I was browsing the internet yesterday and by accident spotted these 2 full page magazine pin-ups. I thought I would post them here as I am not familiar with either of the photos. Looking at Eastwood in these shots I would probably date them as mid to late 60s.
Wednesday 28 March 2018
Wednesday 21 March 2018
The Man Who Loves Women, October 25th, 2010
Clint Eastwood has for decades embodied red-blooded, red-state
American manhood, but under that persona evolved a soulful, deeply humane
perspective on the sexes that has blossomed into a late, great filmmaking
adventure. I recently discovered this piece whilst I was researching for a
class presentation on equality and diversity within Eastwood’s films. It’s a
piece by Karen Durbin for ELLE that was originally published on October 25th,
2010. I thought I’d reproduce it here as I found it to be a very enjoyable
read. I’ve also enhanced it with some photos relevant to the story.
Channel surfing one lazy
afternoon in the '90s, I was stopped in my tracks at the sight of Clint
Eastwood on the hot seat in John McLaughlin's One on One interview show.
McLaughlin is best known as the irascible, right-leaning host of The McLaughlin
Group, a weekly Washington, DC, journalists' free-for-all. That day, thrilled
to have such a spectacular guest all to himself, McLaughlin was pitching
softballs. But as in the fable of the scorpion and the frog, his true nature suddenly
erupted, and, fixing Eastwood with a suspicious glare, he barked, "Some
people say your movies have a hidden feminist agenda. Is that true?" His
eyes dancing with delight, Eastwood could barely keep a straight face, finally
saying, "The only agenda I have for my movies is they should be
good."
Well, sure, but funnily enough,
McLaughlin was on to something. Recalling the show today, Eastwood says, "Everybody's always trying to put a
spin on what a person is or what they do. When I was growing up, George Cukor
was known as a women's director, primarily because his movies had great female
leads. But Howard Hawks did wonderful movies such as His Girl Friday, and he
was considered a man's director." Eastwood has proved to be both. I
think a feminist element entered his work almost 40 years ago and made it
better. It's not an ideological thing, nor does it need to be.
A gut sense of fairness toward
women and a camaraderie built on empathy and respect will do just fine.
Eastwood has become a
woman-friendly director because he's actually interested in us. In his recent
films, the sexes take turns on centre stage, from Million Dollar Baby (Hilary
Swank as a young woman hoping to box her way out of poverty) to the Iwo Jima
war films, then Changeling (Angelina Jolie as a 1920s mother who loses her
child under corrupt and horrific circumstances), then Gran Torino (Eastwood as
a crusty bigot able to change) and Invictus (with his good buddy Morgan Freeman
as Nelson Mandela).
In his new film, Hereafter, the
twain meet again, with the lovely Belgian actress Cecile de France as a
journalist trapped underwater by a lethal tsunami, then almost miraculously
returned to life, and Matt Damon as a reluctant psychic who can communicate
with the dead but longs desperately to be normal. Bryce Dallas Howard puts in a
luminous appearance too, and so do little identical British twin brothers.
The supernatural theme in
Hereafter is subtle, although the movie's inspired description of the
afterlife is something to savour. But the film's real subject and the source of
its emotional power is that terrible thing we all face: not our own death, but
the deaths of those we love. Eastwood, who just turned 80, treats this subject
with uncommon grace. Age hasn't made him maudlin, just deft. Talking about
working with him for the first time, de France says, "Every day he would put his hand on my head—he's very cool, very
tender. He really emanates love. Watching him work, I thought I really would
like to be in his skin. He's happy, and he's found serenity in himself."
