Word: clint
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...filmed entertainment. Out went the hour-long, Broadway-style dramas; in came the strutting gunman with a ornery streak of justice. In the 1958-59 season, six of the seven top-rated shows were Westerns. That's where the B-movie oaters went to live again, and where Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and dozens of others stars-in-the-making came from. Steve McQueen, fresh from the Actors Studio, became a bounty hunter in Wanted: Dead or Alive. He moved to the big screen in The Magnificent Seven, which introduced a new generation of Western stars, including Yul Brynner, Charles...
...spaghetti western changed that. Sergio Leone filched the plot from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (Hollywood had already remade Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) for his 1964 Fistful of Dollars. Clint ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival miscreants and takes both gangs down. In Fistful and the Leone-Eastwood followups For a Few Dollars More (surely the most honest title every slapped on a sequel) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, society was run by outlaws. The moral choice was among various shades of black. Anarchy ran riot, and the only recourse was martial...
...audience needed a rooting interest, and because Clint was so damn cool, he established the new mode: hero by default. The good guy was the one with the fastest gun, the meanest scowl and top billing. And that perpetual three-day beard that Toshiro Mifune had worn in the same role in Yojimbo; in Hollywood Westerns, the hero's visage was typically hairless, while villains sported a dastardly mustache. Eastwood's scruff became a fashion statement that lives today on the carefully unshaven faces of pop stars and young actors. And his surliness, transposed to the Dirty Harry Callahan character...
...ubiquitous, both on the big screen (where such stars as Brando, Gable, Monroe and Stanwyck did sagebrush epics) and on TV (where, in the 1958-59 season, six of the seven top-rated series were oaters). A decade later, the form was revitalized in the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone. But by the late 1970s the genre had virtually bit the dust. Natural western stars might very occasionally be able to get on a horse and shoot it out--like Eastwood in Unforgiven, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves and Open Range--but only through...
...That theme, however, is at first artfully disguised in the film, which was written and directed by Paul Haggis, prime author of Crash as well as the writer or co-writer of such excellent Clint Eastwood screenplays as Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima. Haggis is a man with a gritty, honest sensibility, particularly attuned to life as it's lived in our country at the lower edges of society. But he's also a pretty canny movie guy, initially presenting his material as a fairly conventional mystery, with the icily contained and taciturn Hank...