Clint Eastwood-2 – Press Play Video Blog

Clint Abides: TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

In one of his great essays about baseball, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti famously called the game “our best invention to stay change.” Giamatti (who, besides being president of Yale University, was briefly commissioner of Major League Baseball) added, “I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”

The ragtag group of has-beens and hopefuls in Trouble with the Curve would likely share Giamatti’s sentiment. No matter what illnesses or impediments come their way, they cannot let go of the sound of the bat hitting the ball. Seventy-something Atlanta Braves scout Gus Lobel (Clint Eastwood) is going blind, relying on his wits and a magnifying glass to hang onto his job, while former MLB pitcher Johnny Flanagan (Justin Timberlake) seeks to rebrand himself as a broadcaster for the Boston Red Sox after an injury. It is hard to dislike a movie that makes an odd couple out of stars as disparate as Eastwood and Timberlake—Dirty Harry and Sean Parker—and the incongruous pairing is one of the freshest touches in the debut of director Robert Lorenz (a longtime producer for Eastwood).

In Randy Brown’s so-so script, characters of all ages are scrambling for security and status, including Gus’s ambitious lawyer daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), who is hoping to be made a junior partner at her firm. One of the film’s strengths is its willingness to let Gus, Johnny, and Mickey appear weak or desperate. In the Braves’ front office, peopled largely by callow jocks who lean on computer programs rather than firsthand observation to evaluate talent, Gus is mocked as outmoded. Even his old friend Pete (an amiable, mustachioed John Goodman) wonders if something is wrong when he stops by Gus’s house one morning and observes him mistakenly paying the pizza delivery boy with a $50 bill instead of a $20. The look on Goodman’s face suggests he fears something far worse than failing vision: is Gus going senile? When Pete recruits Mickey to look out for her father out on an important scouting trip in North Carolina, his request has all of the subtlety of an intervention.

The pleasure of Trouble with the Curve is not only that Gus will prove the doubters wrong but that he does not care how he is perceived. If he really is not as far gone as Pete and Mickey suspect, what is the harm in their thinking he is? He will get the last laugh, but in the meantime he has no patience for keeping up appearances, unashamed even when he wrecks his car. (Asked the next morning why he has a conspicuous bandage on his cheek, he says with a straight face that he cut himself shaving.) Eastwood’s remarkably open performance (one scene features him tenderly singing “You Are My Sunshine” a capella) suggests that he shares Gus’s wily indifference to others’ opinions, as does his shrug of a response to the humorless criticism he received following his charming, personal speech at the Republican National Convention.

In fact, Trouble with the Curve reflects its star’s gently libertarian disposition. When Mickey tries to mother Gus—helping him with the keys to his motel room or throwing out a hamburger patty he has overcooked—he recoils, all but saying, “Don’t tread on me.” Gus is affronted, too, when the Braves, having learned of his vision problem, suggest he retire and begin drawing a pension. Such gestures are meant to be helpful, but they are bathed in condescension. At the same time, Gus accepts Mickey’s assistance in scouting the presumptive top draft pick because she acts like she’s just . . . chipping in. The film’s politics, such as they are, are not doctrinaire.

Lorenz inherited most of his boss’s usual crew, including cinematographer Tom Stern and editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach, and the result is an unusually well-produced first film. Lorenz has a sure sense of comedy, too, eliciting amusing supporting performances from the reptilian Matthew Lillard (as a go-getting Braves scout) and Joe Massingill (as the draft pick, a misogynistic, self-regarding oaf who calls to mind the wrestler Gorgeous George).

As with several recent Eastwood projects, the biggest liability is the screenplay. Novice screenwriter Randy Brown is simply no James Bridges or William Goldman (authors of two of Eastwood’s best films of the nineties, White Hunter Black Heart and Absolute Power, respectively). His characters lack consistency. Mickey moans about Gus’s uncommunicative manner, implausibly claiming that his emotional distance has driven her to therapy, yet she seems pert and well-adjusted for the most part. What’s more, she has inherited many of her father’s best traits—not just his eye for the game, but his go-it-alone stubbornness and prickly attitude toward co-workers. Was Gus really such a bad dad, to produce such a nice kid? She is not the only one who vacillates. One minute Johnny gladly risks his new career with the Red Sox by taking a counterintuitive piece of advice from Gus and the next he is furious at him for doing just that.

Through it all, though, Eastwood stands firm. Gus gets what he wants, winning a new contract with the Braves with his methods unchanged. He even orchestrates the romance between Mickey and Johnny, like a craggy, cigar-chewing matchmaker. Ever stalwart, Eastwood is, like baseball itself, proof that there is “something abiding,” as A. Bartlett Giamatti would say.

