The Legend of Clint Eastwood

Revenge of the Creature, 1955 "Doc, could you come here a minute?" was Eastwood's first line in his only scene in Jack Arnold's sequel to the B-minus horror hit Creature from the Black Lagoon, as a lab assistant to star John Agar. A 23-year-old signed by Universal, Eastwood got nowhere playing bit parts: a jet pilot ordering a napalm drop on a giant spider in Arnold's Tarantula, a sailor buddy of Donald O'Connor and his talking mule in Francis in the Navy. None brought him acclaim, or even notice, until much later. On a 1997 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Crow T. Robot watches Clint's Revenge of the Creature performance and opines, "This guy's bad. This is his first and last movie."

Rawhide, 1959-65 What's remembered is the rollin', rollin', rollin' Frankie Laine theme song ("Move 'em on, head 'em up. Count 'em out, ride 'em in, Rawhide!). The show itself, produced by Charles Marquis Warren, who had shepherded Gunsmoke from radio to its 20-year perch on Saturday night TV, starred Eric Fleming as Gil Favor, team boss of a never-ending cattle drive. Eastwood played Rowdy Yates, Gil's second-in-command. Rowdy was young, impetuous and dreamy-looking — an Old-West Ricky Nelson. Richard Schickel's epic Clint Eastwood: A Biography notes that the actor referred to his character as a "trail flunky" and "Rowdy Yates, idiot of the plains." But the show, which ran seven-and-a-half seasons, gave Eastwood a steady job and a marketable face in a series that played around the world. In Rome, Sergio Leone took notice.

A Fistful of Dollars, 1964 The Italian "spaghetti" western was really born in Japan. Akira Kurosawa's 1961 Yojimbo starred Toshiro Mifune as a solitary samurai who ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival malefactors and takes both gangs down. Sergio Leone filched the Yojimbo plot, paid Eastwood $15,000 to play the lead, gave him a poncho and a cigar stub as props and called his movie Per un pugni di dollari — A Fistful of Dollars in the U.S. Clint established a new mode: the Angel of Death as hero. The good guy was the one with the fastest gun, the meanest scowl and top billing. Plus that perpetual three-day beard (which Mifune had worn in Yojimbo). Eastwood's scruff became a fashion statement that lives on; more important, he and Leone twisted, and made, movie history.

For a Few Dollars More, 1965 United Artists, the American distributor that picked up A Fistful of Dollars, wanted viewers to think the Leone Westerns were American, though Eastwood was the only Yank on the set. For a Few Dollars More might be the most honest title ever slapped on a sequel, but Leone had higher artistic ambitions; with each film the series got richer, in drama and visual style as well as at the box office. This time, Eastwood and costar Gian Maria Volonte (renamed Johnny Wels for American audiences) are joined by Lee Van Cleef, a Hollywood also-ran who became a star in Italy. Van Cleef plays an Army officer out for righteous revenge; Clint kills because the corpses of bad guys fetch a high price. When the townspeople make him sheriff, he asks about the pay, hears it's low, removes his badge and says, "I think you people need a new sheriff."

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, 1966 Some stateside genius at United Artists had dubbed Clint's character The Man With No Name. Actually, he had monikers in all three films: Joe in Fistful, Manco (One Arm) in For a Few Dollars More and Blondy in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And by that third film, even middle-aged critics were starting to notice that Eastwood's wry stillness was the perfect counterpoint both to Leone's elaborate, indeed operatic camerawork and to the director's bleak view that, in a society run by outlaws, the only moral choice was among various shades of black. The last and greatest of the Eastwood-Leone collaborations set up a triangular shootout involving the good-by-default (Clint), the proudly bad (Van Cleef) and the sneaky-scurvy ugly (Eli Wallach). Set to Morricone's vigorous, immortal score, that climax was a series of gimlet-eyed closeups, subtle facial twitches and a suspenseful eternity of waiting to see who'd shoot first. By now, there was no question about who'd be the last man standing.