Does that sound like Dirty Harry
to you? Over the years, Eastwood has evolved as few actors have into one of the
true—and most versatile—artists of American cinema: acting, directing,
producing—even composing the music for some of his films. But before any of
this happened, he became a world-famous icon of industrial-strength machismo by
playing two characters. In the mid-'60s, he was the Man With No Name, a
roughneck serape-wearing cowboy in a trio of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, a
character he gave an allegorical tinge to in 1973 in High Plains Drifter, his
third movie as a director. A tale of vengeful salvation, it contains a scene in
which his character, dubbed the Stranger, makes a point of raping a woman—an
awful woman in the awful town that he's ruthlessly setting to rights, but rape
is rape. By that time, the '70s backlash against the transformative '60s had
set in. The Man with No Name had an urban counterpart in Dirty Harry Callahan,
a Magnum-flashing San Francisco cop who shoots the bad guys and gets in trouble
with the city's Constitution-quoting liberals.
The Dirty Harry movies were glib,
nasty, and maliciously false; they're not just silly dick flicks but a
relentless attack on the Bill of Rights: Judges don't gloat at letting
murderers go free, and DAs don't love tying cops' hands. Once the mayor of
Carmel, California, Eastwood genuinely cares about the health of the body
politic, and whatever he thought about those films at the time (he was past 40
and they made him a huge star) his fans' reactions made him uneasy.
"People are always trying to equate you with the roles you play.
When you start going out and diversifying, they say, `Wait a minute, why is he
doing this?' In my earlier years, I found that people would be disappointed if
I didn't pull out a .45 Magnum." He sounds even more uneasy today
about the country at large. "We're
at a point now where nobody can have a political discussion without calling
each other meatheads and idiots," he says. "In the old days you
discussed things. I guess we were more liberal then. Now it seems that no one
is interested in that. It's very frightening."
Luckily, Eastwood had already
begun to diversify, and his first effort as a director, Play Misty for Me
(1971), immediately drew complaints. The beautiful Jessica Walter—known today
as the mean mom in Arrested Development—plays Evelyn, a fling of Eastwood's
late-night DJ who becomes his lethal stalker. Via e-mail, Walter says,
"We decided we shouldn't know anything
about her because it would be scarier that way."
It is. Evelyn is
truly frightening, but she's familiar, too. Who hasn't gone postal on a man and
felt mortified afterward? Eastwood's camera never mocks Evelyn. Walter shows us
her painful fear and confusion; her eyes widen anxiously as paranoia sweeps
over her like a veil, erasing any trace of sanity and culminating in
off-the-leash rage. You can't help feeling relieved at her death; it's an end
to her suffering as well.
"Forty years ago, people were very conscious of feminism,"
Eastwood says. "The first picture I
directed had Jessica Walter's wonderful performance in a wonderful role, and I
had feminists saying, `Why are you so oppressive to women?' At the same time,
one of the executives at Universal asked me, `Why would Clint Eastwood want to
make a movie where a woman had the best role?' "
Eastwood's oeuvre soon became
studded with rich, prominent roles for women, and this time, virtue was
rewarded. Five years ago, Million Dollar Baby brought Eastwood Oscars for best
director and best picture, another to Hilary Swank for best actress, and one
for Morgan Freeman for best supporting actor. The story portrays Maggie
Fitzgerald's dogged quest to become a boxer. Eastwood, as the aging trainer
Frankie Dunn, unpleasantly points out, "I don't train girls."
Eventually he does, of course, and the decision profoundly alters his life.
Eastwood and Swank carry equal weight in this movie, but her performance goes
so deep it's impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Swank puts it all
on him, of course. "It's his great
belief in you that lets you jump off the cliff," she says. "Yet you have to have a safety net, and
Clint gives that to you by making the set a very safe place in which to
work."
Perhaps the most surprising thing
about Eastwood is how romantic he can be, off screen as well as on. Known in
his jazz-playing youth as a ladies' man not unlike the DJ in Misty, he's now a
paterfamilias in spades and revels in it. He has seven children with five
women, bookended by marriages. His first union, a young actor and model's heady
impulse, lasted for more than three decades; the second began when TV
journalist Dina Ruiz interviewed him, and they're still going strong. His
daughter with the actress Frances Fisher lives with him and Dina and their
daughter during the school year because Monterey beats L.A. as a place to raise
a kid. And he speaks with palpable pleasure about his son Scott, now 24, whom
he introduced to music early on and who is now dedicated to it in a way that,
Eastwood says wistfully, he and his Depression-era dad couldn't be. If his
approach to family is more countercultural than nuclear, then judging by the
lack of gossip and bitter tell-all books emanating from the arrangement,
everybody seems reasonably content. (In the '80s, however, following her
breakup with Eastwood and an undisclosed settlement with him and Warner Bros.,
Sondra Locke did write a tell-all with the Leone-ian title The Good, the Bad,
and the Very Ugly.)
