Hollywood’s introspective icon

As Clint Eastwood celebrates his 80th birthday, Peter Hoskin salutes his artistic legacy

My life at the movies began with Clint Eastwood about a decade ago. Channel 4 was screening A Fistful of Dollars (1964) one night, and my brother insisted that we stay up and tune in. I didn’t know beforehand that it was a western, let alone one directed by the great Sergio Leone. But, from the opening scene, I knew everything I needed to know about Clint: the poncho, the cheroot, those eyes burning with cathode ray intensity. This, I realised, is what people meant when they talked about cinema. And I was hooked.

Fast forward to the present, and the lone gunslinger is about to turn 80 years old. He still stands tall, lean and gruff, with none of that old intensity dimmed by the passage of time. And I still regularly watch A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), to remind myself of just how red-blooded the movies can be. This trilogy introduced me not just to Clint’s indelible Man With No Name character, but also to a useful rule of thumb: Clint Eastwood always fills the screen.

This rule certainly holds firm in Dirty Harry (1971), which provided Eastwood with his second defining role. Inspector Harry Callahan is both irresistible force and immovable object — discharging his righteous fury and .44 Magnum on the criminals of San Francisco, while standing stubborn in the face of city bureaucracy. The critic Pauline Kael famously described the film as ‘fascist’, more or less for these reasons. But, either way, it cemented Clint’s status as a masculine ideal. A man who follows no moral code but his own.