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Thursday, June 27, 2024

June 27, 2024: WesternStudying: Clint Eastwood Westerns

[75 years ago this week, the first network TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Few genres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses & analyses in the comments, pardner!]

On AmericanStudies contexts for three stages in the Western icon’s filmography.

1)      Spaghetti Westerns: Clint Eastwood had been acting on TV since the mid-1950s, and his first significant role was in a popular TV Western that debuted a decade after Hopalong Cassidy, Rawhide (1959-65). But it was his film work toward the end of that show’s run, in a trio of mid-1960s films from Italian director Sergio LeoneA Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966)—that truly cemented not just his stardom but his close association with the genre. I think those “Spaghetti Westerns” exemplify the stereotypical layers to the genre and its gunfighter protagonists that I highlighted in yesterday’s post, not only in their actual details, but also in the very fact that they were made in Europe by a director who had apparently never visited the United States. There’s no one way films have to be made nor one person who can make them, of course, but I would just say that Leone’s American West has a lot in common with Tintin’s.

2)      Revisionist Westerns: Eastwood continued to make those kinds of iconic Western films for another decade-plus, further cementing that overall association as well as other specific echoes of characters like Wister’s Virginian (such as the Confederate veteran protagonist of The Outlaw Josey Wales [1976]). Then he took about a decade off from the genre, and when he returned to it, it was to direct as well as star in one of the most famously revisionist Westerns, Unforgiven (1992). No other Eastwood film is quite the same as that one, but I would say that the next two he directed and starred in could also be defined as revisions of Western character types and tropes: A Perfect World (1993) and The Bridges of Madison County (1995). What links all three films is both a recognition of the costs of violence and a willingness to complicate and even soften the gunfighter protagonist stereotype, each elements that hearken back to layers of earlier texts like The Virginian that had been largely absent from the 60s and 70s versions.

3)      Extending Stereotypes: Eastwood hasn’t made any films in the subsequent three decades that explicitly qualify as Westerns, but I would argue that a number of the films he’s directed during that time have unfortunately returned to and reified Western stereotypes in contrast with the more revisionist efforts. Topping that list would be Gran Torino (2008), with Eastwood playing a laconic violence-prone community-savior who literally makes finger guns at the film’s black-hatted villains. A decade later, Eastwood directed and starred in The Mule (2018), a film in which he plays a war veteran who is forced to return to his violent past due to outlaw crime lords who would not be out of place in the Wild West. And I would also put American Sniper (2014) on this list—Eastwood did not star in that one, but directed Bradley Cooper in a role that updated a number of gunfighter stereotypes for a War on Terror setting. None of these films are simplistic, but I nonetheless find it telling and frustrating that toward the end of his career Eastwood seems to have returned to some of those foundational Western tropes.

Last Western tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Westerns you’d analyze?

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