The “pile of crap” movie Clint Eastwood couldn’t bear watching: “This is just dogshit”
Even cinema’s most iconic figures need to start at the bottom and work their way toward the top, and Clint Eastwood was lucky that he got the movie he hated the most out of the way early.
All things considered, landing his breakout role in Rawhide four years after his screen debut wasn’t bad going, but he had to eat a lot of shit to get to that point. Even trying to get a role of any kind was a struggle, with Eastwood loathing the “cattle calls” that very rarely yielded success.
He wasn’t even credited in seven of his first nine feature film appearances, and for a while, it looked as though he’d have to make his peace with being another slumming actor. Rowdy Yates was the first time he’d tasted a hint of success, and he was in his mid-30s by the time Sergio Leone’s seminal Dollars trilogy made him an international star.
Rawhide dominated his career to such an extent that A Fistful of Dollars was Eastwood’s first movie in six years, and he’d rather the one that preceded it was erased from existence. Nobody wants to be part of a bad movie, but that’s a lot harder to do when nobody knows who the hell you are, and you’re happy to take any gig that comes along.
The future four-time Academy Award winner didn’t have a negative experience making Jodie Copelan’s 1958 western, Ambush at Cimarron Pass, and taking second billing in a picture was the best spot he’d found himself yet. However, the first time he watched it on the big screen, he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole.
Since there was no screening for the cast and crew and no marketing campaign, Eastwood only saw it by chance. One day, he was perusing the newspaper in the morning and discovered that the film was showing at a nearby cinema as the second half of a double-bill, so he and his then-wife Maggie decided to check it out.
Unfortunately, the cheap and cheerful B-movie was worse than he could have possibly imagined. He was only paid $750 for the privilege, but Eastwood recalled being “slumped down so low it probably looked like Maggie was sitting alone,” feeling devastated that he had “to sit there in a movie theatre and watch this pile of crap run by.”
He could have left, but he didn’t, and regretted it. “No, this is just dogshit,” was his insightful analysis. “I started thinking, ‘I’m going back to school. I’m going to learn something. I’m going to get some other kind of job. I’m going to jump out of this.'” He didn’t, which was just as well, because Rawhide was lurking right around the corner to finally give him the platform he so desperately craved.
Eastwood has made no bones about Ambush at Cimarron Pass being the worst film of his career, and to think, he might have never seen it at all if it wasn’t for that fateful morning he leafed through the local paper.
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