Clint Eastwood

Through extensive, exclusive interviews with Eastwood (and the friends and colleagues of a lifetime), Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel has penetrated a complex character who has always been understood too quickly, too superficially. Schickel pierces Eastwood's monumental reserve to reveal the anger and the shyness, the shrewdness and frankness, the humor and powerful will that have helped make him what he is today. of photos.

Visually arresting throughout, this is the quintessential volume on the life of a legend, both onscreen and off."--Jacket.

Clint Eastwood is a Hollywood icon, with five Academy Awards, five Golden Globes, and numerous other accolades for his work as an actor, director, producer, and composer. Yet because he rose to fame in "spaghetti westerns" and Dirty Harry shoot-em-ups, few critics have ventured to explore Eastwood's philosophical, ethical, and artistic agenda as an intellectual filmmaker. Addressing this void, film scholar Sara Anson Vaux analyzes fifteen of Eastwood's best-known films from narrative, artistic, and thematic perspectives. She traces the nuanced development of Eastwood's unfolding moral vision over a forty-year continuum, showing how this vision has grown more sophisticated even as many of the motifs expressing it -- justice, confession, war and peace, the gathering, the search for a perfect world -- have remained the same.

In American Rebel, bestselling author and acclaimed film historian Marc Eliot examines the ever-exciting, often-tumultuous arc of Clint Eastwood's life and career. As a Hollywood icon, Clint Eastwood--one of film's greatest living legends--represents some of the finest cinematic achievements in the history of American cinema. Eliot writes with unflinching candor about Eastwood's highs and lows, his artistic successes and failures, and the fascinating, complex relationship between his life and his craft. Eliot's prodigious research reveals how a college dropout and unambitious playboy rose to fame as Hollywood's "sexy rebel," eventually and against all odds becoming a star in the Academy pantheon as a multiple Oscar winner. Spanning decades, American Rebel covers the best of Eastwood's oeuvre, films that have fast become American classics: Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino. Filled with remarkable insights into Eastwood's personal life and public work, American Rebel is highly entertaining and the most complete biography of one of Hollywood's truly respected and beloved stars–-an actor who, despite being the Man with No Name, has left his indelible mark on the world of motion pictures.

As the face of law enforcement in America for almost fifty years, J Edgar Hoover was feared and admired, reviled, and revered. But behind closed doors, he held secrets that would have destroyed his image, his career, and his life. This title tells his story.

Famous for his masculine swagger and gritty roles, American cultural icon Clint Eastwood has virtually defined the archetype of the tough lawman. Beginning with his first on-screen appearance in the television series Rawhide (1959--1965) and solidified by his portrayal of the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy (1964--1966), he rocketed to stardom and soon became one of the most recognizable actors in Hollywood. The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood examines the philosophy and psychology behind this versatile and controversial figure, exploring his roles as actor, musician, and director. Led by editors Richard T. McClelland and Brian B. Clayton, the contributors to this timely volume discuss a variety of topics. They explore Eastwood's arresting critique and revision of the traditional western in films such as Unforgiven (1992), as well as his attitudes toward violence and the associated concept of masculinity from the Dirty Harry movies (starting in 1971) to Gran Torino (2008). The essays also chart a shift in Eastwood's thinking about the value of so-called rugged individualism, an element of many of his early films, already questioned in Play Misty for Me (1971) and decisively rejected in Million Dollar Baby (2004). Clint Eastwood has proven to be a dynamic actor, a perceptive and daring director, as well as an intriguing public figure. Examining subjects such as the role of civil morality and community in his work, his use of themes of self-reliance and religious awareness, and his cinematic sensibility, The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood will provide readers with a deeper sense of Eastwood as an artist and illuminate the philosophical conflicts and resolutions that drive his films.

Clint Eastwood (USA, b. 1930) is a veteran among the grand masters of contemporary American cinema, whose rise through the system took a highly unusual form. After playing iconic roles in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, he returned to Hollywood and underwent a controversial reincarnation as the ultraviolent cop Harry. In the 1970s Eastwood began to direct and, in the style of the great directors of the past, made masterpieces in genres ranging from the western (Unforgiven, 1992) to film noir (Mystic River, 2003), a war epic (Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006), a jazz bio-pic (Bird, 1988), a melodrama (The Bridges of Madison County, 1995) and a sports picture (Million Dollar Baby, 2004). His most recent film, Invictus, takes Eastwood to South Africa and the historic figure of Nelson Mandela, as he continues to explore the question underlying all his films: can human beings overcome experiences of violence and evil?

Interviews with the Oscar-winning director of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby