“They were a little repetitive”: why Clint Eastwood got so bored of his most innovative era
The majority of actors would be happy to keep repeating themselves if they stumbled upon a formula that reaped immediate rewards and elevated their star to the next level, but Clint Eastwood has never been one to do things in any other way than his own.
He’d experienced success relatively early in his career when Rawhide began airing just four years after he’d made his screen debut, but it would be another half a decade until he became a movie star. When he did, he quickly decided that he had no interest in returning to the well in perpetuity, instead opting to bet on himself when nobody else would.
The genesis point for Eastwood’s ascent towards legendary status is inarguably Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In the space of three films, he was suddenly the biggest star the western genre had ever seen this side of John Wayne, with his persona emulated and impersonated by actors all over the world ever since.
Together with Sergio Leone’s distinctive style, the combination of director and leading man shifted the landscape of cinema. Suddenly, the spaghetti western was the hottest new trend in the industry, with the filmmaker’s stylistic flourishes and Eastwood’s stoic charisma setting the blueprint that everybody else wanted to work from, far beyond the dusty plains of the Old West.
He made one more picture in Europe – starring in the ‘An Evening like the Others’ segment of the Italian anthology The Witches with Vittorio De Sica at the helm – and then it was back to the United States where he sought to capitalise on his newfound international recognition and name value.
With the Dollars trilogy proving so influential and integral to his own climb towards the summit of the business, Eastwood could have easily remained on the continent and kept on striking when the iron was at its hottest. Instead, he turned his back on that period entirely in favour of focusing on variety, which often tends to lead directly towards longevity.
“We were attempting an innovative style,” he told Movies of his European adventure. “At least a couple of people thought it a new interpretation of the western genre. That was fun. But after four movies, I knew I had to move on to other roles. Sergio and I talked about doing other pictures, but to me they were a little repetitive. I’ve done sequels myself, but I’ve always tried at some point to do something different.”
It didn’t happen overnight, because what was the first American movie he made upon his return to home shores? Hang ‘Em High, a western. Validation was lurking right around the corner, though, with Eastwood pinpointing the 1971 double whammy of Dirty Harry and his directorial debut Play Misty for Me as the year that everything changed.
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