“It was kind of a whimsical thing”: the only time Clint Eastwood admitted he directed a bad movie
Any director who’s 40 features deep into their career won’t have a perfect track record, but Clint Eastwood isn’t the kind of filmmaker who’d take a dump on his work, figuratively speaking, of course.
He’s always been famously reticent to pass judgment on whether a picture is good or bad, a call he largely leaves up to the audience. Based on how they’ve reacted to some of his movies, as well as the critics, it’s fair to say that not every picture gets to be an Unforgiven or Million Dollar Baby.
The 15:17 to Paris was pretty crap, The Rookie was instantly forgettable, Hereafter was a misjudged detour into supernatural territory, Firefox was dated almost as soon as it arrived on the big screen, and everybody knew from the start that Eastwood wasn’t stylish enough to tackle Jersey Boys.
You’d never catch him admitting to any of that, though, and he probably wouldn’t do it behind closed doors, either. The four-time Academy Award winner has spent decades reiterating that his process is as simple as it has been effective: if a script speaks to him, then he’ll direct it, and he doesn’t give much of a shit what anyone outside of his inner circle has to say once it’s been released.
However, it can’t be a coincidence that when he copped to helming a movie largely because he felt he had to, he suggested that it wouldn’t be remembered as his best work. After three movies of already diminishing quality, the franchise’s fourth instalment, Sudden Impact, finally saw the leading man pull double duty on a Harry Callahan flick.
“I hadn’t directed a Dirty Harry film in the past, and it was, for me, a kind of a whimsical thing,” he explained. “I thought I’d do one before I hung that series up.” It was a ‘why the hell not?’ directing job more than anything else, and it turned out to be the rogue cop’s worst-reviewed outing yet.
“I thought the first Dirty Harry was a terrific film, and it was always going to be hard to follow that,” Eastwood acknowledged. “But it was almost like saying, ‘I’m the only one who hasn’t directed a Dirty Harry movie, so I might as well do one.'”
He did, and while it wasn’t great, he did at least get to direct himself, saying the character’s most iconic one-liner: “Go ahead, make my day.”
Obviously, he was aware of that. “It did have the most famous line of all the Dirty Harry films, if that counts for anything,” he added. “I’m sure that Billy Wilder doesn’t sit there and wonder which film of his was best: Double Indemnity, or Sunset Boulevard, or Some Like It Hot.” Regardless, Eastwood was smart enough to know that he wouldn’t be having that argument with himself about Sudden Impact.
His overriding sentiment wasn’t trying to justify the fourth entry standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the original, which he wouldn’t have been able to do, anyway. Instead, he wrote it off as one for the CV: “I’ve directed one Dirty Harry, and I think that’s fine.” Fine, but not good, and he knew it.
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