Peter Tonguette is the author of Orson Welles Remembered and The Films of James Bridges. He is currently writing a critical study of the films of Peter Bogdanovich for the University Press of Kentucky and editing a collection of interviews with Bogdanovich for the University Press of Mississippi.

In Defense of UNFORGIVEN’s Little Bill Daggett

Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s final western, offers a stirring rebuke to the genre he has done more to popularize than perhaps any actor or director, laying bare the senseless, ugly violence of the Wild West and its depictions. This argument is made most clearly by Eastwood’s main character, William Munny, a retired assassin whose attempt at a final score descends into a murderous odyssey in which almost everyone but Munny is ultimately beaten to death, maimed, or gunned down. It is a grim verdict, but one that remains immensely popular, due in part to a ubiquity on cable that has won it many new fans over the years.

Certainly, the film’s most charismatic, if not memorable, character remains Munny’s antagonist, Sheriff Little Bill Daggett. While appreciated by audiences – and certainly critically, with Gene Hackman deservedly winning his second Oscar for the role – Daggett is generally misunderstood, unfairly branded as the film’s sadistic villain whose final punishment is well deserved. While Daggett is not softly sympathetic – in a film with no sympathetic characters, only brutes, victims, and cowards – he does attempt to create law and order in a region that has previously only seen unrequited violence. Munny’s presence, and the specters of other assassins arriving to claim the bounty of whores, are antithetical to Daggett’s vision for the town and the new house he is building, and thus justify his rough countermeasures.

We first meet Little Bill moments into the movie, after the hooker Delilah Fitzgerald is attacked by a cowboy. Coming into Greeley’s out of the dead of night, Daggett decides to horsewhip the offender and his friend until they agree to repay Skinny, the brothel owner, with several of their horses. When Strawberry Alice (played by Eastwood’s then-wife Frances Fisher) furiously protests the leniency, Daggett angrily asks her, “Ain’t you seen enough blood for one night?” Alice and her prostitutorial brethren thereafter decide to offer a bounty through their johns to entice an assassin to Big Whiskey to kill the cowboys in retribution for Fitzgerald’s disfigurement.

The opening portrays Little Bill as a cold-hearted sheriff disdainful of women and inexplicably unwilling to mete out frontier justice to the two men who slashed a woman’s face without provocation. The whores’ thirst for blood may seem morally justifiable to viewers who grew up on Eastwood films, like his revenge bonanza The Outlaw Josie Wales, but it runs counter to Daggett’s wish for law and order and his aversion to violence solely for its own purpose. While Daggett will resort to violence in ensuing scenes, this precept forms the core of the sheriff’s own code.

Soon after the attack, Skinny alerts Daggett to the hookers’ plan, visiting Little Bill where he is building a house. Even as Skinny smirks at the shoddy construction, Little Bill brags at his work, pridefully looking forward to sitting on his porch with a pipe and coffee. The symbolism of the house as Little Bill's new place in the community is obvious and provides a glimpse of Little Bill's background, suggesting he hasn’t been in Big Whiskey long but intends to plant some roots in the community and help grow it out. Daggett grimaces at Skinny's news, presuming aloud that a swarm of vicious men from as far as Texas will make their way to Big Whiskey to collect on the contract.

When the first such assassin, English Bob, arrives in town, we learn a bit more about Little Bill, getting valuable context for his approach. As Daggett’s inexperienced deputies arm up to arrest English Bob (played with nice understated pluck by Richard Harris, in one of his final roles), two deputies question aloud whether Little Bill might be scared of Bob, a frightening type of killer whose caliber none have ever encountered before in Big Whiskey. The one-armed deputy Clyde scoffs, “Little Bill? Him scared? Little Bill come out of Kansas and Texas boys. He worked them tough towns.”

This is the extent of what we learn about Little Bill’s background, but it says much about his perspective. Coming from the 1870s West, Daggett clearly experienced pervasive wanton violence in such places as Shackleford County, Texas, where bands of roving criminals often ran frontier towns. Cormac McCarthy’s description of a saloon in 1878 Ft. Griffin, Texas in the great Blood Meridian evokes this sort of society: “A dimly seething rabble had coagulated within… he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary…” Ft. Griffin was located in what was then one of the most lawless parts of America, and the type of town Little Bill had come from, if not that place exactly, and help explain his leadership style.

