"Unforgiven:" Welcome to the glory years

Title: Unforgiven
Released: 1992
Genre: Western with guilt pangs
Notable for: Best picture Oscar
Coolest thing Clint does: Shoots Gene Hackman dead on a barroom floor

After one full year and 47 movies, we have watched Clint Eastwood drop agent orange on a giant spider, shoot everyone in sight, sing to trees and share a beer with an ape.

We've paid our dues to reach the official start of Clint's Glory Years.

"Unforgiven" is the movie that made it impossible for snooty people to continue regarding Clint as a cinematic joke. It won the best picture Oscar for 1992, and Clint won best director and was nominated for best actor.

Snooty we are not. Like a surprising number of Clint's fans, we're not even convinced "Unforgiven" is his best western.

"The Outlaw Josey Wales" is impossible to beat. Andrew is also highly fond of Clint's spaghetti westerns and Brad remains overly awed by "High Plains Drifter."

On the other hand, "Unforgiven" beats the crap out of nearly all other best-picture winners.

Clint plays a reformed mad-dog killer who reunites with an old partner and a punk kid for one last round of assassination. They ride into a dusty town to kill two cowboys for reward money.

Both cowboys end up deader 'n hell, but the real conflict comes between Clint and the town sheriff, a sadistic law-and-order type who wants no assassins in his town.

Like many of Clint's westerns, it is difficult to tell good guys from bad. The paid killers have good points and the sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, is a vicious thug.

None of that sounds unique for Clint's sort of movie, but "Unforgiven" has two things his earlier westerns lacked.

First, Clint assembled some incredibly distinguished actors. Three actors nominated for best-actor Oscars in the previous four years were cast in supporting roles to Clint, the old grunt-and-stare master. Those three were Hackman, Morgan Freeeman and Richard Harris, although Harris was never in the same scene with Clint.

Just by attracting and paying those guys, it was obvious Clint wanted "Unforgiven" to be taken as a very serious movie. Hackman would win a supporting-actor Oscar.

Second, and undoubtedly more important to voters of the academy, this is not merely another violent western. For the first time in 47 movies, Clint is full of guilt and remorse for his homicidal violence, which allowed "Unforgiven" to be called anti-violent.

Clint and his gang of killers are haunted by their deadly acts. As a nice aside, one character is a dime-novel writer who glorifies western gunfighters while all around him killing is shown an ugly thing without glory. The best example comes when one cowboy is ambushed in an outhouse and shot three times while taking a shit.

The climactic scene comes as Clint puts a finishing bullet into Hackman while the lawman is wounded and bleeding on a barroom floor.

"I don't deserve this," Hackman says. "To die like this. I was building a house."

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it," Clint says.

"I'll see you in hell, William Munny," Hackman says.

"Yeah," Clint says in that whispery voice. Then he pulls the trigger.

Come to think of it, maybe "Unforgiven" is Clint's best western.

Next up: "In the Line of Fire."

"The Rookie": Clint gets raped!

Title: The Rookie
Released: 1990
Genre: Cop buddy story
Notable for: Clint plays second-fiddle to Charlie Sheen
Coolest thing Clint does: Executes a leering super-villain who expects Clint to take him in alive


If "The Rookie" accomplishes nothing else, it raises a question we never expected Clint to encounter.

Can a male be raped by a female?

Clint throws it in our faces by participating in a sex scene everyone at the studio must have urged him to cut on the grounds of being weird, disturbing and pointless to what little plot exists in "The Rookie."

A psycho-bitch villain played by Sonia Braga mounts Clint while he is kidnapped and tied to a chair. She cuts him a little with a razor blade, then threatens to slice his cock off. Then she squats on his lap and takes deep pleasure.

"That wasn't sex," Brad said. "It's rape."

"Do you think Clint is going to run to a rape counselor and cry about it?" Andrew asked. "He liked it. He had to like it or she wouldn't be able to do it."

Andrew's point is so biologically obvious the script had to address the issue of Clint's boner. In the midst of her beastly pleasure, the villain psycho-bitch orders Clint, "Don't lose it!"

Our verdict: Clint was not raped. There are probably guys who would pay for what he got.

Why Clint chose to include that scene is a mystery, but he probably wanted something memorable in a movie loaded with flaws.


"The Rookie" may qualify as Clint's final pure action movie, and it comes off as a comic-book story of constant explosions, crashes, fires and gunfights.

