The movies Clint Eastwood calls his favourite of all time
In the world of Hollywood, some actors stand for something away from the dark of the cinema. It might be that their carefree air feels reminiscent of freedom, that they embody expression or that they are able to harness melancholy better than anyone. There are few actors that define an air of masculinity quite like Clint Eastwood.
From his early days on the TV show Rawhide to his legendary roles as ‘The Man With No Name’ in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and Harry Callahan in five Dirty Harry films, Eastwood always portrayed characters with an unrivalled American sense of the macho. It means his position as one of Hollywood’s tough guys is set in stone.
When Eastwood was asked on the red carpet by the American Film Institute what his favourite films are, he simply replied: “I was raised, of course, in what they call the Golden Age of movies, and a lot of the early films – John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident, and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – all of those would fit in there.”
With that, let’s take a closer look at Eastwood’s favourite films. How Green Was My Valley is a 1941 drama directed by John Ford, based on Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel of the same name, starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Anna Lee and Donald Crisp.
The film focuses on a tirelessly working Welsh family called the Morgans and is told from the perspective of their youngest child, Huw. The Morgans lived in the South Welsh Valleys in the Victorian era, and Ford’s film tells of how the transition from the coalfields way of life affected them all. It famously beat Citizen Kane to the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’.
Eastwood is well known for his work in the western genre, so it’s unsurprising to find one of its classic films amongst his list of favourites. William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident was released in 1943 and starred Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Mary Beth Hughes. Narratively, Wellman’s film tells of two cowboys who arrive in a town upon the news arriving that a local rancher has been killed and had all his cows stolen in the process. The two cowboys form a posse with the townspeople to try and find the rancher’s killers, determined to bring justice to their wrongdoing.
Finally, we have The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston’s 1948 classic western, which was adapted from B. Traven’s 1927 novel of the same name. Humphrey Bogart and Time Holt play two men down and out of their luck who join up with an old prospector (played by Huston’s father) to try and strike gold in Mexico. The film was one of the first Hollywood features to shoot on location outside of the United States.
See the full list and accompanying video, below.
Clint Eastwood’s favourite films:
- How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)
- The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
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