Hang 'Em High, 1968 Back in Hollywood, now as a star, Eastwood naturally made a Western that was less than the Leone films (no artistry here) but proved he was a solid moneymaker in homegrown oaters. He "plays a leathery loner out to clean up a dirty territory," TIME's Stefan Kanfer wrote. "An unauthorized posse mistakes Eastwood for a murderer and decides that he is nooseworthy, but a kindly marshal helps him escape. Clint spends the rest of the picture ricocheting off some loquacious character actors, getting leaky with bullet holes, and running the lynch mob to earth. Along the way, the necrophilic camera lingers lovingly over the dead and dying. With some evocative photography and a touch of gallows humor, Director Ted Post tries to make Hang 'Em High stylish and spirited enough to swing. It swings all right—like a body at the end of a rope."

Paint Your Wagon, 1969 With four of the previous eight top Oscars going to musicals, and with The Sound of Music reigning as the all-time top box-office hit, studios of the late '60s were transporting every possible Broadway show to the screen. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's 1951 Paint Your Wagon boasted two hit songs ("They Call the Wind Maria" and "I Talk to the Trees") and a Western setting. Eastwood, fresh from his Leone hits, and Lee Marvin, who won an Oscar as the boozy gunfighter in Cat Ballou, were cast as Gold Rush prospectors who share everything, including a wife (Jean Seberg). All three stars were non-singers, though Marvin at least had the baritone bombacity to sell his numbers. Clint is genial enough, and never handsomer, but performs his numbers timidly, as if for once he's on the other end of a tough guy's loaded gun. Entrusted with "I Talk to the Trees," he truly whispers the song, seemingly afraid someone might hear him. Few did; the movie was an expensive flop.

Play Misty For Me, 1971 By now, Clint was a star; but what he really wanted to do was direct. Other Hollywood macho men — John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas — had become producers and occasional directors; only Eastwood made the helming trade a fulltime second career. In his debut film as director, Clint plays late-night disc jockey whose No. 1 fan (Jessica Walter) often calls with a seductive request to play the Errol Garner standard. "As frightening as she is sexy," Jay Cocks wrote in TIME, "Walter plays her part to the hilt, which in one case is at the end of a 10-in. blade. Eastwood, making his first directorial outing, has to chart a course through the holes in the plot. There are a couple of hackneyed moments (notably a nude love scene), but Eastwood displays a vigorous talent for sequences of violence and tension. He has obviously seen Psycho and Repulsion more than once, but those are excellent texts and he has learned his lessons passing well."

Dirty Harry, 1971 Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum all said no to the script (originally titled Dead Right), thus handing Eastwood the first of a five-film, 17-year franchise: this one plus Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact and Dead Pool. The character of Harry Callahan, maverick San Francisco cop, was Leone's lone Western hero — same surliness, same antiheroic attitude — with a badge. The movie validated Eastwood's Hollywood celebrity and kicked up a storm cloud of hostility from critics like Pauline Kael, who pegged Callahan's methods in corralling a psycho killer "deeply immoral" and "fascist medievalism." No matter: audiences cheered Harry's macho aphorisms ("You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" from this film and "Go ahead, make my day" from Sudden Impact) and his scowling swagger through the blighted urban jungle.

High Plains Drifter, 1973 Ernest Tidyman, who in 1971 had written the seminal urban-cop movies The French Connection (winning an Oscar) and Shaft), penned Eastwood's first Western that he directed as well as starred in. This time he really is a man with no name — he may be a ghost gunman, or a vindictive Jesus — with a wild metaphorical streak: he forces the locals to paint the town red and rename the place Hell. "Part of the time The Stranger is Dirty Harry in cowboy boots, a good cop trying to do his duty in a world ungrateful for his sadistic efforts," wrote Richard Schickel in TIME. "Part of the time he is Christ reincarnated; in another life (a recurring dream informs us), he suffered a version of Calvary inflicted on him by this very town." After dismissing Eastwood as a galoot with troglodyte political tendencies and too much power, the critics began perking up to Eastwood, as a director and actor, with this mean, majestic parable.

Every Which Way But Loose, 1979 This roughhouse comedy with a monkey costar was designed to please nobody but the mass audience. "Every Which Way goes in every which direction to no particular avail," Frank Rich wrote in TIME. "It is nearly impossible to sit through. Chase scenes, barroom brawls and barehanded boxing matches follow in dizzying succession, but the movie rarely lurches forward. Director James Fargo (Caravans) seems to delight in disorienting the audience: it is a major chore to figure out who is punching whom, not to mention why. . An orangutan called Clyde does cute monkeyshines that recall the heyday of Jack Lescoulie and J. Fred Muggs on the Today show." Those hijinks were the movie's highlight, and led to a Clint-and-Clyde sequel, Any Which Way You Can.