Stunt work is good, but inexplicable casting and production decisions suggest Clint was either asleep at the wheel or he wanted to make the story silly.

Clint plays a cop on the auto-theft squad who chases a chop-shop kingpin. That sounds like gritty and unglamorous police work, except the chop-shop kingpin is a James Bond styled villain complete with a high-tech evil lair, getaway planes, remote-controlled bombs and homicidal madness.

It gets stupider.

The chop-shop gang is a bunch of Mexicans and the kingpin boss is played by Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia. His girlfriend/henchwoman is Braga, who is Brazilian. Yet for some unguessable reason, Julia and Braga are supposed to be German.

On top of all that, performances by some actors who played higher-ups on the police force were so laugh-out-loud bad we wondered if Clint asked for a campy feel.

As the title suggests, aside from catching the bad guys, the story is about Clint's rookie partner, played by Charlie Sheen. Sheen is a scared rich boy confronting a deep inner struggle to grow a pair. No surprise here: He does.

Despite so many glaring weaknesses, we confess "The Rookie" never lost our interest simply because so many things blow up, crash, and burst into flame. Not to mention flying bullets.

One test of any mindless action movie is whether viewers care enough by the end to enjoy seeing the evil villains die. "The Rookie" passed that test.

"There's got to be 100 reasons why I don't blow you away," Clint says to Julia just before he blows him away. "Right now I can't think of one."

That's classic Clint, and classic Clint is never all bad.

Next up: "Unforgiven."

"White Hunter, Black Heart": We like it better when Clint pulls the trigger

Title: White Hunter, Black Heart
Released: 1990
Genre: Hollywood bio-fiction
Notable for: Clint talks funny
Coolest thing Clint does: Verbally demolishes a smug, Nazi sympathizing Englishwoman over champagne

By this stage of Clint's film output, he obviously itched to try different things. We don't know why he chose "White Hunter, Black Heart" to be one of those things, but it is different.

For starters, Clint must talk more in this movie than in all his westerns combined. And he talks funny.

He plays an egotistical movie director in a transparently veiled story of John Huston making the 1951 film "The African Queen" in the Congo. Other actors play imitations of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, and Clint joins in by imitating Huston's speaking style. He doesn't do a bad job, but it is impossible to stop noticing the dude talks funny.

Studio publicity for "White Hunter, Black Heart" called the movie an "adventure in obsession." It's the sort of script that probably sounded interesting to Hollywood insiders in the same way playing record albums backward fascinates Beatlemaniacs.


The film rises and falls on Clint's portrayal of the flamboyant movie director. His character is selfish, hard-drinking, a womanizer and a lover of manly adventure in the mold of Ernest Hemingway.

"There's nothing tougher than remembering why you chased a dame after you've had her," Clint says at one point. After he is pummeled in a fistfight, he says, "You've got to fight when you think it's right, even if you get the hell beat out of you."

Clint's character annoys everyone, but he has an endearing way of sticking up for little guys.

When a white hotel manager knocks down a black African employee for a minor mistake, Clint calls the white guy a yellow bastard and fights him.

Our vote for the best scene in the movie comes when Clint's dinner companion, a lady he hopes to lay, reveals she hates Jews. He verbally rips her to shreds. Click here to see it.

Elephant-hunting is a central theme because Clint is obsessed with shooting a "big tusker" while in Africa. Much symbolism probably exists here, but we are too dumb to explain it.

"It's not a crime to kill an elephant," Clint explains. "It's a sin. It's the only sin you can buy a license to go out and commit."

Killing an elephant sounds adventurous but it is a poor foundation for a plot. The story never builds to any climax except the less-than-riveting uncertainty of whether Clint will bag his big tusker.

When the moment of truth arrives, Clint -- unbelievably -- wimps out. He cannot pull the trigger and a charging elephant kills his beloved hunting guide. A shaken Clint goes back to his movie set and commences filming "The African Queen."

The elephant-sparing ending must either reveal Clint's manly macho was a fraud or it involves some inner awakening. We did not care enough to ponder.

Lifelong Clint fans are unlikely to place "White Hunter, Black Heart" high on their list of favorites. Among other weaknesses, nothing explodes and Clint's character is not heroic. But critics loved it.

"This material marks a gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood, and makes it clear that his directorial ambitions have by now outstripped his goals as an actor," wrote the New York Times reviewer.

Different must be good for its own sake in Clint's line of work. Oscars were just two years away for the old grunter.

