Clint Eastwood pictured on the sleeve of his 1962 single for “Rowdy” and “Cowboy Wedding Song.”
 

“He will never make big as a singer.”

—Lyricist and record producer Kal Mann on Clint Eastwood’s prospects as a singer in the early 60s.

Well, Kal Mann—who wrote songs for Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker—wasn’t exactly wrong, but Clint Eastwood didn’t care. In fact, twenty-plus years after Mann declared Clint’s musical career was a pipe dream, he and Merle Haggard would occupy the number one spot on the Hot Country Singles chart with “Bar Room Buddies” in 1980. Eastwood’s love of music is well documented and, in addition to his many other talents, he is an decent pianist. In all, Eastwood’s musical career spans nearly five decades dating back to 1959 when Eastwood landed the role of Rowdy Yates on the television series Rawhide. There are several occurrences of Eastwood singing on various episodes of Rawhide, and the actor would leverage this experience and record his first EP in 1961 containing two singles put out by Hollywood record label Gothic; “For All We Know,” and “Unknown Girl of My Dreams.”

Eastwood was not a bad singer—but his baritone vocals and style were rather unremarkable within the country genre. Eastwood’s material was pop, but crafted towards a more country & western kind of swing, keeping in line with Eastwood’s Rowdy Yates character in Rawhide.

Eastwood would continue to tap into his success as the star of one of the longest-running TV westerns programs by finally putting out a full-length album 1963 strategically titled, Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites. Clocking in at under 30 minutes, the album contains mostly standards including “Don’t Fence Me In” written by Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher (and first popularized by Gene Autry). It’s not without its charm as at times Eastwood sounds like he is channeling Bing Crosby and his version of “Don’t Fence Me In” from 1944. Posted below is an assortment of audio from Eastwood’s early recordings—others can be found online. CD’s of Clint’s musical contributions are easily found on eBay should you want to add some Clint to your music collection. (PS: you should want to.)
 
Clint Eastwood sings, after the jump…

 
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo from 1961. When the Italian director first saw Kurosawa’s tale of a rōnin (Toshiro Mifune) arriving in a small Japanese town where two rival gangs fight for supremacy sometime back in 1963, he was so impressed he thought it would translate into a good cowboy film. Unfortunately, Leone failed to secure the movie’s remake rights which led to his company being sued by Toho Productions. This delayed the American release of A Fistful of Dollars for three years. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum
 

 
But Yojimbo was not a truly original story, either. Kurosawa later admitted his movie had been loosely based on the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s crime novel The Glass Key from 1942. More recently, some film writers have pointed out Yojimbo bears an even greater similarity to another of Hammett’s books The Red Harvest—the story of his anonymous Continental Op. working in a town controlled by one kingpin who is battling many other smaller gangs.

Leone used many of Kurosawa’s plot devices in A Fistful of Dollars, with an unnamed anti hero (Clint Eastwood) arriving in a small desert town where two rival gangs fight for its control.

In Kurosawa’s film the town is split between two corrupt families vying for control—three brothers versus a husband and wife. Kurosawa also has other characters and background stories with the gangs hiring loutish mercenaries to do their bidding.

In A Fistful of Dollars the gangs are identified as two families—the Baxters who deal in guns and the Rojos who smuggle liquor. Apart form these two groups, the town appears to be almost deserted with few people other than an undertaker and a barman.

Kurosawa offered a comedy on social manners and the hierarchy of class in Yojimbo. This is not present in A Fistful of Dollars. Leone turned everything up to eleven making the film operatic in its style yet at the same time incredibly austere.

In Yojimbo the lead villain has a pistol. In A Fistful of Dollars he has a Winchester rifle—used to kill any enemies with a bullet to the heart. This leads to a key scene at the film’s denouement.
 
Continue reading after the jump…

 
The Oscar-nominated blockbuster American Sniper plays its cards so close to its chest that it’s difficult to tell if director Clint Eastwood wanted to make a pro-war statement, an anti-war film… or what? The fact that the question is being asked by so many people is probably testament to Eastwood getting exactly the reaction he wanted to get. People end up projecting themselves onto it, or (perhaps unavoidably) assuming that Eastwood’s known proclivities for conservative politics and the Republican party must therefore make it a pro-war film. Eastwood himself has declared the film to be “anti-war.”

Whatever nuances and shades of gray ambiguities Eastwood’s film may (or may not) have possessed depending on your own personal viewpoint, they’ve simply been squashed flat by atheist YouTube vlogger “Cult of Dusty” who made his own LOL “trash compactor” cut of American Sniper.
 

 
I imagine that interviewing Clint Eastwood is no easy task, for although the respected actor and director may appear open and charming, relaxed and good-natured, with a disarming modesty and a facility to talk, Eastwood rarely, if ever, reveals anything about himself.

Norman Mailer discovered this when he interviewed Eastwood on the set of Sudden Impact. The paucity of quotable material saw Mailer cleverly pad out his article with an imaginary conversation between himself and a dinner guest discussing the actor’s merits.

I watched this documentary The Man With No Name when it first aired on the BBC back in 1977. I enjoyed it. I was an Eastwood fan, and had seen most of his movies and read all the film-tie-in books for Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, the Spaghetti Westerns, and so on. But a part of me was slightly disappointed that I had learned no more about Clint Eastwood than what I had already gleaned from the characters he played on the screen—those solitary men united by a belief that one individual can make a difference, even against the most preposterous of odds. It’s an American ideal, and certainly appealed to this young Scot, who had been raised on a culture of collective responsibility and shared endeavor.