Bronco Billy, 1980 As Bronco Billy, Eastwood plays handsomely against type, replacing his Dirty Harry figure with a good-as-gold rodeo star who refers to his fans as "little pards," prays for them not to "get tangled up with hard liquor and cigarettes" and hopes his wild West show will make enough money to pay for a ranch "where city kids can come out and see what the West was really like." Billy lavishes his kindness on everyone from runaway heiresses to Vietnam deserters, from one-handed cowboys to pregnant Indians. He is stirred to righteous anger only when a bad guy mauls his best gal or breaks a little boy's piggy bank. He is too good to be true — except in a sweet-souled dime-novel movie like this one. Eastwood, who turned 50 just before the film opened, now looked sun-burnished, granite-hard, seamed and serene like an outdoor sculpture. His achievement in Bronco Billy, as star and director, is to chisel some emotion and innocence into those features. It is as if one of the faces on Mount Rushmore suddenly cracked a crooked smile.

Honkytonk Man, 1982 The low-key story of Red Stovall, a country singer with an invitation to audition for the Grand Ole Opry and a case of tuberculosis teetering on the brink of the terminal, Honkytonk Man gave the actor-director a chance to cast his son Kyle in the role of the hero's caretaker and potential savior. "Clint Eastwood has fashioned a marvelously unfashionable movie," wrote TIME's Richard Schickel, "as quietly insinuating as one of Red's honky-tonk melodies. It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys."

Unforgiven, 1992 Eastwood's first western since Pale Rider in 1985 is a dark, passionate drama with good guys so twisted and bad guys so persuasive that virtue and villainy become two views of the same soul. But it is also Eastwood's meditation on the burdens of age, repute, courage, heroism — on Clintessence. The movie takes its time letting you watch the aging gunfighter, Will Munny, turn into Clint. And when he does, it's not thrilling but scary. At the end he threatens to "come back and kill everyone." Will says he's doing it all for the money. But it's really because a man's job is his life. Will shoots people. Clint shoots westerns. And for once, the Hollywood establishment took notice, awarding the film Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (Eastwood) and the renegade star an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. After nearly 40 years in the movie business, these were his first-ever Academy Award citations.

The Bridges of Madison County, 1995 When Bruce Beresford was fired, Eastwood took the job of directing himself and Meryl Streep (an Oscar nomination for Best Actress) in this film version of Robert James Waller's best-seller about an incandescent, three-day affair between a roving photographer and an Iowa farm wife. He told TIME's Richard Schickel that he didn't have to waste a lot of energy looking for his character. "I've been that guy," he said, referring to a detached and wandering period in his young manhood; "years of being lost" on the American back roads, unable to define what he was looking for. Those years, those feelings are long gone, but other aspects of that young guy still cling to him; he remains restless, self-sufficient, with a large tolerance for his own company and an equally large indifference toward the good opinion of strangers. "I've always had the theory," he once said, "that actors who beg their audiences to like them ... are much worse off than actors who just say, 'If you don't like this, don't let the door hit you in the ass.'"

Mystic River, 2003 He directed but did not appear in the movie of Dennis Lehane's novel about Boston family values. Sean Penn, ostensibly the least likely actor to get along with Eastwood, famously did, as did the rest of the ensemble. "Clint is the approving rascal, older-brother father," Penn told TIME's Desa Philadelphia. "You are not inclined toward useless rebellion with him, unless you just want to see him laugh at you." On Oscar Night there were smiles all around: Best Actor for Penn and Supporting Actor for Tim Robbins, plus nominations for Picture, Director (Eastwood), Screenplay (Brian Helgeland) and Supporting Actress (Marcia Gay Harden).

