Clint Eastwood: The actor Quentin Tarantino calls “the sexiest motherfucker”
Following on from the success of his debut feature movie Reservoir Dogs, there wasn’t an actor in Hollywood who wasn’t desperate to work in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Throughout his career, Tarantino has worked with some of the greatest movie stars of all time, with several coming back for more than one performance.
Of course, there are a handful of actors that Tarantino could only ever dream of having worked with, too, and the cinephile possesses a deep knowledge of cinema’s history and, therefore, an awareness of the greats of times gone by. There looks to be one actor in particular, though, for whom Tarantino clearly has a physical and creative admiration.
Of all the movie genres that Tarantino is known for loving, it’s hard to look beyond his admiration for the western and of all the actors within the realms of the Old West, it looks like few have captured his admiration quite in the way that Clint Eastwood has, who was known for his incredible efforts for the western master director Sergio Leone.
“Fistful of Dollars is one of the greatest auteur pieces of all time, but one of the things that makes the film so great is that you have to sing the praises of Clint Eastwood,” Tarantino once said. “The way we think of the western icon that Clint Eastwood has become for 50 years straight to today started 50 years ago with this movie!”
“You need no more proof that to watch his big introduction scene when he kills Baxter’s men right at the beginning with one of the coolest badass fucking speeches in the history of action cinema,” Tarantino noted of Eastwood’s ultra-cool demeanour in Leone’s classic western movie. “That is why a hero was born that day.”
A Fistful of Dollars is the 1964 spaghetti western by Leone starring Eastwood in his first leading role as ‘The Man with No Name’. The film was responsible for bringing about the popularity of the spaghetti western movie and was followed by For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which comprise Leone’s Dollars Trilogy.
Tarantino went on to explain that Eastwood managed to transcend the very nature of the western movie star by bringing an element of sexual appeal that seemed to have been missing from the genre during its heyday. Eastwood took the badassery of the characters of John Wayne and doused them in his effortless cool and sexiness.
“If you only know Clint Eastwood from the last 20 years, since he’s been an old man, you don’t know Clint Eastwood,” Tarantino said. “He was one of the sexiest motherfuckers during this time who ever existed. Western heroes didn’t look sexy. They didn’t look cool; they looked badass, or they looked tough or heroic, but they didn’t look cool; they didn’t look sexy. Women didn’t think about fucking them all the time.” But for Tarantino, Eastwood changed all that.
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