Coogan's Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968)

Susan Clark and Clint Eastwood in Coogan's Bluff

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee J. Cobb, Susan Clark, Tisha Sterling, Don Stroud, Betty Field, Tom Tully, Melodie Johnson, James Edwards, Rudy Diaz, David Doyle. Screenplay: Herman Miller, Dean Riesner, Howard Rodman. Cinematography: Bud Thackery. Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Robert MacKichan. Film editing: Sam E. Waxman. Music: Lalo Schifrin. 

If it weren't that it has the hard, garish, overlighted look of most movies in the 1960s, Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff could almost be called a neo-noir. It has the genre's requisite unlikable but determined tough guy protagonist, willing to use sex and violence and flouting the law to achieve his goal, even if it means getting beat up several times. There's something masochistic about Clint Eastwood's Coogan, a deputy sheriff sent from Arizona to Manhattan to recover a fugitive. The screenplay gives him no backstory to explain his headlong relentlessness, but then there's nothing much to the screenplay beyond setups for action. It's an almost cynically mindless movie. 

Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Kiefer Sutherland, Amy Aquino, Adrienne C. Moore, Chieko Fukuyama. Screenplay: Jonathan A. Abrams. Cinematography: Yves Bélanger. Production design: Ronald R. Reiss. Film editing: David S. Cox, Joel Cox. Music: Mark Mancina. 

Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 is the kind of courtroom drama that could have been made any time in the history of American movies, including when the Production Code was most sternly in effect. Which is to say that it's a throwback to an era in which audiences were not expected to question its obvious inconsistencies and falsifications but just sit back and be entertained by the predicament into which its protagonist is cast and expect it to be resolved satisfactorily. The premise is this: A man named Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) finds himself on a jury in a murder case but gradually realizes that he may be the one who killed the victim and has in his hands the fate of the man (Gabriel Basso) accused of the crime. Meanwhile, his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is in the seventh month of pregnancy, having miscarried before. And the prosecuting attorney, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), is in the midst of a campaign for D.A., and wants to secure a conviction no matter what. Add to this the unsavory background of the accused, a group of witnesses to an altercation between the accused and the victim in a bar, and a man who claims that he witnessed the murder, things look pretty solid for the prosecutor. But Justin's conscience won't let him vote for conviction. At least not yet. It's a movie in which suspense is more important than coherence, drama more significant than actuality. Eastwood's no-nonsense filmmaking obscures the nonsense of the story, and the performances give it a specious emotional credibility. (Though I could have done without the sore-thumb obviousness of Collette's Southern accent, when no one else the cast was attempting it.)

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

William Munny: Clint Eastwood
Little Bill Daggett: Gene Hackman
Ned Logan: Morgan Freeman
English Bob: Richard Harris
The Schofield Kid: Jaimz Woolvett
W.W. Beauchamp: Saul Rubinek
Strawberry Alice: Frances Fisher
Delilah Fitzgerald: Anna Levine

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: David Webb Peoples
Cinematography: Jack N. Green
Production design: Henry Bumstead
Film editing: Joel Cox
Music: Lennie Niehaus

