{ The Good, the Bad, the Ugly} ~ Clint Eastwood

Happy 90th Birthday Clint Eastwood!

He came to fame as the taciturn "Man with No Name" gunslinger in Sergio Leone's  B-Westerns "A Fistful of Dollars" culminating in the iconic "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly": the latter being a less-than-heroic quest for treasure against a Civil War backdrop.  By the 1970s, the 'Man with No Name' had tossed aside the cowboy hat and donned a badge and a name: 'Dirty Harry' who squinted at viewers from the end of a Magnum revolver pointed directly at corrupt city officials and criminals.   The props and locations had changed but the ethos remained the same {at least according to critics at the time}.

None other than the 'Great Communicator', President Reagan, co-opted Eastwood's famous line from "Sudden Impact" {"Go Ahead; Make My Day"} when he tabled his agenda before Congress and trotted out the line during Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign.
Art being manipulated and misconstrued by politicians to suit their aims? Eastwood's career choices and iconic characters do champion the 'rugged, individualistic' American myth as he himself noted:

"Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth, I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet." {Eastwood}

an ethos that very much aligns with a 'conservative' political philosophy than liberal democratic.  It's not hard to see the direct connection from Dirty Harry to Bernie Goetz, the Subway vigilante, who gunned down African- Americans and justified his choices with the same rhetoric as Dirty Harry.  The NRA adopted both Dirty Harry and Goetz as their 'poster boys'.  Memberships soared.

However, "Sudden Impact", the movie from which Reagan quoted, received positive reviews for exploring the psychological and physical effects of rape and a woman's inability to get justice from the courts.  If the jury was still out on the political and cultural philosophy emanating from an Eastwood film, there was little to no ambiguity in his output starting in the 1990s.  "Unforgiven" has Eastwood revisiting the Western but with little or none of the bravado.  His character is still misanthropic but there is a determination to demystify his main character in no uncertain terms: he literally is mired in pigshit with an inability to shoot straight and  his character can't even mount a horse properly when we first encounter him.   By the end of the movie, his character is reduced to this exchange from a would-be admirer:
The Schofield Kid: It don't seem real.  How he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever.  How he's dead. And the other one, too.  All on account of pulling a trigger.
William Munny: It's a hell of a thing, killing a man.  You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid: Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.
William Munny: We all have it coming, Kid.

Had any actor/director so clearly repudiated his past?  With "Mystic River" he examines his own youth in a small-town Irish community with unflinching and unsparing condemnation.  Sean Penn plays the 'rugged individualist' who acts beyond the confines of the law in order to mete out 'justice' with tragic consequences.  In both instances, Eastwood takes aim at the two iconic tropes that made his career and mortally wounds them.

His "Letters to Iwo Jima" was another example of extraordinary film-making: an American movie that focused on the 'enemy's perspective' spoken in Japanese and released with subtitles humanized the Japanese.  There was no precedent for this.   "Flags From Our Fathers" was perhaps more radical.  Eastwood reconstructs the iconic raising of the flag at Iwo Jima and in so doing critically examines the power of propaganda and myth-making.  Someone who had worked and thrived within the 'Hollywood system'  with all it's stereotypes and tropes had, by the end of his career, become liberated from them.

Happy 90th Clint Eastwood and thank you for your art.