“I never liked it”: the classic western Clint Eastwood called overrated
As one of the two most iconic actors in the genre’s history, when Clint Eastwood offers his opinion on a western, whether it’s positive or negative, it carries a certain amount of inbuilt heft.
After all, alongside John Wayne, no two stars have ever been as synonymous with the wide-open vistas and dusty plains of the Old West, with the pair combining to headline many of its greatest-ever movies, from The Searchers to the Dollars trilogy and well beyond.
The two never co-starred together, although that wasn’t from a lack of trying on Eastwood’s part; it was more to do with ‘The Duke’ having an increasing distaste for the increased levels of onscreen violence and narrative bleakness that had befallen the medium he called home for the better part of his career.
You wanted Eastwood and Wayne sharing top billing in a western? Fuck you, you get Dean Cain and James Tupper starring in the adaptation of the script that was supposed to star the art form’s two heaviest hitters, which ended up on the Hallmark Channel in what might be one of the most embarrassing comedowns for any screenplay ever written.
Speaking of the upped ante of blood and bullets that began seeping into the western in the late 1960s, something Eastwood became familiar with himself in latter-day efforts like The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and his Academy Award-winning magnum opus, Unforgiven, that was one of the reasons why he didn’t think Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was worthy of the praise it received.
The booze-soaked auteur reinvented how American cinema approached the concept of violence throughout the 1969 classic, whether it was detonating more squibs than the average cinemagoer had ever seen, or using slow-motion and editing to turn a standard shootout into a balletic, bullet-riddled masterpiece.
“It was a good movie,” Eastwood clarified, before immediately tearing down its most iconic and important contribution. “But I’ve never been one for the slow-motion technique, the ballet of violence. It was very effective, and the predecessor to a lot of people trying to do the same thing, but I never liked it.”
Almost 60 years after its initial release, the grand finale of The Wild Bunch can still be called one of the greatest shootouts ever committed to celluloid, and it blazed a new trail that few imitators could follow. And yet, for all of its importance, the four-time Oscar-winning legend didn’t understand the hype.
“I’ve always thought that drama is really the anticipation before the action happens, the build-up to it,” he explained. “And the action itself is like shuffling a deck of cards; so fast it’s kind of unreal.” Far be it from us to suggest that Eastwood is wrong about anything to do with the Hollywood western, but when he says The Wild Bunch‘s climactic showdown isn’t all that, he’s wrong.
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