Films featuring
Clint Eastwood

Kelly’s Heroes

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A contemporary of both M*A*S*H and Patton, this gleefully anti-establishment World War II comedy manages to bridge both films, turning a lot of the clichés of earlier war movies on their heads while not totally disrespecting the genre. The American GIs in this film are still square-jawed and tough-as-nails, but they are also tired of war and bored out of their minds.

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Unforgiven

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I think the last “traditional” western that Clint Eastwood starred in was the television show Rawhide. Even his own The Outlaw Josey Wales, while as close as he has come to what people normally think of as a western, had enough of Eastwood’s character-based humor to make it stand apart from the crowd.

Unforgiven is not going to change that, either. Eastwood’s first Best Picture winner is less of a western than a clear-eyed rumination on the subject of violence. Some have labeled the film “anti-violence” but even that is an over-simplification that denies the film’s depth.

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Million Dollar Baby

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Million Dollar Baby is a film that has such implicit faith in its characters that it allows them to inhabit an unvarnished reality almost completely free of Hollywood artifice. You never get the sense that you’ve seen these people in another movie, but rather that director Clint Eastwood has simply taken his camera out and pointed it at them, including one guy that looks a lot like the director.

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