Next up: "The Rookie."

"Pink Cadillac" and the sleepy traveler

Title: Pink Cadillac
Released: 1989
Genre: Action/comedy, minus apes
Notable for: Clint wears disguises
Coolest thing Clint does: Destroys a white supremacist compound with a Mary Kay-styled pink convertible Caddy

After a delay caused by a week-long trip to Mexico, the land of sun and compromised credit-card security, The Clint Eastwood Project resumed on a shameful note.

Brad fell asleep watching "Pink Cadillac."

This disgrace can perhaps be attributed to travel fatigue inflamed by a brief but unfortunate incident at the border. U.S. Customs agents confiscated what we think was the skull of a sea turtle, an artifact Andrew found while snorkeling in the Caribbean Sea. The feds let us go but papers were filed with the Department of Homeland Security forever identifying Brad as a known skull trafficker.

Or perhaps Brad's shame has more to do with the overall quality of "Pink Cadillac," Clint's last movie of the 1980s.

Andrew pronounces the movie "pretty good" and considered it funny and entertaining. Brad finds it disjointed and uninspired, a movie that tries to do too many things -- comedy, action and romance -- in a half-assed way.


Clint plays a "skip tracer" who finds fugitives who jump bail. "For once in your life, be reasonable," a guy tells him early in the movie. "I tried that once," Clint answers. "I didn't like it."

When a hard guy like that tracks down a fugitive, he ought to stick a .44 in his ear and growl, "Let's go." But Clint doesn't. He tricks them into captivity with a bunch of silly disguises.

Clint's best comedy comes when he is disguised, and he seems to enjoy the chance to be goofy. His funniest exchange comes when he is disguised as a shit-for-brains redneck who infiltrates the paramilitary compound of white supremacists.

"If we get rid of all the blacks, all the Jews, what are we going to do for entertainers? Comedians, things like that?" Clint asks in a silly, mouth-breather voice. "We'll still have David Letterman," a white supremacist says. "Yeah," Clint marvels. "We'll still have David Letterman."

The funniest line goes to Bernadette Peters. When a flasher exposes himself to her, she says, "Looks like a penis, only smaller."

The action part of the story falls flattest.

Clint tracks down Peters for jumping bail on a crime committed by her husband, who is a doofus speed-head mixed up with the white supremacists. An unlikely but entirely predictable romance ensues.

The white supremacists are after Bernadette, too, because she unknowingly ran off in a car with $250,000 of their money in the trunk. They kidnap her baby to force her to bring back the money, and Clint helps get the baby back.

"Pink Cadillac" could not decide whether to make the bad guys really menacing or make them a bunch of goofy screwballs like the neo-Nazi biker gang in the "Every Which Way but Loose" movies. The film tries to split the difference and does neither.

The villains are stupid and incompetent and drug-addled, but supposedly homicidal. When the final confrontation arrives, a big action sequence fails because the bad guys are not bad enough to be taken seriously and not goofy enough to provide comedy.

As a completely minor side note, the movie has a cameo appearance by Jim Carrey, who plays the world's most disturbing Elvis imitator. Click here to see it.

Clint was almost 60 years old when "Pink Cadillac" was released. A man that age ought to be forgiven for trying to do too many things while he still can. The same impulse might cause a middle-aged man to become an international skull smuggler.

Next up: "White Hunter, Black Heart."

"The Dead Pool:" Harry's last stand

Title: The Dead Pool
Released: 1988
Genre: Dirty Harry, take five
Notable for: Memorable performances by future stars
Coolest thing Clint does: Blows away the bad guy with a harpoon gun

No doubt exists in our limited minds that "The Dead Pool" is the worst Dirty Harry movie. It's the fifth and last in the series, and inspiration does not flow like a cool stream.

Here are five bad parts.

1. "You're shit out of luck" is the worst catch phrase in the Harry Callahan arsenal of catch phrases. Brad could expound on this for several paragraphs, but as a gesture of mercy, he won't.

2. It was impossible to hate the bad guy with the proper passion because he was barely in the film. "The Dead Pool" tries to be something of a whodunit, and that's not right. We don't want to see Dirty Harry solve a crime, we want him to bring bloody justice to psychotic scumbags we know are guilty almost from the opening credits.

3. The expected elements of Dirty Harry movies were by this time so predictable Clint himself plays with them as cliches. When assigned a new partner, he says out loud what everyone in the audience must think. "All my partners end up dead or in the hospital." He carries Dirty Harry's fondness for big guns to a laughable extreme by wielding a harpoon gun in the final scene.

4. The plot is stupid. It's a story about some celebrities who bet on which other celebrities will die and somehow their picks become public and for some reason a dude kills off celebrities on the list of a particular movie director played predictably well by Liam Neeson. That is all we intend to say about that.

5. Dirty Harry is no longer despised by superiors on the police force. He receives a little token complaining about the cost of a police car destroyed on his watch, but Dirty Harry has become a celebrity cop. He's so famous he's on Neeson's list of celebrities expected to die. Much of the movie's message appears intended to be commentary on the nature of celebrity and the media in modern society. No one watches Dirty Harry for that kind of crap.

Strangely enough, we still like the movie.

Jim Carrey and Neeson give good performances early in their careers. Click here to see Carrey (credited as James, not Jim) go all super-freaky. And there is a cameo appearance by Guns N' Roses.

Stupid plot or not, Clint has some great scenes blowing away scumbags. Some of them, as usual, he stumbles upon while walking down the street. Others are hit men out to kill him for sending a mob boss to prison.

One example of classic Clint comes when he's had enough of those pesky hit men. Clint goes to the prison where the mob boss is locked up and scares him shitless by fooling him into believing he, Clint, has purchased protection from the nastiest inmate goon in the prison. A couple of scenes later, mobsters are tailing Clint as bodyguards, not killers.

The ending includes fine symmetry circling back to the very first moments when we saw Dirty Harry 17 years earlier. In the first movie, Clint pretended to lose track of whether he shot all his bullets, asking punks if they felt lucky enough to assume his gun was empty. In the finale, the bad guy steals Clint's .44 magnum and blasts away at him. Then all grows quiet as Clint walks slowly toward the killer with the aforementioned harpoon gun. "You're out of bullets," Clint says. Then he fires a harpoon through the guy's chest.

Nailing that guy with a harpoon was unnecessary (translation: murder) but it is one of the more awesome displays of Dirty Harriness.

As every male knows, the worst Dirty Harry is still better than a lot of other movies. Speaking on behalf of The Clint Eastwood project, we're going to miss Harry Callahan from here on out.

Next up: "Pink Cadillac."

"Heartbreak Ridge:" This is where Clint starts getting to be an old man

Title: Heartbreak Ridge
Released: 1986
Genre: Military humor and heroics
Notable for: The script pissed off the U.S. Marine Corps enough to cancel cooperation
Coolest thing Clint does: Smashes up a thug while spending a night in the drunk tank, then tells him, "Why don't you sit there and bleed a while."

Anyone who thinks Clint emerged in the 1970s as The New John Wayne should know the vast database of The Clint Eastwood Project reveals "Heartbreak Ridge" was the first time Clint played a member of U.S. military forces in a war movie.

His character was on loan to the Brits in "Where Eagles Dare." He was AWOL all through "The Beguiled." "Kelly's Heroes" was an anti-war movie where Clint made friends with Nazis at the end. And "Firefox" was a spy story with Clint playing a military veteran pressed back to duty for a secret mission.

We conclude Clint did not much care for war movies, and he made an odd one when he finally gave it a whirl in "Heartbreak Ridge."

Andrew finds "Heartbreak Ridge" entertaining and judges it "not the best, but pretty good." Brad thinks it is mostly stupid because it is two different movies crammed unconvincingly into one.

Clint plays a tough Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who has a habit of getting drunk and finding trouble. The makeup people put scars on his face and Clint put extra gravel in his voice.

He is assigned to lead a platoon of young Marines who are complete screw-ups. One actually talks a little like Gomer Pyle. The rest behave, ludicrously, as if they can ignore commands. No wonder the Marine Corps withdrew its support.

The first part of the movie is basically a comedy where Clint whips the screw-ups into shape. It has some fine moments. Clint runs around growling about how he's drank more beer, pissed more blood and banged more quiff than anyone alive.

"Heartbreak Ridge" is set in the early 1980s and Clint's character is a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. He is a little frustrated to have no wins on his war record. At first, the young Marines think he is a crazy old man. His asshole major calls him a relic.

"This is the new Marine Corps," the major says. "Characters like you are an anachronism." It sounds exactly like the crap Dirty Harry took from his superiors.

