August 6, 1992 | Now is the summer of Clint Eastwood’s reassessment.
It is the best of times for the 62-year-old superstar, as he greets a seemingly endless series of critics, feature writers and enthusiastic well-wishers into the quiet, casual elegance of his Manhattan hotel suite.
Eastwood is holding court to promote, discuss and reap bountiful praises for Unforgiven, a grandly ambitious and darkly ambiguous Western, his finest work to date as director and actor.
The film, which opens Friday, is the sort of mature, richly textured and classically crafted work — an instant classic, really — that demands a whole new appreciation for its creator’s entire body of work. And, indeed, coming so soon after the release of his masterful White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), and in the wake of full-scale retrospectives of Eastwood’s earlier directorial efforts at the Cinematheque Francaise and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Unforgiven is more than magnum opus. It also is Eastwood’s bid for a place in the pantheon of the truly great filmmakers.
And, not incidentally, it should serve as definitive proof — even to those who refuse to think of Eastwood as anything other than the monosyllabic Man With No Name or the dreadnaught Dirty Harry — that Eastwood has, in his 36 feature films as a 24-karat movie star, evolved into an actor of impressive skill, precision and emotional eloquence.
Trouble is, this also is the worst of times for Eastwood. He receives his guests with gracious good humor, but cannot quite disguise his discomfort. By all accounts an intensely private individual, he is at once polite but removed whenever the conversation veers toward the introspective or the analytical. He gives the impression of being someone who finds it unseemly, and not a little embarrassing, to talk about motivation or emotional investment. For him, it is enough to know what you want to do, then do it with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of professionalism.
To have to talk about it later — and, worse, to explain why you wanted to do it — is part of the deal that pleases him not at all.
So a visitor decides to take a different approach. Instead of digging for revelations, why not ask for observations? Keep it in the third person, and Eastwood might feel freer to comment.
OK, you’ve been directing movies now for more than 20 years. And throughout your career as a filmmaker, you’ve worked many times with this actor, Clint Eastwood. He played a disc jockey in your very first film, Play Misty for Me, and is a retired gunfighter who’s haunted by his past in Unforgiven. How has Eastwood matured as an actor since you’ve been working with him?
Eastwood smiles. He knows what sort of game is being played, and he likes it. He settles back into the plush couch, takes a swig from his bottle of Perrier, and returns the opening serve.
“Well, let’s see. I first directed him in 1970. He was an actor who was well known for Westerns and cop films. People would ask, ‘Why would anybody want to watch him be a disc jockey?’ But I thought, ‘Why not be a disc jockey? He’s not a cowboy, he’s not a cop — he’s an actor playing a role.’
“His versatility has probably increased over the years, but that’s just as everyone’s versatility increases — by the knowledge you take in. The main thing is, does he have nerve enough to really push it? To keep going, to keep pushing it? Along the way, he’s pushed it. He’s done a lot of different things. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not so. But at least he’s tried.
“He’s stepped up to bat, and he’s taken a few swings. Sometimes against the advice of others, where he’s been successful. And sometimes against the advice of others, where they were right and he was wrong. But he’s still growing. He’s going to grow until the end, hopefully.
“I hope he does, because I’d hate to see him just get mired down. He had a great opportunity in the ‘60s, I suppose, to just stay in Europe and imitate himself, and go on with Italian-made cowboy films. But he broke away from that. He did cop dramas, and then he broke away from that. So who knows what he’ll do?”
Has he ever let you down? Have you ever thought of casting someone else in a role you gave him to play?
“I’ve thought about that a lot of times, a lot of times. But by and large, the material that he’s chosen to do is material that he felt he was suited for at that time. Maybe another actor could have done it differently — better, maybe. Or maybe not better, but with a different interpretation that might have been more appealing to audiences. It’s hard to tell — nobody will ever know.
“But he’s a cooperative guy. He does what I tell him.”
Yes, indeed. But now, in the spirit of fairness, the other half of the team must be given equal time.
OK, you’ve been working with this director, Clint Eastwood, throughout the past 20 years. He’s cast you as everything from a would-be Wild West Show star in Bronco Billy to a mountain-climbing spy in The Eiger Sanction, from a broken-down country-music singer in Honkytonk Man to a John Huston soundalike in White Hunter, Black Heart. As an actor, what do you think of his abilities as a filmmaker?
“Well,” says the actor, shifting slightly in his seat, as if to jokingly indicate a shifting of his sensibility, “he’s a guy who absorbs a lot around him. He has a good memory of the cinema he saw growing up. He learns just as much from the directors that he’s worked with that were maybe not so great as he has from the good ones. But, fortunately, he’s had a few good ones.
“He’s a guy who never had the opportunity to work with the lauded directors of the ‘40s or the ‘50s — the Fords, the Hustons, the George Stevenses, the William Wylers, those kinds of guys. But he managed to work with some newcomers that had good ideas in Europe. And he worked with a B-movie director (Don Siegel, the auteur of Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz) who knew a lot, but who had never had opportunities to do A-films. And I think he picked up a few pointers from him.
“And he’s fairly observant. Hopefully, he keeps progressing along the way. He’s given himself harder challenges as time goes on, and that’s good. He’s not afraid to fail. And that’s good, I think those are his virtues.”
What are his weaknesses?
“In the early days, he became known as very efficient for his speed. But nobody really cares much about that anyway. And so that didn’t mean much. He has a good respect for the financiers’ money. But maybe he tried to do things a little too fast in the early ones. Maybe he’s hit more of a happy medium these days.”
Eastwood the actor and Eastwood the auteur are of one mind in viewing Unforgiven as a revisionist Western, one that is in many ways more cynical — and in many more ways more realistic — than the nihilistic carnage of A Fistful of Dollars.
As Unforgiven’s William Munny, “a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition,” Eastwood gives us an anti-hero who claims he is done with killing, who he insists his wife “cured me of drink and wickedness.” Unfortunately, Munny’s wife died two years before the movie begins. Even more unfortunately, Munny’s pig farm is failing, and he’s desperate to support himself and his two young children.
So when a prostitute is viciously assaulted in Big Whiskey, Wyo., and her co-workers advertise for hired guns to extract bloody revenge against her attackers, Munny takes his guns out of storage. With the help of a grizzled old friend (Morgan Freeman) and a cocksure young upstart (newcomer Jaimz Woolvett), Munny rides into Big Whiskey — and runs against the local sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), who’s a mite too eager to maintain law and order.
Eastwood optioned the Unforgiven screenplay by David Webb Peoples (Blade Runner) nearly a decade ago, then “put it on the shelf, figuring that I’d mature into it.” He never doubted he would eventually bring it to the screen, with himself in the role of Munny, because “I liked the whole idea of taking the West and de-mythicizing it, and putting another spin on the whole deal — the whole exaggeration, the whole romanticizing of the West.
“I liked the idea of the women being treated like property, very second-class, and striving for justice. And the character of Little Bill, I liked particularly, because I thought he was a good guy in a way, an affable character. But he set into motion a series of events that there was no stopping.”
And William Munny? Eastwood says Munny’s the one to whom the title really refers, for the ex-gunfighter “has never really forgiven himself” for the crimes he has committed. And he certainly doesn’t feel forgiven by the victims who return, unbidden, to haunt his dreams. “He is caught by his demons,” Eastwood says. “When he says, ‘I’m not like that anymore,’ he’s definitely trying to convince himself more than anyone else.”
By contemporary standards, there isn’t a lot of violence in Unforgiven. But what there is, is intensely, ferociously brutal. When Munny and his companions find and shoot one of the prostitute’s attackers, the movie forces us to consider the full horror of dying, and killing, with sudden savagery. (“Well, he had it coming,” the upstart says by way of rationalization. “We all have it coming,” Munny responds.) Little Bill, obsessed with keeping his town free of “assassins,” makes an example of the foppish English Bob (Richard Harris) by beating the gunfighter bloody in the town’s main street. In the film’s final minutes, Munny has only one chance of surviving — by once again turning himself into a remorseless, relentless killing machine. “I’ll see you in hell,” says one of his victims. Munny doesn’t argue. Hell will hold no surprises for him.
Throughout Unforgiven, Eastwood says, “Violence is painful, and not the comedic thing that it might be in other types of stories. And I like that in this. I thought it was very, very timely.
“Like, when the violence starts, when (Little Bill) becomes so violent with English Bob, you can see the deputies are all thinking, ‘Wait a second — what are we doing this for?’ It’s almost like an officer watching from the outside in the Rodney King beating or something. How would an officer react to that? Maybe he’d say, ‘Hey, wait a minute — do we have to hit him this many times?’”
Does Eastwood think Unforgiven will be viewed in some circles as an act of self-criticism?
“You mean, doing penance for the mayhem of the past?” he asks — not testily, exactly, but not altogether playfully.
OK, take two: Does Eastwood think some of his earlier films — say, the Italian-made Westerns, if not the Dirty Harry melodramas — may have helped desensitize audiences to violence?
“Maybe,” Eastwood replies. “But at the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal. We all have grown up with films that had Jimmy Cagney shooting somebody down, or drilling somebody in the trunk of a car — and that didn’t make us all violent people.
“I must say, though, that in recent years, I’ve viewed a lot of films where the violence has turned into a gruesome dismembership thing. Not very pleasant. But, then I start thinking, ‘Am I just getting older, and I’m criticizing someone else who’s coming along, maybe doing something that makes me feel the same way that people felt about some of my things at some point?’ I don’t know.
“Really, there’s no conscious effort in this thing to correct anything, or look back over my shoulder. It’s just, this is the way I feel today. I’m not haunted by anything, like William Munny. But today I feel that, with the way the world is now, maybe violence shouldn’t be treated as too humorous. Maybe Harold Lloyd walking into a wall, or Tom and Jerry in a cartoon, that’s different. But in reality, killing is not justifiable.”
It’s true: These days, even Clint Eastwood is having second thoughts about Clint Eastwood movies.