It's easy to forget that Eastwood
didn't just star with Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County, he was her
director, too, and the result is one of the best love stories, middle age be
damned, ever to grace a movie screen. In adapting the purple-prose novel of
thwarted passion between a rural housewife and a photojournalist, Eastwood gave
Streep a gift that wasn't just generous but smart—he reversed the perspective. "The book told the story from the man's
point of view," he says, "but
it's the woman's dilemma of having a family and facing big decisions." Streep
describes a scene in which the lovers fight and she accuses him of standing
apart from life, just being an observer, and says she's just a byway for him. "And he breaks," she says. "He shocked me when it happened. It was
something Sean Penn would be very proud of—you can just march right up to the
podium with that performance. And he cut it out. It wasn't about him. It was a
matter of never losing focus on the piece and its integrity." As for
the notion that a lot of directors don't have a deep interest in women, just
saying that to Streep inspires a vigorous hoot. "That is the understatement of the century," she says. "And that's right, it's just interest.
Clint at some point became interested."
Eastwood has a witty way with
love scenes, particularly the hesitation waltz between people who are just
starting to realize what's happening. De France describes a scene in Hereafter
in which she and Damon are meeting in a public place. "The camera went around and around, circling us. Suddenly Eastwood
says, `Okay, can you kiss the girl?' ”She laughs, adding, "It was not written in the
script!" No, but it's there on the screen, two people surprised by
love, looking utterly real.
In such unlikely films as the
militaristic Heartbreak Ridge, with its gnarled gunnery sergeant (played by our
guy) who has a secret stash of women's magazines he pores over to understand
us—particularly his ex-wife—better, Eastwood has a way of acknowledging the
importance of women. And in Bird, he tells the story of the heroin-doomed jazz
genius Charlie Parker from the perspective of Parker's wife, Chan, with Diane
Venora both a pungent presence and a satisfying reality check throughout the
movie. But never has Eastwood injected a female perspective into a male genre
to greater effect than in Unforgiven, the movie he calls his last western
because he doesn't believe he'll ever find a better one. Unforgiven, which
brought Eastwood his first pair of Oscars in 1993, and the less celebrated 1984
New Orleans noir Tightrope, are two brilliant repudiations of the ethos that
made Harry Callahan and the homeless man on horseback into romantic figures.
Unforgiven opens with a
particularly ugly act of violence: A cowboy cuts up the face of a young
prostitute he thinks has laughed at his small penis. When the bully who runs
the town refuses to punish the cowboy, the prostitutes' enraged madam rallies
them to raise a bounty: "Just
because we let them smelly fools ride us like horses doesn't mean they can
brand us like horses. Maybe we ain't nothing but whores, but we, by God, ain't
horses." That's what brings Eastwood's retired and bitterly regretful
gunslinger—now an impoverished widower with small children—into the drama,
which plays out violently, and largely among men. But the women's implicit
critique of the codes of masculinity infuses the whole movie, preventing it
from becoming just another righteous thrill ride.
In Tightrope, credited to Richard
Tuggle but much of it directed by Eastwood, he creates the antithesis of the
confidently lethal Dirty Harry. Wes Block is a New Orleans homicide detective
riddled with guilty self-doubt who is the devoted single dad of two daughters.
