Clint Eastwood : A Biography

Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag biography
Review: Being a huge fan of Eastwood as well as a close personal friend creates quite the conflict in TIME film critic Richard Schickel as he attempts to write a biography about an artist who closely guards his privacy. This obstacle results in a hap-hazard biography that provides few surprises or insights into the laconic, silent man who has become on of America's true unique artists.

Schickel also drives a stake through the pacing of his writing by providing scene by scene recounts of each of Eastwood's key films. He is overlooking the fact that the majority of his intended audience already has each film memorized. This causes the book to often languish in molasses and cause the reader to skim- never a good thing.

Where Schickel does succeed is in the all-too brief insights into Eastwood's technique and artistic philosophy. Had Schickel chosen to focus in this area, his work would have provided more depth and sustained interest.

As is CLINT EASTWOOD: A BIOGRAPHY is a mixed bag read. Worthwhile only if one is willing to skim.

Rating:
Summary: Padded and Nonobjective...
Review: If you are looking for a thick book about actor/director Clint Eastwood's life and career, illustrated with some unusual photos, then this will fill the bill. If you want an objective biography of Eastwood, together with an objective analysis of his film work, this is not the book you want. Schickel was basically an employee and friend of Eastwood during the researching and writing of the book, and he tends to ignore or downplay the dark side of Eastwood's activities, particularly his alleged "women are like kleenex" philosophy, and his alleged cruelty toward former collaborators.

The long book is made longer by merciless padding, including detailed and completely unnecessary plot summaries of the films.

Viewed from 2004, Clint Eastwood is an important actor--- as good an actor as Jimmy Stewart and as iconic an actor as John Wayne. He is also an important and stylish director, and justifiably famous for his gentle ways with cast and crew, as well as his efficiency in coming in under budget. One of the author's continuing themes, brought up on nearly every page, turns upon the consistent misunderstanding of Eastwood, both as actor and director, by two generations of famous mainstream film critics. This theme wears thin quickly when one realizes that there is probably not a single case in which famous mainstream film critics have had the slightest clue as to the value, importance and significance of any new film or film star.

Eastwood is an important figure in 20th Century cinema, and he deserves an objective, scholarly, independently-researched analysis of all aspects of his life and career. I don't know of one... we'll keep looking.

Rating:
Summary: A Book For Insomnia
Review: If you have trouble going to sleep, read this book. It's really dull.

This is no biography. It's a compilation of reviews from the author and a bunch of incidents in Eastwood's life that sounds like a copy-and-paste from press releases. As far as the reviews go, Eastwood does not star in bad movies. So, just rent the movies, and don't buy the book. I didn't buy it. I borrowed it from the library.

I read his Disney biography and some people say that is garbage. The Disney biography was interesting. This isn't.

Rating:
Summary: Too much Clint, not enough America
Review: It's a cliché, but it's true: With Clint Eastwood, either you love 'im or you hate 'im. Fortunately for the actor/director, there are far more who do the former-though it's questionable whether any moviegoers are bigger fans than Richard Schickel. That, too, is a stroke of luck for Eastwood. Schickel, a longtime film reviewer for Time, has produced a massive critical biography of America's favorite strong, silent symbol of manly authority, a biography that's insufficiently critical. In his 14th book, Schickel isn't exactly obsequious toward Eastwood, but he comes close, frequently crossing the line to hagiography. He seems driven to right every wrong done Eastwood-or "Clint," as the author familiarly refers to his subject throughout-by critics and audiences.

Beginning with Eastwood's Northern California childhood and early blue-collar career ("he was forging a link with the people who would one day form his audience"), Schickel describes how Eastwood edged into acting, got himself named a rising young Universal star, got cast in several smallish roles, and made it to the cast of "Rawhide," which in the course of eight TV seasons made him a star big enough for Sergio Leone to cast him in a trilogy of edgy spaghetti Westerns; those made him popular enough for title roles in American crime dramas and Westerns. In 1971 Eastwood directed "Play Misty for Me" and starred in "Dirty Harry;" two years later he was named "the nation's number-one box-office star." He's held that position pretty consistently since-an amazing run-through a quarter-century of unexceptional genre movies, smallish personal films and the occasional blockbuster, plus two years as bureaucracy-busting mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

"Clint's gift is to let us see the dark comedy in the American male's contorting, distorting attempts to achieve his masteries of the moment while at the same time not entirely discrediting the tradition that bids him make this effort," Schickel writes. "[I]t is the secret of his stardom's longevity, for thi! s quality also humanizes heroism, draining it of its tiresome and threatening elements. Put simply, irony is both the source of that cool that he has personified for our time and the heart of that unknowability that causes men and women alike to draw in as close as they can to him, trying to catch his message." Eastwood's message is what Schickel's after. The tall, squinty actor "has taken the American male deeper into the country of disaffection than he has ever ridden before, reversing the great theme of our adventure movies, which has been male bonding, and insisting upon the opposite, the difficulty men have in making connections-not just with other men, but with communities, with women, with conventional morality, with their own best selves."

