The Clint Eastwood hit he admitted “no one was particularly excited about”
Intentionally playing against type and deliberately going against the grain has the potential to backfire spectacularly, but Clint Eastwood was confident enough in his abilities to realise that he couldn’t keep on playing a grizzled hero with a penchant for violence forever.
Following the success of the Dollars trilogy and Dirty Harry, the iconic star would continue playing the type of characters audiences expected from him in the likes of High Plains Drifter, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Magnum Force, and The Outlaw Josey Wales, which only convinced him that he needed to freshen things up.
In his eyes, the chance to share the screen with an orangutan in a family-friendly comedy presented the ideal opportunity, even if those closest to him weren’t convinced. Eastwood had taken a liking to the screenplay for Every Which Way but Loose, and though his representatives tried to convince him it wasn’t the smartest play, he signed on the dotted line anyway.
The actor’s Philo Beddoe is a hard-as-nails trucker who keeps a simian companion, moonlighting as a bare-knuckle fighter to earn some extra cash on the side. When his love interest suddenly disappears, he and his companion end up trying to unravel the mystery behind her vanishment and get into plenty of hijinks along the way.
As he explained to Empire, despite the misgivings he and his team held, he was convinced that doing the opposite of what people wanted to see was the right call. “It was not quite the thing people were expecting,” he said. “No one was particularly excited about it. It had nothing to do with Dirty Harry.”
Still, that only encouraged him further. “Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go in the opposite direction. I saw it as some camp deal, there was something about the screenplay that was unusual,” he continued. “I mean it was about this fringe society where there is bare-knuckle fighting. It turned out to be this PG kind of movie, one that could reach down to an audience I hadn’t been appealing to with the tougher pictures.”
Any Which Way but Loose wasn’t greeted with open arms as one of Eastwood’s best movies, but it turned out to be one of his most successful. The zany action-comedy ended up recouping its budget 25 times over at the box office before going on to launch the sequel Any Which Way You Can in 1980. At the time it was the highest-grossing release of his entire career, and more than 40 years later, both of his orangutan-assisted adventures are among his ten top-earning titles ever where he wasn’t also directing.
Typecasting successfully avoided, then, Eastwood also proved he was capable of headlining a broad, all-ages caper with wide-ranging appeal.
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