This murkily handsome movie doesn't pit good and evil against each other so
much as explore the thin line between them. Pursuing a serial killer, Block
finds himself in a moral fun house hall of mirrors; among other things, the
killer makes a specialty of murdering the prostitutes Block has taken to
visiting. But the movie's most radical element, in more ways than one, is the
woman Block finds himself increasingly drawn to. She's the smart, no-nonsense
head of a rape crisis centre who teaches self-defence, and as played by the
masterfully understated Genevieve Bujold, she holds out to Block not just the
possibility of redemption but of simple peace. When I asked Eastwood if she was
in Tuggle's script to begin with, he mentioned other things in the script but
said he couldn't remember. I'm not sure I believe him, but that's okay. To go
in 12 years from High Plains Drifter's portrayal of a woman's punishment by
rape to a romance with the kick-ass head of a rape crisis centre is a hell of a
learning curve.
Saturday 17 March 2018
Flashback, Clint and Maggie at the Frank Sinatra Retirement Concert, June 13th 1971
On June 13, 1971 at a concert in
Hollywood to raise money for the Motion Picture and TV Relief Fund Frank
Sinatra at the age of 55, announced that he was retiring, bringing to an end
his 36-year career in show business. This concert was held at the Ahmanson Theatre
in Los Angeles. The Program began with Princess Grace of Monaco (the former
Grace Kelly) giving the opening remarks followed by the concert. Frank Sinatra
was introduced by Rosalind Russell and began his performance by singing All or
nothing at all, followed by I’ve got you under my skin, I’ll never smile again,
a moving rendition of Ol’ man river, That’s life, Try a little tenderness, Fly me
to the Moon, Nancy, My way, The Lady is a Tramp and concluding his performance
with Angel eye. His performance was reported as by far the best of the evening.
All of the best known entertainers of the time were on the program, not to
mention celebrities like Clint Eastwood and his wife Maggie, Robert Wagner,
Lucile Ball, David Jansen and Don Knotts that would be in the audience. By all
accounts, it was a great show, although Frank Sinatra made his comeback a
little more than a year later! It was also memorable for Sinatra’s mic cutting
out half way through his opening number, apparently due to someone backstage
tripping over the wire and pulling its plug from the socket. Hey, it could
happen to the best of em, right?
Saturday 10 March 2018
Clint Eastwood’s Japan critics are always there to make his day
It’s always a refreshing and enduring quality when a
director or star finds the ability to hold their hands up and say ‘hey’… In
many ways, it’s like watching your football team lose a game, but you
nevertheless leave the stadium safe in the knowledge and satisfied that they
gave it a damn good go. Acceptance is made all the more easier.
I recently came across this interesting piece from the
Culture section of the Japan times and thought I’d reproduce it here.
‘Everybody knocks out a flop every now and then,” quipped
Clint Eastwood during a recent interview to promote his latest movie, “The
15:17 to Paris.”
The film forms part of an informal trilogy dedicated to
real-life examples of American derring-do, following on from “Sully” (2016) and
“American Sniper” (2014). Yet it’s also the most experimental of the three,
thanks to Eastwood’s bold decision to re-create the 2015 Thalys train attack —
in which a trio of U.S. backpackers foiled a terrorist gunman — using many of
the actual protagonists. Six decades into his career, the filmmaker probably has
better things to worry about than the opinions of a few critics, but the
response to the movie has been overwhelmingly negative. Though a few writers
have rallied to its defense, it has been widely lambasted as “dramatically
inert” (The Guardian), “defiantly amateurish” (Time Out) and “too muffled and
often too dull to make an impact” (The New Yorker). The esteemed French
periodical Cahiers du Cinema, normally one of the director’s staunchest
advocates, declared simply: “Eastwood’s latest is a shipwreck.” In Japan, however, the critics are telling a different
story. The official website for “The 15:17 to Paris” is festooned with blurbs
from dozens of notable film writers, singing from a by-now familiar hymnal. “At the age of 87, Eastwood is in a realm of his own, still
reinventing the language of cinema,” says Koremasa Uno. “Are you a god?”
“An innovation in docudrama,” concurs Masamichi Yoshihiro.