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven is the one "real" Western to win a best picture Oscar. Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931) is more about a fractured marriage, politics and land development in the Oklahoma Territory than about gunfire; Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) is preoccupied with revising our views of the American Indian; and No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007), though it doesn't lack for gunfire, is set in our times, not in the days of gunslingers and dance-hall girls. Unforgiven also a very good movie, though not a classic on the order of Westerns the Academy mostly cold-shouldered, like Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) or The Wild Bunch (1969). It placed Eastwood among the pantheon of contemporary directors, though Eastwood had the grace to dedicate the film to John Ford and the less-celebrated directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel; the latter two had made him a star and taught him the trade. Eastwood is a good director by virtue of not overreaching: He reportedly stuck closely to David Webb Peoples's screenplay, which provided him with characters of considerable depth. Gene Hackman's Little Bill Daggett is a nasty villain, but Peoples gives him a human side with his obsessive work on his house and a porch he can sit on and watch the sunset. What Peoples doesn't give Eastwood is a wholly satisfactory ending: The movie builds to the concluding shootout, even after we have been led to think that there's more to Eastwood's William Munny than just an old gunfighter in retirement. Earlier, we have seen evidence that Munny has lost his shooting skills, but suddenly at the end he's able to gun down a roomful of armed men with complete ease. Others object to the rather inessential stuff like the episode involving English Bob, and Saul Rubinek's writer in search of a subject for pulp-magazine hagiography is an overworked caricature. Still, for most of the picture Eastwood skates over the clichés and conceals vague motives -- like the swiftness with which Munny decides to leave his two children to fend for themselves while he follows the young would-be gunfighter on a foolish mission -- so that we don't have time to be bothered by them too much.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name* may be the movies' most famous picaro, the roguish hero who wanders through an often hostile landscape, surviving by his wits -- and in this case, his skill as a gunman. The picaro's heart is generally in the right place even if he doesn't mind breaking a few laws to get his way. In the first two films of Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), he is a loner, but in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly he has picked up an unlikely (and untrustworthy) sidekick in Tuco (Eli Wallach), with whom he is working a scam: Tuco has a price on his head, which our hero collects by bringing Tuco in to justice, and then splits with Tuco after rescuing him from a hanging. Tuco is a more vicious Sancho Panza to No Name's more capable Don Quixote. I think it's interesting that The Good.... was filmed in Spain, where the picaresque tradition began with Lazarillo de Tormes in 1557 and produced its most influential analog in Don Quixote. Okay, I'm getting a little pretentious with the literary history here -- though Leone himself once admitted his debt to the picaresque tradition. But who, in the mid-1960s, when Leone was making movies derided as "spaghetti Westerns," would have anticipated such analysis or the veneration those films receive today? Half a century ago, when Leone's trilogy was being released, critics were raving about films like A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), and Becket (Peter Glenville, 1964): "prestige" movies on high-toned subjects that have dated badly, while Leone's movies still get enthusiastic viewings. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly currently has an 8.9 rating on IMDb and a 97 percent favorable on Rotten Tomatoes -- the only two negative reviews cited on the latter are the ones from Time and Variety at the time of the film's release. My own view is that The Good.... is overlong, especially in its latest restoration, which runs for 177 minutes, and that there's some confusion in integrating the Civil War's New Mexico Campaign scenes with the story of the titular triad. But there are few scenes in movies more dazzling than Tuco's dash through the cemetery and the subsequent three-way standoff. Lee Van Cleef is a suitably scary Bad guy; Eastwood demonstrates the growth as an actor that would continue as his career soared; Wallach gives one of his best performances: and the contribution of Ennio Morricone is breathtaking. Raw and unpolished as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at times is, it remains memorable filmmaking, while the films more celebrated in its day are mostly forgettable.

*Actually, he picks up a name in each of Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" films: In A Fistful of Dollars he is called "Joe," which is a generic name for an americano. In For a Few Dollars More he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho. And in the third film he is dubbed "Blondie" by Tuco. (The color of Eastwood's hair seems to me like a minor characteristic, but I guess "Tall Guy Who Squints and Smokes Cheroots" would have been a mouthful.)  

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

Most of us didn't realize it until much later when he was an Oscar-winning director, but Clint Eastwood was a very smart man. When Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars became a hit in Italy in 1964, he asked Eastwood if he would make a sequel. Eastwood hadn't seen the movie, which hadn't yet been dubbed in English and released in the States, so Leone sent him a print of the Italian version. Even though he didn't speak Italian, Eastwood immediately recognized Leone's skill, and signed up to do the sequel. It was a gutsy move: At the time, making genre films like Westerns and sword-and-sandal epics in Italy and Spain was a job for has-beens and never-weres. Eastwood was on the brink of becoming one of the latter: His career to that point had been mostly in TV, on the long-running series Rawhide, with a few unmemorable movies. But cultivating a persona distinct from that of Rawhide's callow Rowdy Yates, that of the taciturn Man With No Name* of the Leone films, proved to be precisely the right thing to do. By the end of the 1960s, he had become a major star. Narratively, For a Few Dollars More is not quite so tight as the first film -- for one reason because it lacks the well-tested framework of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) that was the underpinning of Fistful. Also, setting up a rivalry between Eastwood's character and that of Lee Van Cleef's Col. Douglas Mortimer tends to diffuse the story a bit: As in Fistful, Eastwood's character is beaten to a pulp by the bad guys, but so is Mortimer, and the double mauling feels gratuitous, especially since there's no particular reason why the bad guys shouldn't just kill them. But the sequel shows Leone growing in style and technique, with a fine use of widescreen in establishing shots and a deft use of closeups in establishing the characters, especially the bad guys in the mob headed by El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, who had also been the chief villain, Ramón Roja, in Fistful). Am I the only one who suspects, from Leone's closeups of the mob's faces, that Leone had been influenced by Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929)? One standout in the mob is a superbly twitchy Klaus Kinski as a hunchback named Juan. The cinematography is by Massimo Dallamano. And once again, Ennio Morricone's score is integral to the film's success. The spareness of the music, scored only for a few instruments, serves as a contrast to the sweeping orchestral scores for Hollywood Westerns by composers like Dimitri Tiomkin and Max Steiner. Morricone and Leone recognized the need for silence, punctuated only occasionally by a penny-whistle tweedle or a guitar riff, to maintain the film's texture.