Some will be unhappy with Schickel's refusal to dwell on Eastwood's multitudinous affairs and delve deeper into his troubled relationships, particularly his unconventional pairing with actress Sondra Locke, whose tell-all memoir is expected in bookstores all too soon. But that would have lengthened this 557-page book even more-and diluted its efforts to explore Eastwood's work. So, except for more-or-less oblique references-"The need to have many women was a fact of his life, his nature if you will, and it remains an undeniable fact of his history"-Schickel sticks with the movies. If he examines the plotlines of "For a Few Dollars More" and "Every Which Way but Loose" and the behavior on the sets of "City Heat" and "A Perfect World" a bit too closely, he had little choice: Eastwood, singularly closemouthed onscreen, appears equally inarticulate in interviews. In three years of research, Schickel elicited barely a memorable quote for his book. Director of 20 films, the star is never less than likable and appealing, but he's no font of wisdom, insight or anecdotage. Indeed, Schickel repeatedly points out that Eastwood, spare and economical in thought and practice, resists close scrutiny of his life, thoughts and films. "He is not accustomed to, is in fact flummox! ed by, close ideological examination of his motives and works, because quite literally he can't see anything that grand and abstract in them," Schickel writes.

But the author persists in drawing meaning from even Eastwood's least significant performances and productions. He devotes two full pages, including a full plot rundown, on a 1962 appearance on "Mr. Ed," and nearly four pages to Eastwood's 1966 role in one segment of a virtually unreleased Italian "vanity production." "[T]here is a kind of indolent self-regard about Clint's Charlie, an utterly unexamined projection of male superiority, that slyly satirizes the most basic subtexts of conventional movie masculinity to come," he writes. On 1974's middling "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot": "What the movie says," Schickel writes, "is that the American center, if there ever was one, has not held and, perhaps more important, that ordinary people know it-or, rather, in their inarticulate way sense it. Cast loose from their traditional moorings they drift into misdirected rage and paranoia." The problem here is that most of Eastwood's films-and certainly his understated performances-can't withstand the weight of such critical analysis, even if that attention is respectful and even laudatory. A fact that Schickel fails to note is that while Eastwood has been making movies for more than four decades, his filmography lacks a single no-argument four-star classic. (1991's "Unforgiven" is his Oscar-winner, but whether it's a great film is questionable.) He didn't work with a great actress until "The Bridges of Madison County" in 1995.

Schickel sees this as the fault of not Eastwood but of America's movie reviewers. Throughout the book, he hotly defends Eastwood against the slings and arrows of "the critics," who, he insists, usually are flat-out "wrong" (except, of course, for the times he deems them "correct"). His game plan is to attack: The New York Times' Renata Adler "knew almost nothing about movies"; in his review of "The Enforcer," the Times' Richard Eder r! eached "new heights of cluelessness"; Michael Medved and Richard Grenier are "right-wing ideologues masquerading as movie reviewers." Schickel goes ballistic over the writings of Pauline Kael, who's cited on 23 pages: He derides the former New Yorker critic as "prissy," "naive" and "the most fashionable voice in her field" (that's Schickel's field too, right?); he dismisses Eastwood's detractors as "Kael and her coterie." The onslaught's centerpiece is a five-page dissection of Kael's four-page "vicious assault" on "Dirty Harry"-which, if you go back and read her review, is actually overly generous to this clumsy, dated, amoral film. Grasping at her prudent use of the word "fascist"-though she was hardly the only critic to wield the word-Schickel sputters, "One still gropes for some rational justification for [her review]."

Eastwood deserves better than these name-calling distractions: The quality of his critics, or of his films, matters far less than what he has meant to American moviegoers. Sure, Schickel sounds silly in explaining that "What is in his soul is in all of our souls-that rage that we spend so much of our time suppressing and denying.... Acting out for himself, he acts out for all of us." But he accurately judges Eastwood's "great theme" to be "the difficulty men have in making connections with any sort of community." It's that difficulty that has made Eastwood a household name and an important figure to millions of Americans. Clint Eastwood and his times are certainly important enough for a 500-page critical biography; it's too bad that this one peers too closely at its iconic subject. "Missing the forest for the trees" is another cliché, but it's appropriate: Schickel looks at the films and misses the audience.

Rating:
Summary: A very good informative biography
Review: Richard Schickel's biography of Clint Eastwood is very informative and immensely readable, though Schickel's critical distance may be marred by his closeness to Eastwood. (This book is sort of an authorized biography and had Eastwood's cooperation.) An interesting look at the last great icon of American cinema.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable read, very informative.
Review: This is an excellent book about the life and work of a legend. Richard Schickel gives us a close look at the free spirited man that's living inside of the veteran actor. Very detail work about Mr. Eastwood's movie making process and his no bulls**t attitude toward the studio execs and anyone who stands on his way. Ms. Pauline Kael should just say it out loud that she's begging for the legend's attention or just shut the hell up. Any Eastwood fan will really appreciate the author's work.

Rating:
Summary: Sufficient overview of Eastwood's career
Review: With few biographies of Clint Eastwood available, Richard Schickel's 1996 effort fills a void. Unfortunately, the void, though smaller, still exists since this is far from an objective look at either Eastwood the man, the star, or the filmmaker. It's certainly not a surprise. Schickel wrote a 1992 TV special promoting "Unforgiven," and also compiled the film clips for the tribute preceding Eastwood's reciept of the Irving Thalberg Award at the 1995 Oscars. Eastwood cooperated with the author for this biography and even did some interviews in tandem with Schickel to promote the book. And when informing us that the critic for Life magazine praised 1968's "Hang 'Em High," Schickel neglects to point out the name of that critic who just so happened to be...duh, Richard Schickel. When biographer and subject are such good buddies, well, you just have to wonder if you're getting anything closely resembling the truth. But...

As an overview of Eastwood's career, particularly his transformation from a superstar in genre movies to respected auteur, it is sufficient, even though some easily detected errors go undetected ("Unforgiven" recieved 9 Oscar nominations, not 8 as Schickel says - doesn't anybody bother to check these things?).