“I bow down before his directorial abilities.” To say that Japanese critics have a bit of a thing for
Eastwood would be an understatement. His films have topped the year-end poll in
Kinema Junpo, Japan’s oldest and most respected movie magazine, an
extraordinary eight times. Only one of his 14 flicks since 2000 has missed out
on a spot in the top 10. Kinema Junpo isn’t alone, either. Eastwood is also a
six-time winner of both the Mainichi Film Award and Blue Ribbon Awards, which
are voted for by critics, as well as the Japan Academy Prize, which appears to
be chosen by throwing darts while blindfolded. Anglophone critics still like to joke about Eastwood’s
conservative politics and that thing with the chair at the 2012 Republican
National Convention, but in Japan he’s afforded far greater respect. In a passionate defense of “The 15:17 to Paris,” published
in i-D, Shinsuke Ohdera rails against his American counterparts for treating
Eastwood as a “B-movie director cozying up to popular taste,” without
acknowledging the complexity and ambiguity of his work. These are the
qualities, he argues, that make Eastwood’s films “a perfect fit” for Japan’s
distinctive critical culture; there’s nothing unusual here about a literary
magazine mentioning him in the same breath as Jean-Luc Godard.
One distinctive trait of Japanese movie criticism that
Ohdera doesn’t mention is that it has very little bearing on a film’s wider
reception. “Jersey Boys,” Eastwood’s 2014 adaptation of the Broadway musical,
snagged both the Blue Ribbon Award and the top spot in Kinema Junpo’s poll, but
pulled in just $2.7 million at the box office — compared to $12 million for
“Sully,” and $42.9 million for the Japanese-language “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Without the burden of shaping popular opinion or answering
to irate ticket buyers, film criticism in Japan tends to be pretty academic.
One of the most influential figures in establishing Eastwood’s reputation has
been the great scholar Shigehiko Hasumi, who has been championing the
director’s work for decades. It was during Hasumi’s tenure as president of the
University of Tokyo that Kinema Junpo really went all-in with Eastwood,
proclaiming “Space Cowboys” the best international film of 2000.
That’s right: “Space Cowboys.”
In retrospect, the magazine may merely have jumped the gun
by a few years. When Eastwood snagged Oscars for best picture and director for
“Unforgiven” in 1993, few could have foreseen that he would repeat the trick a
decade later, with “Million Dollar Baby” in 2005. Moreover, that was just one
film in a remarkable late-career bloom that’s also included “Letters from Iwo
Jima,” “Mystic River,” “Changeling,” “Gran Torino,” “American Sniper” and
“Sully.”
“Even Yasujiro Ozu and Alfred Hitchcock started imitating
themselves toward the end of their careers,” movie critic Takeo Matsuzaki says.
“Compared to them, Eastwood is still just as comfortable tackling contemporary
or period material, and covering a wide range of genres, from human drama to
science fiction.”
He explains that Kinema Junpo’s poll is compiled using a
points system, so even if Eastwood isn’t many critics’ first pick for a given
year, he may still amass enough votes to get to No. 1. But really: eight No. 1
films? Including “Jersey Boys” and “Space Cowboys”?
“I think it’s odd,” concurs online film critic Kei Onodera.
“Obviously he’s a great director, and I rate him highly myself, but the support
he’s had from Kinema Junpo does seem excessive.”
It doesn’t help that even Eastwood’s biggest fans sometimes
struggle to pin down exactly what it is they like about him. In a 2016 article,
Onodera compared it to the experience of eating at a dowdy-looking restaurant
that turns out to serve sublimely good grub.
“There’s nothing ostentatious about his approach,” agrees
film writer Mutsuo Sato, a self-professed Eastwood lover and Kinema Junpo
hater. “People like Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson are doing things
that are more cinematically striking and using more state-of-the-art
techniques. You could say that Eastwood is old-fashioned.”
“He means different things to different generations,” says
Matsuzaki. Younger writers think of Eastwood principally as a director; older
ones might more readily associate him with his screen roles in spaghetti
westerns, or even with the “Rawhide” TV series that originally made his name.
“He’s been all these things while staying at the forefront of the movie
industry for half a century. … He’s a unique presence.”
Matsuzaki, incidentally, is one of the writers blurbed on
the website for “The 15:17 to Paris,” where he predicts: “Clint Eastwood’s No 1
spot in the top 10 films of 2018 is already secure.”
