David Vining's Blog, page 108

The Gauntlet

Clint Eastwood seemed very self-aware of his image, and The Gauntlet feels like an attempt to subvert the image he had cultivated through the Dirty Harry series of films, which he thought was over after The Enforcer. Warner Brothers would come to him a few years later carrying a very large bag of money to change his mind about that. However, before then, Eastwood made a film about a cop, not the best cop but one of the worse ones. An unremarkable and alcoholic metro cop from Phoenix who gets...

The Enforcer

The script for the third outing of Inspector Harry Callahan feels like several scripts smooshed together with just enough connecting tissue conjured up out of thin air to keep the thing afloat for its relatively brief running time. There are ideas about women in the police force, the continued degradation of San Francisco, and militant revolutionary groups akin to the Weather Underground, but instead of digging into anything or coming to any kind of conclusions, everything just kind of peter...

The Outlaw Josey Wales

This is one of those movies where there really should be a co-directing credit. Phillip Kaufman co-wrote the script, went through all of the pre-production, and then filmed about the first two weeks of the shoot before Clint Eastwood convinced the producer, Robert Daley, to fire Kaufman and let Eastwood direct. There’s so much work in the film that that’s obviously the work of Kaufman in the role of director that despite Eastwood firing him for whatever reason (either Kaufman was working too...

The Eiger Sanction

This feels like another effort to create an American James Bond, this time from director and star Clint Eastwood, and I think he fumbles it. Eastwood’s cool directing style seems ill-fitted for an international espionage thriller, especially when he prefers to keep a languid pace throughout the second act. There doesn’t seem to be a huge effort to actually build tension or mystery, and he seems to treat the whole thing like a drama leading up to a large production effort to film an actual cl...

Magnum Force

This movie doesn’t feel like it really begins for an hour. Considering that it’s the longest of the Dirty Harry movies, that really tells me that Ted Post and his editor Ferris Webster needed to pare down its opening half majorly. It’s introduction of the entire concept is repetitive while the main character feels curiously uninvolved for such a long stretch, that it massively tempers the effects of the final half. That final half does show a surprisingly thoughtful approach to the very fine...

Breezy

Well, this is certainly a change of pace. After the taut thriller that was Play Misty For Me and the violent, revisionist Western that was High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood makes his third directorial feature about an older man learning to accept the romantic love of an attractive, young hippie chick. That’s…different. Creating a melding of the old Hollywood and the new by hiring William Holden as his lead, Eastwood crafts a tale of small stakes, little emotion, and consummate professional...

High Plains Drifter

This is just really well-made exploitation, isn’t it? I’m not really complaining because Clint Eastwood, in his second outing as director, brings a professionalism and sense of class to both the directing and acting that the basic script doesn’t seem to deserve, taking a simple tale of revenge with a bare sense of character and spinning quite a yarn that pushes the feel of the film into a supernatural sense of unyielding and uncompromising justice. It ends up with precious little to say whil...

Dirty Harry

Here we see the influence of Fritz Lang’s M decades after its release. There’s the emphasis on process and the absolutely insane antagonist serial killer. Where there are differences are the obvious setting changes, but also the focus on an individual investigator and how the official process can outright fail. Made by Don Siegel in his consummately professional manner, there’s little flashy about this film stylistically, and he creates an engrossing tale of procedural obsession in the face ...

Play Misty for Me

Clint Eastwood (made famous by his leading role in Revenge of the Creature, obviously) was a movie star with designs to becoming a film director, so he found a small, thriller script, went to Universal, and asked for the money to direct. He seemed out to prove nothing else than he could make a movie and make it well. Don Siegel, who directed him the same year in Dirty Harry, was something of a mentor and even appears on a small role as a bartender. Eastwood did his thing and came in ahead of...

Clint Eastwood: A Statement of Purpose

Follow up one Western director for another. It makes sense!

I decided to look through Clin Eastwood’s body of work as a director for a specific reason. When the Discovery/WB merger completed, one of the earliest stories about the takeover was David Zaslav being really angry that WB had greenlit Eastwood’s most recent film, Cry Macho. It was reported that WB knew that the film wouldn’t make its money back, but they greenlit it anyway out of a sense of loyalty to Eastwood. I doubt it would ...