THE CLINT EASTWOOD COLLECTION
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARSFOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY
HANG ' EM HIGH
When I started this blog in January 2021 I had been collecting and writing about movies for about 3&1/2 years on Facebook. Hundreds of those reviews went with other Fb accounts - I had a genius for locking myself out of my own account for awhile - which a friend and I thought I'd be able to easily access and port over to the blog. We were not correct. Though a relatively simple solution likely exists, I've had the blog for six months and I'm not finding it.
Which means I'm going to have to replace that content with new writeups. Which means re-watching a lot of movies. If I'm going to do that, I may as well go back to the start and do some writing about the first two years of collecting, when I made Clint Eastwood a primary focus, buying any movie he starred in, directed, or produced. Last week, I watched all eight movies from the CLINT EASTWOOD BLURAY COLLECTION, a set of the eight pictures he did at Universal between the Dollars Trilogy and THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, his Warners debut as a director and contract player.
Money came and I went out and bought newer movies, posted about two of them, highly enjoyed most of the rest, and have no idea what to say of them. THE AMERICAN & RONIN were both great, if stylistically opposite, Eurothrillers which I found entirely satisfying and - that's it. Such is the tale of the newer movies. Drawing to the end of the stack, knowing I used it to put off finishing my writeup of the box set, instead of finally buckling down to it I decided to watch ALL my Eastwood titles, in sequence, first going back to the multidisc set with the DOLLARS TRILOGY & HANG 'EM HIGH, then filling in where the Universal set missed. I don't have WHERE EAGLES DARE or PAINT YOUR WAGON, but I do have KELLY'S HEROES and all the DIRTY HARRYs as well as the rest of his '70s output. After that, it's spotty but not uninteresting, I think, with movies all the way through THE MULE, including the execrable, inexcusable AMERICAN SNIPER.
Because I've written a longer history of how and why I focussed on Eastwood for the box set piece, I don't want to replicate too much of that here, but it's safe to say I never saw myself, as a younger man, being a passionate fan of Clint Eastwood, Westerns, cop movies, war movies, John Ford & John Wayne, and yet here I am and all that is true. I circled Eastwood for years, first bitten by OUTLAW JOSEY WALES & ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ in the '70s, then gradual exposure to his other work from that decade via TV and cable and VHS over the next 30 years, such that, once I found myself stable and realistically able to start collecting dvds/Blurays, Eastwood's work, easily had for next to nothing in every thrift store in the US, was some of the stuff I most wanted.
I read Richard Schickel's biography of him in the mid-Aughts when I lived in a homeless camp in Cincinnati. Eastwood's ideas about masculinity and archetypal heroes, which he usually plays, fascinated me, as did his simultaneous direction of most of his movies since 1971. Grabbing every $1 Clint Eastwood movie, or paying $3-4 for a multidisc set of the first four DIRTY HARRY discs, made eminent sense to me.
That said, as of four years ago, despite being able to say I've seen THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES over a thousand times, I had not seen some of Clint's biggest movies, including the first two legs of the DOLLARS trilogy. I had only ever caught the final 30 minutes of THE GAUNTLET, in which Clint, Sondra Locke, and a Greyhound bus run same, and I hadn't seen ALCATRAZ since my Dad took me to see it in second-run in 1980. As of 2017, despite my peculiar fondness for JOSEY WALES and my appreciation of UNFORGIVEN, MYSTIC RIVER & MILLION DOLLAR BABY, I was an Eastwood appreciator.
Today, I'm a fan. Even the bare handful of duff titles he appeared in during his pre-Warner years make me unhappy more because they blow good work by Clint in favor of stupid story machinations, like EIGER SANCTION, or because he's picking up a check and clearly bored, like KELLY'S HEROES, which could have been a good movie but opted out. Whenever the name is Leone or Siegel or Eastwood or his company, Malpaso's, on a project, it may not work but it will be an interesting failure. Virtually nothing he starred in or directed-starred in the '70s reaches that level outside of EIGER which, again, is not only interesting but may be the best-shot Eastwood movie not DPed by Malpaso's resident cinematographer, Bruce Surtees.
