June 27, 2024: WesternStudying: Clint Eastwood Westerns

[75 yearsago this week, the firstnetwork TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Fewgenres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’llAmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses &analyses in the comments, pardner!]

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

1)     Spaghetti Westerns: Clint Eastwood had been acting on TVsince the mid-1950s, and his first significant role was ina 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 atrio of mid-1960s films from Italian director Sergio Leone—A Fistful ofDollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, TheBad, and the Ugly (1966)—that truly cemented not just his stardom but his close association with thegenre. I think those “Spaghetti Westerns” exemplify the stereotypicallayers to the genre and its gunfighter protagonists that I highlighted inyesterday’s post, not only in their actual details, but also in the very factthat they were made in Europe by a director who had apparently nevervisited the United States. There’s no one way films have to be made nor oneperson who can make them, of course, but I would just say that Leone’s AmericanWest has a lot in common with Tintin’s.

2)     Revisionist Westerns: Eastwood continued tomake those kinds of iconic Western films for another decade-plus, furthercementing that overall association as well as other specific echoes ofcharacters like Wister’s Virginian (such as the Confederate veteran protagonistof The Outlaw Josey Wales [1976]). Then he took about a decade off fromthe genre, and when he returned to it, it was to direct as well as star in oneof the most famouslyrevisionist Westerns, Unforgiven (1992). No other Eastwood film isquite the same as that one, but I would say that the next two he directed andstarred in could also be defined as revisions of Western character types and tropes:A Perfect World(1993) and The Bridgesof Madison County (1995). What links all three films is both arecognition of the costs of violence and a willingness to complicate and evensoften the gunfighter protagonist stereotype, each elements that hearken backto layers of earlier texts like The Virginian that had been largely absentfrom the 60s and 70s versions.

3)     Extending Stereotypes: Eastwood hasn’t madeany 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 timehave unfortunately returned to and reified Western stereotypes in contrast withthe more revisionist efforts. Topping that list would be Gran Torino(2008), with Eastwood playing a laconic violence-prone community-saviorwho literally makes fingerguns at the film’s black-hatted villains. A decade later, Eastwood directedand starred in TheMule (2018), a film in which he plays a war veteran who is forced to returnto his violent past due to outlaw crime lords who would not be out of place inthe Wild West. And I would also put American Sniper (2014) on this list—Eastwooddid not star in that one, but directed Bradley Cooper in a role that updated a numberof gunfighter stereotypes for a War on Terror setting. None of these filmsare simplistic, but I nonetheless find it telling and frustrating that towardthe end of his career Eastwood seems to have returned to some of those foundationalWestern tropes.

LastWestern tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Westerns you’d analyze?