The 2003 Clint Eastwood movie Stephen King loves: “An absolute joy”
Any fan of Stephen King’s decades-long oeuvre of horror and fantasy will know just how towering cinema stands across his work.
Andy Dufresne escapes from prison via the tunnelled hole underneath a succession of Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, and Raquel Welch posters in the Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption novella, the young boys of 1960’s Maine grapple with mortality by passionately discussing Disney’s Bambi in The Body, later adapted into Stand By Me for the screen, and much of the Universal monster canon is smattered throughout the many guises of terror taken on by the shape-shifting Pennywise in the It opus.
King even stepped up to the world of non-fiction analysis, penning 1981’s Danse Macabre as a non-”academic bullshit” exploration of the psychology of horror and how cinema had played its seismic part in the contemporary horror landscape with two whole chapters, ‘The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext’ examining the societal underpinning to Hollywood’s most significant fright flicks, and ‘The Horror Movie as Junk Food’, wading into the glut of low-grade B-pictures and gleaning their merits as well as well suggesting their usefulness in providing pointers as to what any filmmaker should avoid.
So, movies play a big role for King. It’s of little surprise, then, that the Hollywood acting and directing veteran Clint Eastwood looms in his psyche; such is his stature in movieland. King made no secret of practically ripping off Eastwood’s immortal ‘Man with No Name’ for The Dark Tower saga, modelling the series’ gunslinger protagonist Roland Deschain directly on Eastwood’s starring role in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western ‘Dollars Trilogy’
He’s a big fan of Eastwood’s directorial work. As well as including the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby in a curated selection of the greatest 21st-century pictures, King highlighted 2003’s Mystic River as a movie close to his heart.
Offering an insight into Eastwood’s crime mystery with all the same enthusiastic rigour as his Danse Macabre dissection, King celebrates how Eastwood orchestrates the phantoms of the past with as much spectral command as the malevolent spirits that haunt The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.
The disturbing tale of sexual abuse and its grip years later, surrounding the case of a man’s murdered daughter, captivated King with its expert character building and masterful narrative unfolding.
“We jump ahead 25 years, to the day before Jimmy’s teenage daughter is found murdered,” King wrote in an Entertainment Weekly piece in 2007. “What follows is a heart-wrenching tragedy culminating in the murder of an innocent man. With its razor-sharp script and strong performances (most of the kudos have gone to Sean Penn, but this is Kevin Bacon’s best acting job), the movie is an absolute joy.”
Concluding, “You’re never wondering if you should have gotten the small popcorn instead of the medium; you’re never checking your watch. You’re totally absorbed.”
Mystic River would win near universal acclaim, celebrated for its haunting thematic wanderings and dramatic crescendo, everything about Eastwood’s venture into humanity’s dark half standing tall with the best of King’s literary works.
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