Clint: A Retrospective Featured in The Montreal Gazette

"I like seeing Clint enter a restaurant."

That's how veteran movie writer Richard Schickel begins his fascinating new book about Clint Eastwood.

"Or wait - let me refine that statement - I like NOT seeing him enter a restaurant."

To put it another way, "He seems to know all the side doors in town."

As anyone who has met Eastwood knows, he tends to be laid back about his celebrity. And Schickel, a longtime friend, knows this iconic filmmaker very well indeed. When Clint uses the back entrance, it's for a very fundamental reason: to avoid the limelight.

Not that he's hostile to fans. Rather, "it seems slightly to puzzle him that, as he approaches 80, he remains the object of their attention. Haven't they had enough of him by this time?"

Schickel's lavishly illustrated new book, Clint: A Retrospective, has many virtues, not the least of which are perceptive analyses of every Eastwood film since A Fistful Of Dollars in 1964. But an intimate portrait of the man and artist also emerges, as Schickel traces Eastwood's remarkable arc from macho acting icon to award-winning director. Whether it's Clint entering a restaurant or quietly making a film set a safe and comfortable place for actors, or taking his wife and kids to a Carmel movie house, just as any other family would do, a lack of ostentation seems essential to his nature.

"I'm just a guy who makes movies," Eastwood once famously observed. To Schickel, this neatly sums up his friend.

"I think, what's striking about him is that he's unstriking," Schickel told Canwest News Service in a telephone interview. "He's sort of this amiable guy, a man who wears his fame very easily and worries about being pretentious and imposing himself on you. And I think that's a great quality for a guy who's been as famous as he has for as long as he has."

Schickel - a veteran Time Magazine writer whose many books include studies of Walt Disney, Cary Grant and James Cagney - published a comprehensive biography of Eastwood in 1996.

But, he notes, "that stopped short of the most interesting period of his career" - one which, remarkably, is happening in Eastwood's twilight years.

"It's turned out to be interesting, because he has remained so productive as he approaches 80. Most filmmakers are finished by that age. More important, these are not tired movies which repeat stuff he's done in the past. Each is different from the other."

Schickel hopes to come out with an extended version of his biography in the future. In the meantime, there's the lavishly produced Clint: A Retrospective, which has arrived in time for Eastwood's 80th birthday on May 31. This volume, from Sterling Publishing, provides a treasure trove of Clint material - movie stills, behind-the-scenes shots, 325 photographs (most never before seen) from archival sources, and an introduction by the great man himself.

It's not surprising that 2010 has become a year of celebration for Eastwood. There's Warner Brothers' elegant DVD gift set: Clint Eastwood: 35 Films, 35 Years at Warner Bros. This package also includes Schickel's short 22-minute documentary, The Eastwood Factor, which is also a bonus item in this lavish new book. In addition, Schickel, a skilled documentary director, has prepared a longer, 90-minute film for sale in stores and to be shown on the TCM channel. He suggests Eastwood deserves nothing less at this stage of his life.

With the book, it's Schickel's task to assess Eastwood's unique place in Hollywood history and his evolution from bankable action star into the iconic filmmaker who, at the age of 62, started delivering a succession of remarkable achievements - Unforgiven, Mystic River, Letters From Iwo Jima, Million Dollar Baby. Schickel provides valuable context in showing how the blood-spattered, bullet-spitting imagery of Eastwood's Italian spaghetti westerns, and such early Hollywood hits as Dirty Harry, yielded to a more questioning approach to his craft of filmmaker.

For example, Eastwood's attitude toward violence has changed significantly - "certainly around the time of Unforgiven, which is a major meditation on the cost of violence."

Schickel also talks about Eastwood's enemies. He talks about the "implacable" hostility of the late Pauline Kael, at one time the doyenne of film critics and, in Schickel's view, a dangerous influence on impressionable reviewers. He's also tough on other detractors. There's former New York Times writer Richard Eder: "He's just a nitwit. That this guy has a Pulitzer Prize for reviewing is absolutely lunatic to me." Then there's "motor-mouthed" filmmaker Spike Lee, who accused Eastwood of racism because he showed no black soldiers in the Iwo Jima film, Flags of Our Fathers - ignoring the historical fact that blacks were not involved in the battles being depicted. Schickel is both angered and amused by the irony that Eastwood - "the most colour-blind of all directors" - was unfairly targeted in this way.

Schickel worries many people still don't appreciate Eastwood's development as an artist.

"They're stuck with Where Eagles Dare, or something like that. They irritate me, because they keep turning the subject backwards instead of forwards. He was a forward-looking guy."

Eastwood continues to be that way. By the time he unveiled Invictus, his study of Nelson Mandela and South Africa's World Soccer Cup victory, in early winter, he was already at work on a supernatural story, Hereafter. Next will be a film on FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover.

Without apology, Eastwood makes movies the old-fashioned way, because that works best for him. In an era of fragmented, confused screenwriting, he goes for narrative strength.

"His films are certainly very straightforward, narratively speaking," Schickel observes. "There's a respect for coherence, the point being that he likes the story to occupy the time and space it needs."

Clint is similarly straightforward in his choice of material. "It has to be something that would interest him, should he be a member of the audience."

There's also the fact that cast and crew adore him.

"Everybody who's been on a Clint picture wants to be on another Clint picture," Schickel laughs. "I've been on his set a lot, and they're all the same. He's amiable. He's low-key. He's not lazy, he's always under schedule, usually under budget."

Above all, there's Clint's remarkable intuition.

"Everything he does is intuitive. He's a guy who's just all instinct. He's the kind of guy - it happens all the time - who'll see a script sitting on an assistant's desk, start looking at it, get fascinated, finish the script. By the time he's finished, he's decided to do the film."

This is not what normally happens in Hollywood - but "Clint is not a man who dithers, he's not a man who requires a lot of committees to help him make a decision."

Schickel can be clear-eyed about Eastwood films that didn't work (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Rookie) while being a staunch defender of others he thinks are underrated (White Hunter Black Heart, True Crime).

"Not that many people know Clint as well as I do. So I think it's a good portrait of him. I think it's an honourable portrait of him."

- by Jamie Portman

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