Piano Blues, 2003 Eastwood's lifelong passion for jazz has informed many of his films, from the Errol Garner theme in Play Misty for Me to the documentary he produced on jazz pianist Thelonious Monk (Straight, No Chaser) to the piano scores he's written for such films as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. In his contribution to the seven-feature doc series The Blues, supervised by Martin Scorsese, Eastwood sat on a bench next to Ray Charles, Marcia Bell, Dr. John and other magnificent piano pumpers, talking about the craft and feel of making rough poetry by slamming or caressing the keys. Antique film clips buttress the conversations. Maybe the film should have been called Piano Jazz — this is not really about the blues — but it's still a smartly composed love letter from a icon of one indigenous American art form to the masters of another.

Million Dollar Baby, 2004 At 74, Eastwood fashioned one of his richest and sneakiest fables: a boxing tale that screenwriter Paul Haggis based on the stories of F.X. Toole, a former ringside "cut man." That was the trade of Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), who with his pal Eddie (Morgan Freeman) now runs a gym for boxing hopefuls, most without a hope. The longest shot is Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). She hasn't a prayer, or a clue, but she's determined to be the champ and ... can you guess what happens? Maybe not. The story has a sucker punch, which reveals both the importance of family and the ways loyalty can trump official morality. The Motion Picture Academy loved Million Dollar Baby too, gracing it with Oscars for Picture, Director (Eastwood), Actress (Swank) and Supporting Actor (Freeman), plus nominations for Actor (Eastwood), Adapted Screenplay (Paul Haggis) and Editing (Joel Cox). It marked the second of three times in the decade — Mystic River the year before, the Japanese-language Letters to Iwo Jima three years later — that Eastwood would be short-listed for both Picture and Director.

Gran Torino, 2008 The Motion Picture Academy decided to ignore Gran Torino. Yet this small film about an old man softening up to his Hmong neighbors, then steeling himself to avenge a crime committed against them, was the star's biggest hit. Growling and spitting like a distempered stray, his Walt Kowalski is a mass of gruff prejudices against the minorities who've moved into his Michigan town. When some kids brawl in front of his house, he brandishes a rifle and actually shouts, "Get off my lawn!" Underneath, though, Walt is a stalwart man of the Midwest — the hero who has a score to settle. With himself. Eastwood the director puts Eastwood the actor is in total command of his character, daring himself to new depths. You'll see a tough man cry — one of the few flourishings of tears in the Eastwood oeuvre. That unaffected emotion eventually informs the whole movie, making it a wrenching, rewarding experience. Along with his famous guts, Dirty Harry has a heart.

Hereafter, 2010 In three countries, three people — a San Francisco psychic (Matt Damon), a French newscaster (Cecile de France), an English boy with a dead twin brother (George and Frankie McLaren) — get emanations from the beyond. The first movie of Eastwood's ninth decade, Hereafter takes no position on the afterlife; but it believes that people who believe have the power to alter their destinies. The movie can also be seen as the final testament of many Clint characters, from his antihero in the Leone films to the Pale Rider preacher, from Million Dollar Baby's Frankie Dunn to Gran Torino's Walt Kowalski: men for whom facing down death was a natural part of life.

The Eastwood Factor, 2010 Who better to conduct an intimate career appraisal of Eastwood than his biographer, Richard Schickel? The Eastwood Factor, made for Turner Classic Movies and now on DVD, boasts unprecedented access to Clint: clips of his rehearsals, a stroll with him through the Warner Bros. back lot where so many of his films were made and a literal look in his closet, where 40 years of Eastwood wardrobe is stored. Follow the Clint canon from the icon-establishing Dirty Harry ("I had no idea whether anyone wanted to see it; but, I figured, I'd like to see it") to the Oscar-dominating Unforgiven (it was his last western because "I don't know what else I'd have to say" in the genre) to another multiple Oscar-winner, Mystic River ("It just felt together kinda nicely"). Prying insights out of a soft-spoken man, Schickel offers a life portrait of an 80-year-old who ain't done yet.

Eastwood's most recent effort, American Sniper, tells the true story of Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in the U.S. military history. Based on Kyle's memoir and starring Bradley Cooper, the movie stirred up some controversy for what critics called a glorification of violence and war. Eastwood, for his part, clarified that the film was meant to be just the opposite, an anti-war account of the harrowing circumstances faced by soldiers sent into battle. All disagreement aside, American Sniper was recognized both by the Academy—snagging six Oscar nominations and winning one, for Best Sound Editing—and moviegoers, earning more at the box office than the other seven Best Picture nominees combined.