Clint Eastwood's Enduring Significance
Good morning, it’s May 31. Today is the 83rd birthday of an actor, director, social commentator, and local California politician who is still occasionally greeted by residents of Carmel as “Mr. Mayor.” The rest of us know him as Clint Eastwood.
The Hollywood star caused a stir at last summer’s Republican National Convention when he pretended to address President Obama while talking to an empty chair on stage. But it wasn’t, shall we say, his first rodeo.
Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born in San Francisco on May 31, 1930, and kicked around Northern California with his family while his father took what work he could find during the Great Depression.
In the 21st century, the San Francisco Bay Area is a beacon of the New Economy, with its high-tech start-ups, Pacific Rim banking, and imposing housing prices. It wasn’t like that in the 1930s, however, and when Clinton Eastwood narrated Chrysler’s gritty, Detroit-based Super Bowl ads in February 2012, he was speaking from a familiar place – his own childhood.
In the 1920s, Clinton Eastwood Sr. had been a star athlete for the academically rigorous Piedmont High School in the East Bay, but as his introverted, but rebellious, son was preparing to enroll there he was “disinvited to attend” (in the words of a later principal) for tearing up a newly sodded athletic field with his bike.
So Clint went to Oakland Tech instead. Educators there saw something in him and asked him to go out for school plays. He demurred, mostly, but in a classic Hollywood story, after joining the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he was stationed at Fort Ord when he was noticed by a casting director from Universal Pictures.
One thing led to another, and by the late 1950s, he was co-starting as a tall silent cowboy -- “Rowdy Yates” was his name -- in the long-running television series Rawhide.
During a break in the shooting in 1963, Eastwood agreed to perform a more morally ambiguous role in a movie being filmed in rural Spain by a little-known Italian director named Sergio Leone. By the time A Fistful of Dollars and the other so-called spaghetti westerns were finished, both Leone and Eastwood had conquered the world of feature film.
“In Rawhide I did get awfully tired of playing the conventional white hat – the hero who kisses old ladies and dogs and was kind to everybody,” Eastwood later explained. “I decided it was time to be an anti-hero.”
Such roles turned out to fit his on-screen persona – and his off-screen political views – quite well. In the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood played a San Francisco police detective frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and court-imposed barriers while searching for a psychotic serial killer who is terrorizing the city.
Audiences loved Harry Callahan, but some influential liberal commentators were appalled. New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael, herself a Northern California native, attacked the film. The action movie genre, she wrote, “always had a fascist potential,” and in Dirty Harry, “it has finally surfaced.”
Clint Eastwood was stung by this criticism, but as his career continued he displayed, both in his filmmaking and interviews, to be a more thoughtful social critic than many of his detractors – and even some of his allies. Despite his proven box office appeal, Eastwood ran into a little trouble getting Warner Bros. to let him make Million Dollar Baby.
“They saw it as a ‘boxing movie.’ I saw it as a love story,” he told CBS’ Lesley Stahl in a 2009 interview.
“Well, which is it?” she asked him.
“It's a love story,” he answered. “It’s a father-daughter love story. And it’s about hopes and dreams. And it's about people and the fragility of life.”
When Stahl gently expressed surprise at how sensitive “Harry Callahan” had become, Eastwood pushed back, but gently – with words, and not a .44-Magnum.
“Well, I don’t think he was insensitive then,” he said. “I think 'Dirty Harry' was probably sensitive toward the victims of violent crime.”
Last year, an East Bay writer named Paul Kilduff interviewed Piedmont High School’s principal, a celebrated educator named Richard Kitchens.
Kilduff wonders aloud whether Eastwood would have made different kind of movies had he gone to Piedmont instead of Oakland Tech.
“You never know,” says the principal.
“No Rawhide. No Dirty Harry,” says Kilduff, pressing the principal. “I mean he would have been some intellectual.”
“Well,” replies the educator. “I don’t think Clint would have changed too much.”