Comedy stops abruptly with 30 minutes left in the movie. Clint's Marines are put on alert and sent to invade Grenada. From then on it's all blood-and-guts battle scenes that show what a wonderful job Clint did making his guys combat-ready.

Victory is sweet for Clint, who savors his first war win. It seems inconceivable that anyone who fought in Korea and Vietnam could put Grenada on the same level, but Clint does it anyway.

The film ends with a glorious homecoming as a band plays "Stars and Stripes Forever." As far as we know, that exhausts the film library of Grenada Invasion stories.

"Heartbreak Ridge" may be most notable in the annals of Clintdom because it is the first film to address head-on the fact he was growing old. Clint was 56 in real life. He appeared in great physical shape for the movie, but he could no longer pass himself off as a youthful hero. He played a character his real age, a dude struggling with the approach of mandatory retirement.

Unlike some action stars we could name, he was man enough to accept the truth. And some of his most celebrated roles were still ahead.

Next up: "The Dead Pool."

"Pale Rider:" Clint was western when western wasn't cool

Title: Pale Rider
Released: 1985
Genre: Mysterious-stranger western
Notable for: Clint's first return to the saddle in nine years
Coolest thing Clint does: Beats gang of thugs senseless with hickory stick

One of Clint's seldom-mentioned accomplishments is a key role in saving, or at least prolonging, the life of the American western drama.

It started with "Pale Rider."

Anyone old enough to remember knows it seemed vaguely stupid and pathetic in 1985 for Clint to make "Pale Rider." Cowboy movies were out of style. By today, they could easily be just as dead as the TV western.

Then "Pale Rider" came out and it kicked ass. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby called it "the first decent western in a very long time."

Seven years later, Clint won his first Oscar for another western, "Unforgiven." Then many male stars started making westerns for fun and profit.

"Pale Rider" is never included on lists of the best westerns ever (here's one list and here's another), but it should be. Because it came out at a time when no one made westerns, it never received the full credit it deserves.


Believe it or not, Clint plays a mysterious stranger who rides into town and never reveals his name or the exact nature of his bloody past. Quite a stretch, huh?

He comes to the aid of a community of small-time gold miners who are brutally oppressed by the town's gold tycoon. The villainous tycoon wants their land so he can rape it with modern mining methods.

After beating the snot out of a few of the tycoon's goons, Clint puts on a preacher's collar and, from then on, is called "The Preacher."

A side-story veers close to pedophilia (not a first for Clint) when The Preacher is sexually propositioned by a 14-year-old girl. Clint declines but spares her feelings by assuring her 99 men out of 100 would nail her. Statutory rape must not have been a crime yet. He rejects the girl because he is more interested in her widowed mother. As romances go, a mother-daughter love triangle is either edgy or creepy.

"Pale Rider" was acknowledged to be a rip-off of the classic "Shane," but more interesting similarities are found to the story of ghostly vengeance Clint delivered 11 years earlier in "High Plains Drifter."

Saving the miners from the evil tycoon is a given for Clint's character in "Pale Rider," but the real intrigue centers on his connection to the spirit world.

In "High Plains Drifter," Clint played the revenge-seeking ghost of a murdered sheriff. "Pale Rider" is far less clear.

The movie title comes from the Book of Revelation, which says death rides on a pale horse. Clint, as director, made that obvious by having the verse read aloud while The Preacher is seen riding a gray horse.

So maybe Clint is death incarnate. Or maybe not.

In one scene, viewers see Clint has five bullet scars in his back, wounds that look as if they must be fatal. When the tycoon hires a paid killer, Clint reveals he has a score to settle with the dude. At the end, the killer stares hard at Clint, then says, "You!" Clint shoots him five times, leaving a pattern exactly like the scars in his own flesh.

So maybe Clint is a ghost. Or maybe not.

After shooting the bad guy five times in the chest, Clint fires once more and plugs him in the forehead, causing one of the greatest death-grimaces ever recorded on film. Clint does not have a scar on his own head, so this seems like an extra shot he never received.

So maybe Clint is just a mortal man who did not want to repeat the bad guy's mistake of leaving wounds that could be survived. Or maybe not.

The aforementioned Mr. Canby speculated that Clint's character was supposed to be God. We're not sure why God needs to retrieve guns from a bank safe-deposit box, as The Preacher did, to smite someone down. But why not?

God or no god, Clint helped raise western drama from the near-dead with "Pale Rider."

For that we thank you, Clint.

Next up: "Heartbreak Ridge."