Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.
Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, The Animators, The Documentarians, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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Clint Eastwood (San Francisco, 31 May, 1930 — )
Ranking: Actors Turned Directors

The Beguiled: The Storyteller (1971 documentary short)
Play Misty for Me(1971)
High Plains Drifter 1972)
Breezy (1973, director only)
The Eiger Sanction (1975)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The Gauntlet (1977)
Bronco Billy (1980)
Honkytonk Man (1982)
Firefox (1982)
Sudden Impact (1983)
Pale Rider (1985)
“Vanessa in the Garden” (1985, episode of Amazing Stories)
Heartbreak Ridge (1986)
Bird (1988, director only)
White Hunter, Black Heart (1990)
The Rookie (1990)
Unforgiven (1992)
A Perfect World (1993)
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Absolute Power (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, director only)
True Crime (1999)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Blood Work (2002)
Mystic River (2003, director only)
Piano Blues (2003, episode of The Blues)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006, director only)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, director only)
Changeling (2008, director only)
Gran Torino (2008)
The Human Factor (2009, director only)

The most successful of all actors turned directors, Eastwood has fashioned a creditable body of work while making only one film that transcends its genre, the commercial limitations of the art form, and its director’s rigidly codified public personality.

Unforgiven was duly honored by public and Oscar alike, and remains an all too unique chapter in his nevertheless still fascinating career. An often no more than efficient director both stylistically and financially, Eastwood began his directing career while blazing brightly as one of Hollywood’s most popular American stars, an heir to John Wayne, and an actor who appealed to both men and women. Now his status as an eminence grise within Hollywood virtually guarantees Oscar noms, if not the occasional win.

Though he found fame through the spaghetti westerns he made for Sergio Leone, it was as a disciple of Don Siegel that he made his directorial debut, with Play Misty For Me. This film, coming as it did from an international sex icon, was an odd tale, one bespeaking of an almost paranoid suspicion of women within a view of sexuality that foreshadowed Fatal Attraction in its account of a female stalking her prey with unlimited patience, while also anticipating the reliance on the stalker as a fundamental figure in the films of the ’90s. In fact, this thriller showed more the influence of Siegel (who has a cameo) than Leone, and Eastwood starred in Siegel’s The Beguiled, which has a similarly paranoid view of womankind. In the end, Misty had more to say about the screen actor as besieged public figure (and about Eastwood’s affection for jazz) than it did about the genre with which it was theoretically aligned. Suspicion of women also crops up in Breezy, a businessman-meets-hippy tale staring an icon from an earlier era, William Holden.

Eastwood’s career can be divided broadly into three phases. From 1971 through 1976 Eastwood was an actor-turned director still better known for his acting. His directorial projects, usually popular with the public but designed simply to support and continue that popularity, alternated with blockbusters made with other directors who increasingly proved to be cronies from his old Rawhide days or stunt or second unit directors, men of little creative or visual distinction who could be relied on to serve the star’s needs.

But with The Outlaw Josey Wales, on which he took over the direction after filming started, a new Eastwood emerges, one who makes lengthy, deliberately paced films that emphasize groups or ensembles over Eastwood as sole star. This phase announced the collaboration, personal and professional, with actress Sondra Locke. Yet in the end this phase also proved to be a creative nullity, though coincidentally it came at a time when other directors (Woody Allen) and stars (Robert DeNiro) were experiencing similarly long and inexplicable dry spells. Yet at least Eastwood was exploring unusual characters, some comic, some tragic, while in the other side of his career as mere superstar he was appearing in a string of bread and butter hits.

After the Locke years, Eastwood endured a rough transition. Anomalies such as the hit aspiring Heartbreak Ridge , A Perfect World, and The Rookie paired the aging Eastwood as a mentor to younger actors, and the narrative content of these films seemed more explicitly political than his elegiac westerns. But with the watershed achievement of Unforgiven, written by David Webb Peoples, a new, mature set of tones invaded his work: feelings of melancholy, twilight moods of loss, regret, memory, and the desire to change. What is most interesting in the otherwise routine if entertaining Absolute Power is the mood of remorse over his daughter that Eastwood’s character feels, and the continued use of Gene Hackman as a linchpin of near successful malice, the moral mirror of the star but whose evil is much greater then that found in the unconventional characters Eastwood cast himself as, men who are deemed “officially” evil by society (thieves, alcoholic reporters).

Also interesting in Absolute Power is its confirmation that Eastwood has always been better on screen with great actors, be it Richard Burton, or in this case Ed Harris, than with similar “stars” such as Burt Reynolds, types whom he has been all too often pair for strictly commercial reasons.

The mood of regret reappears in True Crime, and offsets the concurrent thread in Eastwood’s directorial career, that of official adaptor of popular novels, on par with fellow actor turned director Robert Redford. Eastwood lacks the visual zest and attention to detail to qualify - at this point - for the Pantheon, but his films show much more thematic variety within narrative consistency than they at first seem to offer, a sign that Eastwood, behind his pose as a simple man, is in fact working out complex ideas and responses to life. As his content spreads to a middle of the road liberalism focusing on the troubles of women, Africans, and African-Americans, his films remain paradoxically too long for a fiscal conservative, pedestrianly photographed, and all too often intellectually incoherent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.