*Actually, he has a name in both films: In Fistful he is called "Joe," which is obviously just a generic name for an americano, while in the sequel he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho.

A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars

Joe: Clint Eastwood
Marisol: Marianne Koch
Ramón Rojo: Gian Maria Volontè
John Baxter: Wolfgang Lukschy
Esteban Rojo: Sieghardt Rupp
Piripero: Joseph Egger
Don Miguel Benito Rojo: Antonio Prieto

Director: Sergio Leone
Screenplay: Adriano Bolzoni, Victor Andrés Catena, Sergio Leone, Jaime Comas Gil
Cinematography: Massimo Dallamano, Federico G. Larraya
Music: Ennio Morricone

My father was a huge fan of Westerns, which meant that whenever one was on TV -- which in the 1950s and '60s was almost all the time -- the set was tuned to Gunsmoke or Bonanza or Laramie or Rawhide or whatever. And naturally, that meant my adolescent rebellion took its course into a distaste for the genre. Which is why the "spaghetti Western" phenomenon escaped my notice in its heyday. Having had my exposure to Clint Eastwood on Rawhide, I was certainly not going to pay money to see him in a theater. Perhaps if you had told me that A Fistful of Dollars was based on (or stolen from) Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), I might have been curious. But it was not until years later, when people began talking about Sergio Leone as an auteur, that my curiosity about the movie was piqued. By then I had overcome my indifference to Westerns, having learned that they were the essential American Myth, and having admired Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) and Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), so I was intrigued enough to check it out. I still think A Fistful of Dollars is a shade on the primitive side, and that Eastwood occasionally shows his discomfort at being directed by a man who doesn't speak English, but it holds up, not only as a precursor of the compelling violence of The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) and as a landmark in Eastwood's extraordinary career, but also as a tour de force: a Western filmed in Spain by an Italian with a polyglot cast. Best of all, it established the career of Ennio Morricone as one of the great film composers.

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014)

Bradley Cooper in American Sniper

Chris Kyle: Bradley Cooper
Taya Kyle: Sienna Miller
Marc Lee: Luke Grimes
Ryan "Biggles" Job: Jake McDorman
Dandridge: Cory Hardricht
Dauber: Kevin Lacz
Sheikh Al-Obodi: Navid Negahban
Jeff Kyle: Keir O'Donnell
Goat-Winston: Kyle Gallner

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: Jason Hall
Based on a book by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, and Jim DeFelice
Cinematography: Tom Stern
Film editing: Joel Cox, Gary Roach

I think American Sniper is not going to come into focus for us until 20 or 30 years have passed, and we have fully assessed the damage done by the American invasion of Iraq -- if, in fact, we ever do. Now, the only thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that Bradley Cooper's powerful performance holds the film together. Otherwise, opinions about the movie range from those who see it as a reprehensible portrait of American arrogance to those who see it as a laudable portrait of American heroism. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, trying to decide whether it presents Chris Kyle as a victim of the Iraq incursion, as a misguided embodiment of false and outdated values, or as an archetype of the dutiful American military man. What it really seems to me is a muddle of all of these things because screenwriter Jason Hall and director Clint Eastwood can't bring the movie together into a satisfactory whole. It's wrong to review a movie that wasn't made, but I think American Sniper would have made a more coherent film if Chris Kyle's murder hadn't been relegated to a caption and shots of his funeral at the film's end. If the convergence of murderer and victim had been dealt with from the beginning, we might have had a more cohesive narrative about the effects of war on both those who can "handle it" and those who can't. As it is, we have only glances at large issues like simplistic world-view (Kyle's father's division of humankind into sheep, wolves, and shepherds), the American gun culture, the testosterone poisoning of machismo, the stereotyping of the enemy as "savages," and the inability of the United States to come to terms with the hidden problems of returning veterans. What we have instead are often exciting combat scenes mixed with rather clichéd domestic interludes. Sienna Miller does what she can with the underwritten and over-familiar role of the wife back home, but the script doesn't give her enough to work with. I admire Eastwood's restraint as a filmmaker, but I think it does him a disservice here. We are too close to the events of the first decade of the 21st century to have anything but our individual emotional reactions to them, and American Sniper is bound to ring false in some way to each of us. I kept thinking of Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941) as I watched American Sniper. Made on the cusp of World War II, that unabashedly flag-waving movie about another American hero sharpshooter seems naive by contrast, even though the World War I in which Alvin York fought was at least as colossal an international fuck-up as the Iraq invasion, but it's also a better film. Maybe American Sniper will seem like a better film 74 years from now, but somehow I doubt it.