The Lucky Brand Modern Master Award 2009: Clint Eastwood

Reviewed by Collier Grimm. Presented to Clint Eastwood at the 2009 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Clint Eastwood could easily be considered the most iconic macho movie star to ever saunter across the silver screen. He’s usually a man of few words, fans came to know him as “The Man With No Name”, and his versatility continues to amaze and inspire. On January 29^th at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre, actor Sean Penn presented Eastwood with the Lucky Brand Modern Master Award. Before Penn presented the award while simultaneously embarrassing Eastwood, famed critic Leonard Maltin sat down with Eastwood to revisit his lengthy, over six decades long, career.

Eastwood began his career hanging around Universal Studios, taking classes and hanging out on movie sets. At the time Universal was mostly making B-Pictures, Science Fiction and horror movies.  The top director working for Universal was Douglas Sirk, who made films Eastwood described as “flowery pictures”. Sirk films also boasted top actors like Lana Turner, Lauren Bacall, and hunky Rock Hudson.  Eastwood revealed he wasn’t really “Sirk-material”, and thus landed is first role on a Television series called Rawhide. However Eastwood became tired of the plot constraints on his show and jumped at a rather obscure Italian directors offer to make a film overseas.

Sergio Leone and Eastwood hit gold with the Italian Western, A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), and went on to make two more “Spaghetti Westerns” together. Eastwood would later claim his “Man With No Name” was a combination of the imagery from the silent film era and Neo-Realism. His gun-slinging character, constantly chewing a cigar and clad in a Mexican poncho, was fresh and innovative. However, despite great success in Europe, Eastwood was literally a man with no name in Hollywood for quite some time. United Artists finally picked up the picture and it was released in the United States in 1967, and Eastwood became a living legend.

In the ‘70s Eastwood decided he was ready to make his directorial debut, and approached Universal studio heads about a film called Play Misty For Me (1971). Eastwood told a funny story about visiting the “heads” and asking to make the film. He revealed that they seemed interested and gave their ok, but as he was leaving the office they asked his agent to stay behind for “a little chat”. Although the studio heads had their qualms, Eastwood’s projected was finally green lighted, and with a miniscule budget Eastwood created big hit. My mother forced me to watch this film before I was ten, and although I’m permanently scarred from the true horror this film evokes, it is my favorite Eastwood picture.

Maltin and Eastwood went on to talk about Eastwood stint doing what he considers “cop-dramas’, like Dirty Harry (1971) and In The Line of Fire (1993). Eastwood also revealed that Unforgiven (1992) is his last Western. However, Eastwood has mostly eager to talk about his work behind the camera, and the amazing talents he has been able to work with in the last few years. Eastwood expressed true amazement for Penn in Mystic River (2003), Hilary Swank as the Million Dollar Baby (2004), and Angelina Jolie in Changeling (2008). Eastwood, who honestly seems like a perfectionist, exposed his main tactic when working with actors- trust. He tweaks them when he has to, but casts actors that were born with the talent to make on-screen magic.

Eastwood disclosed that he is in pre-production on a film about Nelson Mandela’s first term as president after the fall of the apartheid in South Africa. The Human Factor, the working title, will star Morgan Freeman in a role the crowd seemed to feel Freeman was born for.

The night was star studded, Eastwood was modest, and the magic of film flowed as easily through the veins of audience members, as would bullets from Inspector Harry Callahan’s  .44 Magnum.