, on the TV series Rawhide from 1959 to 1965. He had some career defining roles along the way, such as "The Man With No Name" in Sergio Leone's Westerns and tough cop Dirty Harry Callahan. And, yet, while he perhaps was best known for Westerns and cop thrillers due to those roles, his career spanned genres, including not just those but diverse films like Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby, and even the musical Jersey Boys about the band Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. And even within the Western, he did a classic deconstruction of the genre with Unforgiven.

He won the Oscar for best director twice out of four nominations, and five of his movies were nominated for Best Picture, with Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby winning. I saw somewhere that something like five actors received Oscars for their work on Eastwood films, showing that he was an "actor's director". He himself was nominated for Best Actor twice but has never won.

Besides his career in acting and directing, he is a huge jazz fan and a working musician and composer. He has on several occasions written or contributed to the scores of his movies. He is a board member of the Berklee College of Music in Boston and received an honorary degree from them in 2007.

Kyle Eastwood, one of his children, has followed him into music. Another, Scott, is an actor who has worked with his father.

Here's hoping he gets a long, happy retirement.

 

[Mendalla]

A personal favourite of mine is Pale Rider, a 1985 Western starring and directed by Eastwood. There's a vaguely supernatural overtone to the tale of stranger just called "Preacher" who takes on a corrupt mining boss' gang and a mercenary marshal's crew to help independent miners and settlers. The scene where it is revealed that Preacher has six bullet holes in his back is a chiller. Did he survive the shooting (by the marshal)? Or is he back? The title even refers to Revelation 6:8 "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." (KJV) implying something more than just a vengeful ex-victim. Another great scene, a classic Western cliche but played well, is when Preacher retrieves his guns from a bank vault (prior to this, all his fights were hand-to-hand) and removes his dog collar, signifying he is now again the gunslinger he clearly had once been. That, naturally, leads to the final showdown and lots of dead bad guys.

Unlike Unforgiven, which plays with a lot of the same material and themes, Pale Rider does not so much deconstruct the Western as try to be a kind of Platonic ideal of one.