Many Eastwood critics, few of them academics, have done a great deal more than just murmur. James Wolcott wrote years ago in Vanity Fair, “The truth is not that Eastwood’s films have gotten ‘hip,’ but that the movie critics have gotten so square.” But in recent years, it’s Eastwood’s films that have become “square.” In 1971, in a review of Dirty Harry, Pauline Kael famously noted that “The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.” Dirty Harry (directed by Don Siegel with uncredited dialogue by the notorious John Milius) was, she wrote, “A remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place, a kind of hard-hat The Fountainhead.”
Almost as if in direct response to Kael’s criticism, the master, late in life, seems to have transformed himself. In such recent films as Flags of Our Fathers, Changeling, Gran Torino (2008) and last year’s Invictus, he has taken on such big social issues as discrimination against American Indians, child abuse, gang violence, and apartheid—and guess what? He’s strongly against all of them.
From the Dirty Harry Callahan that Thomson called “a tortured vision of conservative ideals at a breaking point,” Eastwood has morphed into Hollywood’s leading purveyor of liberal pieties. He’s become the Stanley Kramer of the 21st century with one major difference: When Kramer came out against such evils as segregation, fundamentalist attacks on evolution, and nuclear proliferation, they were at least still controversial. Eastwood’s late career pattern has been to come down firmly on the side of issues that have been decided for decades. Eastwood might not have become the cultural institution we now know, but he probably would have been a much better filmmaker if he had followed the advice he offered as Dirty Harry, “A man should know his own limitations.”
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