For a film that’s currently rated 25 percent on the website
Rotten Tomatoes, that seems like an outlandish claim. In Japan, however, it may
turn out to be correct.
Saturday 3 March 2018
Cook like Clint – 1970 style!
Well, would you believe it, exactly 1 year ago to the day I
posted a fun little piece from 1969, which was one of Clint’s recipes. Out of
pure coincidence I last night found another recipe from Clint, from the
following year 1970. It’s so strange how these things sometimes work out…
So, this recipe appeared in a book called Cookbook of the
Stars, published by Anderson, Ritchie & Simon and compiled by the Motion
Picture Mothers, Inc.; 1st Edition, Hardback (1970). The Motion Picture Mother's
Club was formed in 1930, as a small social group. It became an incorporated
club, limited to one-hundred members, with "charity" within the
industry as the chief purpose. The profits from the sale of this cookbook went
into the Motion Picture & Television Relief Fund.
Friday 2 March 2018
Early Eastwood captured by Earl Leaf
Photographer-to-the-stars Earl
Leaf was known for going behind the scenes with the women of Hollywood's Golden
Age, Leaf redefined celebrity portraiture by taking intimate photos that
managed to capture, for the very first time, something sensual and true in his
female subjects. Leaf partied with the cream of the crop to become the
Hollywood insider, a man for whom the professional was always up-close and
personal. Here is a selection of Leaf’s early photographs capturing an
on-the-rise Clint Eastwood. They were reportedly taken on either June 1st
or June 5th, 1956 in Los Angeles, California. Whilst some have
probably been seen before, I thought it would be nice to have them all together
here.
Born in 1905 in Seattle and
raised in San Francisco Earl Leaf spent many years finding his calling. By 1936 he was the North China manager of the
United Press Associations (later known as UPI) covering the Sino-Japanese war.
Before that he was a cowboy, sailor, prospector, dude rancher, harvest hand,
actor, teamster, bookkeeper, Salvation Army cadet, guitar player in a Hawaiian
trio in a Panama cabaret, member of the Nevada state legislature, and a
journalist on the road covering unemployed migrants for the Reno Journal. During
his time covering the war in China he was the only western journalist to
interview and photograph Mao and his comrades behind communist lines in 1938. By
1940 he was back in the US (in New York) and was appointed as an advisor to
Chinese government’s Central Publicity Board, and was basically China’s PR man
in America. During the war Earl served with the OSS a precursor to the CIA but
there is little or no documentation as to what he did for them.
After the war Earl decided that
he would be both a photographer and a journalist and spent time after the war
in New York shooting the city and taking assignments to shoot artists like
Martha Graham and then on to France to record life there after the war.
By 1949 Earl had picked up and
moved back to the West Coast arriving in Hollywood in the summer of that year.
By the Fall earl had his first Hollywood celebrity session shooting the actress
Cleo Moore at home. While there were many celebrity shooters in Hollywood at
that time earl broke new ground by shooting the starlets at home in their
bedrooms usually in a skimpy negligee.
Press agents took notice and soon he was
shooting the B list elites like Marilyn Monroe and Clint Eastwood who were
under studio contract but hardly household names. It was Earl’s job to get them
into the papers and fan magazines.
By the early 50’s earl was well
established on the scene shooting both candid sessions (never in a studio) and
out on the town hobnobbing with the cream of Hollywood like Bogart and Bacall,
Brando, john Wayne etc. all of them would willingly pose for him and ham it up
for the camera.
He was welcome everywhere from the Oscars to Ciro’s the Mocambo
and the Cocoanut Grove. Unlike almost all of the celebrity photographers of
that time Earl not only took the photos but wrote his own stories in the fan
magazines and had several syndicated columns. Leaf died in 1980 at the age of
75.
A great deal of Leaf’s early
Eastwood shots now belong to The Michael Ochs Archive, located in Los Angeles.
The collection contains some 3 million vintage prints, proof sheets and
negatives.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)