Though I knew his later Westerns, and knew about spaghetti westerns, and The Man With No Name, and all the things a film fan in my generation had to know about the Leone movies, regardless, I had only seen THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY prior to 2017. Which made finally seeing the first two great for me in a blank-filling, dot-connecting way.
Eastwood read Leone's screenplay for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and recognized it as a remake of Akira Kirosawa's YOJIMBO, a movie of which he was a fan and understood as a Western, so he signed. Watching AFOD my first time, and again two days ago, it struck me how many movies I've seen over the years borrow YOJIMBO's basic idea of playing both ends against the middle for personal gain, and how many of those as likely borrowed from Leone's retelling. LICENSE TO KILL, the second of the Timothy Dalton James Bond films, is an explicit homage by its director, John Glen, to Leone's film. MILLER'S CROSSING, where Gabriel Byrne's character "knows all the angles" also shares the premise. Pretty much any gangster or crime movie post-A FISTFUL with an underdog fighting a war on two fronts probably owes to Leone and Eastwood if not Kurosawa and Mifune.
All three films explain much of what I've watched over the course of my life, particularly the last four years. Few subsequent Westerns, even much more traditional Westerns, do not show Leone's influence, if only in how defiantly non-spaghetti they try to be. The latter two films showed me why Van Cleef, who I always enjoyed in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, was such a perfect casting choice, something most of my cinephile friends have known since the 1970s.
Ditto Eli Wallach, an actor I've seen and enjoyed in many movies, but now felt I never fully appreciated until seeing him play Tuco in GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY. Perhaps it's better I hadn't seen his Tuco: the temptation to use it as the standard of comparison throughout his later career is hard to resist. Tuco is a remarkable piece of work, as a character and as a performance. Few characters commit to being morally repellent, even when it doesn't work in their favor, as Tuco. He's like our former President - in failure, he doubles down on nasty. Throughout the film, Eastwood repeatedly exploits Tuco's avararice and shortsightedness, including to save his life once Tuco gets the upper hand and almost kills Eastwood's Blondie on a forced march through the desert.
That occasion also puts Eastwood and Wallach, whose storyline as grifters whose partnership dissolves to deadly rivals meanders across the path of Lee Van Cleef's as Angel Eyes, a feared bounty hunter on the trail of a Union soldier calling himself Bill Carson, who knows the location of $250k in Confederate gold, like the Rio Grande across Texas, onto the same course and gets the movie, already at least an hour old, actually pointed in the same direction. It's a tribute to Leone and his writers and the cast's powers that a film can take fully an hour to engage and yet be so compelling.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE UGLY never made me wonder if there was a point - I felt content to go where Leone & his cast led me. I've seen certain movies absurd numbers of times, but even in those cases few of them count as movies I like MORE everytime I see them. Some may have once, and the DOLLARS trilogy could eventually be that way, too, or could, if I were still a teenager with 40 years of movie-watching ahead. I'm not, so I probably can't get to that point, but I'm not worried. Right now, and for sometime to come, when I watch any of the three, I'll like it more than the time before.
Though not overstuffed in the way Spike Lee's best joints tend to be, not as detail-intensive as Terry Gilliam, not as allusion-saturated as something like Spielberg's READY PLAYER ONE, all of the DOLLARS Trilogy, and especially THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE UGLY rewards multiple views and close attention, offering simple, yet layered and character-rich, stories. It took until the most recent watch to notice, for example, the way the three main characters deal with the American Civil War, which is going badly for the South, all around them. Wallach and Van Cleef alternately see the war as an obstacle to be avoided and an opportunity to greater wealth, but neither sees the epic-scaled human tragedy. They plow across immense set pieces illustrating the titanic futility of war with almost tunnel vision once scented on unclaimed CSA gold. Van Cleef proves savvy enough to turn the war to his profit, but enjoys exploiting, even abusing, the soldiers he watches over at one point. The inanity of the struggle, the rightness or wrongness of civil conflict, make no difference to Angel Eyes. Only Eastwood, the allegedly "Good" leg of their tripod, sees what's happening. Blondie's as much about the gold as the others, but it's Blondie who comments on the senselessness of the waste of life during the bridge sequence, and Blondie who covers a dying soldier with his coat and leaves him his cheroot as the boy dies.
