The “terrible” movie Clint Eastwood said was “an affront to women” everywhere
His name won’t come to mind when you’re thinking of Hollywood’s definitive feminists, but Clint Eastwood nonetheless took a stand and defended women everywhere against a movie that he thought was demeaning and degrading to them in many ways.
As commendable as that sounds, he did so with an ulterior motive: the four-time Academy Award winner’s stance seemed less concerned with standing up for women’s rights and how they were depicted onscreen and more concerned with furthering a feud he’d been caught up in for years.
Any actor or filmmaker, and his case, both, who spend decades at the top of the industry ladder are bound to make a few enemies. Eastwood had a few, and when he wasn’t destroying one of his former closest friends’ careers or getting caught up in petty squabbles with Spike Lee, he had Pauline Kael to deal with.
The critic made a habit of trashing not only his movies, but his performances in them, regardless of whether or not she was flying in the face of the consensus. It was clear that Kael didn’t like Eastwood, and it was equally clear that he fucking hated her, too, going so far as to suggest that all of her vitriol was born from the undying love she’d been secretly harbouring for him all along.
He even hired a psychiatrist to do a deep dive on her reviews to try to figure out exactly how and why her animosity emerged, when it would have been much easier for him to simply ignore her and go about his business. What does this have to do with feminism? Fuck all, really, but Eastwood took umbrage when Kael showered Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris in praise.
She said the picture’s October 14th, 1972 premiere “should become a landmark in movie history,” called it both “the most powerfully erotic movie ever made” and “the most liberating movie ever made,” and declared it “a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing.” Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but Eastwood couldn’t resist having a dig.
“She was taken by Last Tango; it seemed romantic to her,” he mused. “But, to me, that movie was an affront to women. If I were a feminist, I’d think that the portrayal and treatment of women in that movie was terrible.” He was making a salient point that was shared by many, which he immediately undid.
“I mean, if buttering up a girl’s ass and giving her a poke job is romantic sex, or represents male tenderness, then, I’m sorry, but I’m on a different plane than she is,” he added, not exactly in the words of an ally. “Higher or lower, depending on whose opinion. Jesus, how can she not see that as violence?”
Eastwood isn’t incorrect in highlighting the more uncomfortable and misogynistic side of Last Tango in Paris, a sentiment that’s been echoed for over 50 years, but there was definitely a nicer way to put that across than talking about arse-buttering and poke jobs.
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