Clint Eastwood names the greatest performance of his career: “As good as I can do it”
If you were to have asked famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael to name the greatest performance by Clint Eastwood, she’d have probably answered, “None of them”. Kael was easily the most notable critic to never give Eastwood the time of day as an actor, despite his incredible box office success and list of beloved movies that only grew over time. It led the two to engage in a bitter feud over the years, with neither seeming to know when to leave well enough alone.
Thankfully, most other movie critics recognised that Eastwood was a taciturn icon of American cinema, and when he had the right material, he was capable of delivering incredibly resonant performances. Naturally, many of his most popular roles came in tough-guy westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or explosive action movies like In the Line of Fire. However, his turns in films like The Beguiled, Unforgiven, Bridges of Madison County, and Play Misty For Me all showed that he was a more nuanced, adaptable performer than many gave him credit for.
According to the man himself, though, there were only two contenders for the mantle of his most outstanding performance. The first was Harry Callahan in Don Siegel’s original 1971 Dirty Harry, a masterclass in underplaying that launched an enduring five-film franchise. The second, though, pipped Dirty Harry to the post, with Eastwood musing in Conversations with Clint, “Josey Wales maybe is as good as I can do it.” Indeed, The Outlaw Josey Wales would be a popular pick among Eastwood fans, too, as that uncompromising revisionist western is widely seen as one of the best examples of the genre.
Interestingly, Eastwood drew a direct correlation between Callahan and Wales, and revealed that both of those characters spoke to what he feels cinema does better than any other medium. “For that kind of character, I told a lot about a guy without telling a lot about a guy,” the Oscar winner explained. “Using a minimal amount of exposition, the picture of a man and the changing of a man as he went along, through the experiences with meeting other people, were shown without having to stop and do explanatory scenes.”
While it’s become an easy joke over the years to point out that Eastwood tends to play characters of few words, this comment reveals that it’s all entirely intentional. Eastwood doesn’t push for minimal dialogue in his films because he can’t learn his lines or he doesn’t think he’s a strong actor; it’s because he is allergic to exposition, and prefers to let visuals and body language tell an audience what it needs to know. In fact, he’s been known to go through scripts to excise anything that smells remotely like over-explaining for the audience’s benefit.
“The most important thing in a visual art or a communication like a movie, whatever you want to call it,” Eastwood insisted, “Is telling without insulting the audience by saying, ‘Now, I’m going to read you a night-night story’ or ‘I’ll read you the funny papers over the radio.’ You tell it visually.”
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Eastwood is so enduringly fond of Wales, the avenging Missouri farmer-turned-gunslinger who communicated so much with only the slightest flicker of emotion on his face or an almost imperceptible movement. It’s what made the devastating scene when Wales weeps uncontrollably over his murdered family all the more harrowing, because Eastwood spends the rest of the film keeping his emotions in check.
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