I don't often hear TGTBATU discussed as a war movie, particularly a Civil War movie, yet it very much is one, Leone's characters' near-oblivion to their surroundings as much a commentary on the futility of mass conflict as most any war movie not featuring John Wayne. (Wayne's war movies always come off rah-rah war-is-good, most directors' war movies are a little more uh-no-John-not-really.) It's no accident the way the war asserts itself almost as a character, over and over, first only as CSA troops retreating through a town, next as a spectacular set piece featuring the bombardment of a town during a manhunt-shootout down its main street, to a Union army prison, to the film's final set piece, a colossal battle between Union and CSA for control of a bridge which finally sucks Eastwood & Wallach all the way into the conflict, when they volunteer to blow up the bridge the Union captain, who likes them, has been told to preserve. That they pick a side entirely to benefit their own side pales in irony compared to their action's result, an intensifying of cannon fire which annihilates both sides completely, leaving only a fleeing Tuco & Blondie alive.
It also never grabbed me before that Tuco, the most venal, most oblivious of the three, also happens to be the one character actually involved in a struggle with his literal brother, like the war he ignores. Tuco's argument with his priest brother doesn't endear him, but it does give human dimension to his unpleasantness. He may be a self-justifying ass, but we get a sense of why he feels himself entitled to be that way. It's a moment which enriches Wallach as a character even as it proves an ironic layer within Leone's larger story.
Approaching any of the trilogy, especially TGTBATU, as easily-digested pop cinema is certainly possible - they were sold as popcorn movies not arthouse experiments - but it misses most of what brings their fans back again and again. The DOLLARS Trilogy is certainly hyperstylized and reinvented the language of the Western for a generation unmoved by Messrs Wayne and Murphy, but it's also a collection of three stories which, if only sort of interrelated - and by a character known for not having a name even though he's called by name in all three movies - reward repeat viewings with rich, clever, humorous, exciting, well-acted, beautifully-shot, and also layered stories. Leone has more on his mind than how cool serapes look and inspiring Sam Peckinpah's bloodlust.
(It took until my second viewing of the DOLLARS trilogy, by the way, for me to understand that Clint is The Man With No Name because, though others call him by a different name in each film, he never calls himself by any name. That hit me like the guy who understands the sound of one hand clapping is his master's hand slapping the back of his head.)
It's as John Ford is said to have said, "People thought Westerns were silly so the studios left us alone, and we decided to make them about ideas."
The idea in Ted Post's HANG 'EM HIGH, a Malpaso production, is obviously Clint and MGM's idea: to take Leone's technique and style and people it with American stars and faces, including much of the John Ford Stock Company. The basic intelligence of my research on Malpaso indicates he more or less ghost directed all of its few features not utilizing him as director. Ted Post and Jim Fargo have both indicated that was true of their episodes of the Harry Callahan series, and it's just as clear on HANG 'EM HIGH, though one suspects Eastwood probably leaned on Post more at this point, a few years from his own directorial debut.
If marrying spaghetti and American westerns is HANG 'EM HIGH's filmic point, its story point concerns the price of an obsession with vengeance and the consequences of violence, two ongoing themes in Eastwood's films, especially the Westerns. What Ford didn't say, perhaps didn't need to say, is that making Westerns about more than White Hat vs. Black Hat makes them more rewarding on their 5th, or 15th, or 150th viewing. Eastwood's gradual realization that his ideas of justice and Pat Hingle's are equally problematic gives HANG 'EM HIGH the hook making it worthy of revisiting often.
As a marriage of the two styles, HANG EM HIGH looks like a pretty-great episode of GUNSMOKE. That could be the limitations of the dvd, though I have to say all three dvds of the DOLLARS trilogy look vivid and clear on my 40". In any case, I mean that it looks like a traditional Western, but maybe not the most striking ever lensed. The casting, on the other hand, shows Post or Eastwood or someone understood getting distinctive faces and personalities to surround Eastwood's ultimate-straightman style.
