“Dirty Harry” (1971) & “Unforgiven” (1992) & “Letters from Iwo Jima” (2006)

Dirty Harry (1971)

Clint Eastwood turns 80 this year.  An actor for well over half a century, a movie star since 1964 and a two time Best Director Oscar winning filmmaker who has called the shots on 31 features, Eastwood is today a lot more than the gun totting, angry reactionary cliche that the uninitiated still continue to reduce him to.

The Eastwood legend has its origin in three ’spaghetti’ westerns made in the mid 1960s by the Italian stylist Sergio Leone.  Known collectively as the ‘dollars trilogy’, “A Fistful of Dollars”, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” cast Clint in the role of a taciturn mercenary, an amoral loaner whose self-serving antics are very distinct from the conventional heroics of the western icon from whom he inherited the mantle of box office champion, John Wayne.

“Dirty Harry” cemented Eastwood’s Hollywood stardom, successfully transplanting his ‘man with no name’ persona into an urban, contemporary context.  Significantly, Harry Callahan is a role that Wayne had turned down, its anti-establishment, cynical-to-the-point-of-vigilantism elements being too extreme for the Duke.  Eastwood is perfect as the jaded cop frustrated at bureaucracy and what a later generation would later imprecisely label ‘political correctness’.  An America that returned Richard Nixon to office in a landslide had no problems with its anti-heroes trampling on the constitutional rights of criminals.

“Unforgiven” (1992)

A turning point in Eastwood’s career as director as well as a landmark in the history of the western, “Unforgiven” addresses the issues of violence and retribution that underpin “Dirty Harry” and the many star vehicles that followed in its wake.  Eastwood’s Will Munny is a gunfighter long in retirement, nominally reformed by a now deceased spouse, struggling to bring up two children on a pig farm that doesn’t pay its way.  Tempted to take on a job of righteous assassination - the killing of a cowboy who maimed and assaulted a prostitute - he struggles with the morality of the act, both in itself and as a reflection earlier misdeeds.

When the inner killer in Munny is eventually resurrected the resulting blood bath has sadness and black comedy to it.  His stoic monologue - “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man.  Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have” - problematizes the revenge fantasy on which the narrative and to extent the entire genre is based.  His assertion to a young would be gunslinger looking to follow in his footsteps that “we’ve all got it coming, kid” suggests a spiritual understanding of human frailty, one far removed from the no nonsense philosophy of “Dirty Harry”.  Eastwood stages the climactic gunfight so as to emphasise  clumsiness and futility, making us feel the loss of villain Gene Hackman rather than revel in his demise.

“Letters from Iwo Jima” (2006)

Eastwood’s most ambitious project to date demonstrates that his humanism extends to adopting the perspective and culture of America’s historical enemy.  Telling the story of the defense of Iwo Jima entirely from the Japanese side, in the Japanese language, he presents a number of different variations on the martial tradition, avoiding the stereotype of blind self sacrifice whilst respecting responses that ranged from ritual suicide to pragmatic surrender.  Seldom has a combat film been so free of the mythology of war, so determined to show us the cost in lives and suffering.  Without labouring the point or straying into sentiment a back story involving the time spent in the United States in the 1920s by the island’s commanding officer quietly suggests the shared humanity between the combatants.