The four classic movies Clint Eastwood hates with a passion: “It’s dead as a dick”
An actor and filmmaker as experienced as Clint Eastwood doesn’t often criticise other people’s movies, because he knows better than most people in Hollywood how much hard work goes into making them on either side of the camera, regardless of how they turn out.
That said, there have been the odd occasions when he couldn’t hold his tongue. While it seems out of character for such a distinguished and dignified legend to admit there are certain films he simply can’t stomach, it just goes to show how deep-seated his disdain for them is.
He’s made a few stinkers in his time, and he’s happily admitted it, but as an audience member, there aren’t many titles that pissed Eastwood off so much that he felt compelled to denigrate them. Naturally, there are exceptions, and the unlikely unifying theme is that they’re all classics in their own right.
One of them is even regarded as a masterpiece from one of cinema’s greatest-ever directors, heralded as one of the finest entries its chosen genre has ever seen, which still wasn’t enough for the four-time Academy Award-winning icon to even contemplate giving it a passing grade.
Four classic movies Clint Eastwood hates with a passion:
The Karate Kid (John G Avildsen, 1984)
Eastwood only has one reason for loathing Rocky director John G Avildsen’s coming-of-age classic, and unlike the rest of the forthcoming entries, it’s entirely personal.
As unlikely as it sounds, Sandra Locke revealed that the erstwhile ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan was mulling over an offer to helm Daniel LaRusso’s journey from punk kid to martial arts master, with his solitary condition being that his son, Kyle, played the lead role.
When Columbia Pictures refused to grant his only request, he dropped the project and became so spiteful that he wouldn’t even allow Coca-Cola to enter his line of sight, since the drinks magnate was in charge of the studio at the time.
The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn, 1976)
If there’s one genre you’d call Eastwood an authority on, it’s the western. He’s been in several of the greatest ever made, and the medium both made him a star and served as the backdrop to his magnum opus, but he wasn’t a fan of Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks.
Notable as the one and only onscreen collaboration between Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, it wasn’t a critical or commercial hit when it debuted in May 1976. However, over time, the film has been reappraised, and it now ranks among the most underrated and overlooked efforts from both of its legendary leads.
As for Eastwood? He called it “ridiculous,” suggesting it “wasn’t a good script and they obviously felt so, too.” He even held Brando accountable, theorising that the method man thought so little of the material he treated the shoot like a holiday so he could “go off and screw off somewhere.”
Dersu Uzula (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
Dersu Uzula isn’t one of Akira Kurosawa’s top-tier features, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a classic when the director was responsible for at least eight masterpieces, according to Francis Ford Coppola.
Eastwood owes him his entire career, with Yojimbo the inspiration for A Fistful of Dollars, a matter that was eventually settled in court when Kurosawa took issue with Sergio Leone ripping off his movie without giving him proper credit.
The Unforgiven star was a huge fan of the filmmaker and his work, apart from Dersu Uzula, saying he “thought that was terrible,” even if it “did have a nice wind sequence in it.” It won the Oscar for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’, though, and mid-range Kurosawa still makes for a remarkable, ambitious, and esoteric picture.
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Horror was never Eastwood’s bag, not that he’s tried to hide it by staying away from the genre for his entire career. If he ever met Stephen King, they’d have plenty to talk about, though, since they both hate Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with a passion.
Obviously, their apathy towards the seminal psychological horror stems from completely different ends of the spectrum, with Eastwood finding it hilarious that it was marketed as a masterpiece in spine-chilling terror before it had even been released, and the mirth didn’t stop there.
Once he’d seen it, he claimed that “they would have bombed it right out of the building” had it been made by anyone other than Kubrick, said “there just wasn’t anything at all terrifying about it,” branded Dick Halloran’s axe-assisted murder as “dead as a dick,” and summed his thoughts up in a scant six words: “It was just a giant failure.”
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