HANG 'EM HIGH features a quality assortment of vets like Ed Begley, Sr. as the vigilante Capt. Morgan, contemporary Western standbys Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper as members of Begley's posse, and Eastwood regular Pat Hingle as a federal judge determined to hang the Oklahoma Territory into statehood, one criminal - or six - at a time. One sure sign of Clint's close involvement is the cast list. Like both Don Siegel and John Ford, Eastwood featured a rotating cast of semi-regulars in his 1970s casts, including Robert Mitchum's brother, John Mitchum, John Vernon, Matt Clark, Albert Popwell, and Hingle. Arlene Golonka, who plays a prostitute, played goofball blondes on both THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW & MAYBERRY R.F.D., which I found a little discomfiting. (What can I tell you - with parents from NC, I'm much better versed in my ANDY GRIFFITH casts than my Clint Eastwood casts.)
My takeaway from the DOLLARS Trilogy and HANG 'EM HIGH remains consistent with a few years ago. Mostly. Which is to say I like and admire and revere A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY and I like and admire but perhaps do not revere FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE & HANG 'EM HIGH. Even as I continue liking FAFDM a little more each time, I don't like it as much as the first and third. I enjoyed HANG 'EM HIGH more than I remembered, but like FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE its story isn't quite as affecting or as enduring. In the fourth film's case, we can probably blame directorial meddling. In the case of the second, it's on me and my preferences.
Since buying and watching this set four years ago, I've picked up any of the few other examples of the spaghetti-western genre which appear on Oxford shelves, including a Vic Morrow-directed effort starring James Garner, A MAN CALLED SLEDGE, as well as the Van Cleef/Yul Brenner character SABATA's box set. I've enjoyed each according to its merits, or lack, yet I always hesitate to put one on. That's strange, considering that THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES is my go-to Western and, if it looks somewhat more traditional, in structure and tone it's pure Leone, not to mention that most Westerns following the trilogy show some amount of Leone in their bones, and yea-gods knows how many other gangster and crime films, particularly those of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, riff directly on them.
Whatever latent racism or pure middle-aged stodginess accounts for the block, I think this visit removed it. After a proper layoff, the DOLLARS Trilogy and HANG 'EM HIGH did what all great films should do, entertained and inspired and sated me at least as much as the first time. Not many movies can do that. Leone, like all my favorites, like Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese and Allen and Tarantino and Ford and Hawks, does it as if it's all he can do. Eastwood also belongs on that list. HANG 'EM HIGH, regardless of Ted Post's name, suggests Clint learned well from the maestro, and that he soon will be there. PLAY MISTY FOR ME, which I'll post about in the next couple days, paid off that suggestion, a damn-good, if not all-time, directorial bow just a few years later.
People today don't dig Clint Eastwood. People in 1966 didn't dig him, either. And in 1976 and '86 and so on. His sociopolitical values, safely described as fiercely libertarian, differ from most of his Hollywood contemporaries and successors, hewing much closer to the studio's boards' than its stars'. His representation of masculinity and heroism, while more nuanced and winking than some insist on seeing, can at times trouble even defenders like me, who finds his characters' ongoing interest in age-inappropriate girlfriends at least questionable. As much and as long as I've defended Eastwood even I cannot rationally account or apologize for AMERICAN SNIPER, as repugnant an exercise in propaganda and lies glorifying a wrongheaded war as I've seen, never having seen BIRTH OF A NATION or TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.
Like many stars of his generation, Eastwood's a problematic, sometimes-frustating figure, and I think I understand his critics' issues with him even if I disagree with them. When I watch movies like A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE UGLY, and HANG 'EM HIGH, however, it's only mystifying to me that people hesitate/refuse to collect Eastwood's work.
If they hate every single one with a passion they would still be hard put not to see how the course of his career has paralleled the course of the town and country which have spent the last 55 years rewarding it. For me, I find collecting and watching Eastwood pays off on even the few wretched entries I've seen and do not look forward to trying again, like JERSEY BOYS, and the aforementioned AMERICAN SNIPER. Those wait a long way down a mostly-great line, though, and the four movies in the CLINT EASTWOOD COLLECTION make an auspicious beginning.
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, John Egger. Dir. Sergio Leone, United Artists, 1964
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef. Dir. Sergio Leone, United Artists, 1965
THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE UGLY
Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach. Dir. Sergio Leone, 1966
HANG 'EM HIGH
Clint Eastwood, Pat Hingle, Ben Johnson, Bruce Dern. Dir. Ted Post, United Artists, 1968
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