Yet, there was something about Eastwood’s tales of filming and homespun wisdom I found unsatisfying.

“Just keep grinding, until the talent, the hard work, the effort to learn, and the good luck all come together at one time. And when they do, well, then you’re alright.”

Even then I’d seen enough people who had worked hard, had been more than willing, had put in the effort, and had never had the luck. Their fortune was poverty, violence and despair. Of course that had nothing to do with Eastwood. But still, I naively wanted him to be more open and give a little thought to some of the myths he was selling.

That said, The Man With No Name is an excellent documentary, with presenter, the writer and broadcaster Iain Johnstone getting great value from directors Sergio Leone and Don Seigel, actor Richard Burton and the critic Dilys Powell. 
 

 
Bonus featurette on the making Clint’s ‘The Gauntlet,’ after the jump…

 
The issue was money. Sergio Leone originally wanted Henry Fonda to star as the “Man With No Name,” in his film A Fistful of Dollars (1964). But the production company could not afford such a famous Hollywood actor. The role was then offered to Charles Bronson, who turned it down, because he thought the script “bad.”

Then came the list of those who could have been and the one who eventually became the “Man With No Name:” Henry Silva, Rory Calhoun, Steve Reeves, Ty Hardin, James Coburn and Clint Eastwood.

Leone wanted Coburn, but at $25,000, he was too expensive. The role, therefore, went to Eastwood, who was $10,000 cheaper.

Having finished working on the long-running cowboy TV series Rawhide, Eastwood was not keen on making another western. But encouraged by his agent, he read the script. Eastwood recognized the screenplay as a direct lift from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Intrigued, he took the part.

What Leone liked about Eastwood was that he moved like a cat—quietly assured, self-confident. It was a quality other actors and directors would notice. Richard Burton, who co-starred with Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare, compared him to Robert Mitchum, as having a “dynamic lethargy.” Director Don Siegel said Eastwood did nothing, and made those around him appear to be acting.

A Fistful of Dollars nearly collapsed during filming as a copyright license had not been agreed upon with Kurosawa. This meant the film was only given a European mainland release, and was banned from being shown in the U.S.A. and Britain. However the film made sufficient profit to fund Leone and Eastwood in making a sequel, the aptly titled For A Few Dollars More (1965), and then a third the following year, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966).

By 1967, all license agreements had been cleared and Leone’s trilogy was released in America. The critics hated it, and damned all 3 films outright. Yet, the public rightly adored the series, and the films became Classic Westerns.

This is “Out of the West” which formed the first of a 2-part documentary on Clint Eastwood. This section looks at Eastwood’s early life (from childhood to drifter, to Army) and on to his first acting roles, success in Rawhide and working with Sergio Leone. The documentary concludes with Eastwood setting-up his own company Malpaso, and his collaborating with Don Siegel on Coogan’s Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled and Dirty Harry.

If you have an interest in film, this is definitely one to watch before it disappears.
 

 
As if it wasn’t already patently obvious to everyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, last night at the Republican National Convention, 82-year-old actor Clint Eastwood took to the stage and showed America and the rest of the world what the Republican Party is REALLY all about: Senile old white gits yelling crazy, incoherent shit.

Last night, without much effort, Eastwood’s loopy “skit” turned the house full of extremely Caucasian Republican convention goers “every which way but loose.” The rest of the country was just deeply embarrassed for the octogenarian Hollywood legend. The RNC apparently wanted Clint there as the embodiment of modern Republicanism, a stand-in for Ronald Reagan, if you will. Eastwood inadvertently delivered in spades, coming off like a sad, old, spaced cowboy, giving the, uh… strong impression, that the GOP is full of crazy elderly folks suffering from senile dementia.

At least they were happy to loudly cheer one on. As Michael Moore wrote at The Daily Beast this morning:

Speaking to Invisible Obama last night, in a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech & Chong, Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: “We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!”

With his cringe-worthy word salad performance on the same level as Sarah Palin’s, someone close to Clint Eastwood should have said “NO” and said it firmly and hung up the phone when the RNC came a callin’. Looking at the evidence of last night’s pathetic televised fiasco—and his loathsome wife and spoiled daughter’s execrable E! network reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company—Clint seems to be going the route of Charlton Heston, a once legendary Hollywood star, who now comes off like a cranky, punch-drunk fighter who has taken far too many blows to his noggin.

I’m sure Clint being offered the presidency of the NRA isn’t far behind!

The best part? How NO ONE is talking about Mitt Romney today. They’re all talking about how crazy old Clint Eastwood went on national tee-vee last night and shit in his diaper!

NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson put it succinctly when she described the cut-aways to Ann Romney during Eastwood’s skit as like watching “the mother of the bride listening to a drunken wedding toast.”

The Clint Eastwood memes are proliferating like Tribbles today. You’ve already seen the “Eastwooding” meme, here are a few more:
 

 

 

 

 

 
Watch and weep:
 

 
Like we all knew this wasn’t coming…
 

 

 

 

 
Via BuzzFeed

 
Sometimes Republicans get it right. Clint Eastwood on gay marriage:

These people who are making a big deal about gay marriage?” Eastwood tells the magazine. “I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of ... Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.”