Word: eastwoods
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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...
...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 - not marshall...
...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 he played in five films, lent the cop film an antiheroic attitude the genre still can't shake...
...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...
Then there's the problem of tempo. Other modern movies move at warp speed, but the cowboy hero is a man with a slow hand. As Christopher Frayling, author of biographies of Eastwood and Leone, notes, "You can speed up spaceships and cars, but you can't speed up horses." A director also has a tough time making the old new--and the western is 19th century. "Americans don't like the past," says Andrew Dominik, the New Zealand-born writer-director of Jesse James. "They're O.K. with future and the present, but they can't remember anything before...