Clint Eastwood retired so quietly that I didn't even notice until his birthday came around this weekend, and for the first time in my lifetime — almost my parents' lifetimes for that matter — that there isn't a Clint Eastwood movie in production.
The Hollywood legend turned 96 on Sunday, making him more than a third as old as the Republic itself. He was born in 1930, just as the Great Depression was really getting going. His first screen appearance was an uncredited role in 1955's Revenge of the Creature, the quickie sequel The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Small parts on TV and movies followed, until his starring role as Rowdy Yates on the long-running TV western, Rawhide.
Movie stardom eluded Eastwood until he traveled to Italy to headline as Joe in Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars.
He quickly became one of the big screen's biggest draws, but as the old Hollywood cliche goes, what he really wanted to do was direct. And produce. And continue those starring roles.
Seriously, the man is a machine.
His first directorial outing was 1971's Play Misty for Me, which scarred the crap out of me when I saw it on TV as a kid and scarred me even more when I finally watched it again as an adult. That film allowed Eastwood his first public expression of his lifelong love for jazz, culminating in his 1988 Charlie Parker biopic, Bird.
He made no fewer than five Dirty Harry movies, but also blew the character apart by showing us what a rogue cop might look like in real life with the criminally underappreciated Tightrope in 1984.
The man who helped reimagine westerns in the 1960s with Leone reimagined them again in 1992 with Unforgiven — and by then he was already in his 60s, with another 30-plus years of moviemaking ahead of him. In 2004, he finally won a belated second Best Director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby.
For my money, Eastwood should have, or at least could have, also won for Play Misty, Bird, and Gran Torino. But he didn't often make the kind of BIG IMPORTANT MOVIES that Academy members feel like they're supposed to vote for.
Eastwood just made damn good movies ...
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