Little Bill’s first encounters with English Bob and William Munny starkly display this leadership. In two confrontations similar in their origins and outcomes, Little Bill badly beats first the suave English Bob and then Munny for entering town and not surrendering their firearms pursuant to the advertised county ordinance. The scenes further cement Little Bill’s status as the film’s heavy, but they also demonstrate his sympathetic motivations.

Little Bill and the audience already know of English Bob’s deadly nature, revealed from the fear of his fellow train passengers who comment on his penchant of gunning down Chinese immigrants; Munny’s reputation as a murderer is established early by the Schofield Kid’s awe, and while Daggett does not know it initially, he correctly surmises that Munny too has arrived in town for blood. As Daggett separately pummels the two assassins, he revealingly bellows that their ilk may be tolerated down in Wichita and Cheyenne, but not in Big Whiskey. He later delineates his philosophy to the simpering W.W. Beauchamp (played in a terrific send-up of Hollywood itself by Saul Rubinek): “I do not like assassins or men of low character, like your friend English Bob,” who Daggett explains once gunned down a disarmed man over a woman (ironically only to fabricate the tale through Beauchamp). Little Bill believes that the only way to deal with assassins who embody the carnage of the west is through opposing brute force, and he uses that force to run a black-and-blue Bob out of town.

Little Bill’s past in post-Civil War Texas and Kansas informs his rule in Big Whiskey, which up to this point in 1881 has not yet been torn down by the violence so common back east. His ruthlessness and dictatorial laws, while stark, are his way of keeping the peace to create a place to put down his new house.

Of course, it is Little Bill’s violent enforcement that costs him his life in the final shootout. Facing the end of Munny’s shotgun, Daggett calls the avenging dark angel Eastwood “a cowardly son of a bitch” for killing an unarmed man (much as English Bob had once done) and for “kill[ing] women and children” before Munny guns him down, along with Skinny and most of the overmatched deputies. With Munny standing over him, Little Bill croaks, “I don’t deserve this – to die like this! I was building a house.”

When the kill shot rings out and past Eastwood’s shadowed face, the audience – myself sometimes included – cheers at the baddie getting his comeuppance, but the moral picture is far hazier. Little Bill’s last words encapsulate his sense of frontier nobility as he sought to build a community and protect it from the bloody rigors of the age. In an interview on his film, Eastwood has acknowledged this perspective: “He was a sheriff, who had noble ideas. He had a small town, and he ran it with a lot of strength… He had dreams…”

Little Bill’s tough enforcement is likely the only way to meet the challenge of the time and place, but its effectiveness inspires the same dangerous people he fights to pursue him and seek brutal revenge. Indeed, it is Daggett’s ruthless killing of Munny’s partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to get information on Munny that leads Munny to kill Little Bill and ravage his town to a point from which the Wyoming backwater will probably never recover. Daggett was building a house, of shoddy construction maybe, but it was well-intentioned and just.

In the end, though, Little Bill is ultimately incapable of taming the world of Big Whiskey.

Mark Greenbaum's work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The LA Times, The New Republic, and other publications. This is his first piece for Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: Clint Eastwood and His Iconic Side View Profile

“The human face is the great subject of the cinema. Everything is there.” – Ingmar Bergman

The craggy complexion. The stately ovate chin. Those thin lips deceptively wrapped around that charming smile. That perfect nose. Those clear greenish-brown eyes. That squint.

One cannot discuss Clint Eastwood's iconic stature in film without mentioning his face. There are other faces that have been as handsome (Newman), masculine (Gable), striking (Hitchcock), fearsome (Bronson), and symbolic (Wayne). But from a visual standpoint, none of them have been as instrumental as a filmmaking tool or signature. Most actors are cast to fill in a character from the inside out, building an individual based on the personal. But Eastwood himself is a form. An absent presence whose persona is filled primarily by the film’s themes and ideas.

Clint Eastwood’s “side view” profile is probably the most recognizable visage in cinema. On the one hand, it is the picture of a supremely good-looking and rugged individual. On the other, it is the quintessential outline of a man’s man, whatever that ideal might be: a tool that Eastwood uses to better effect than any actor could or would ever dare to try.

The first true film in which Eastwood’s profile became noticeable was in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. On casting Eastwood, Leone said, “I looked at him and I didn’t see any character… just a physical figure.” In that sense, Eastwood might have been the perfect choice for the film. With Leone’s penchant for extreme close-ups of his characters’ faces, often exposed to the extreme heat of the desert, Eastwood's rough complexion would reflect the barrenness of his environment. His “Hollywood” looks amongst his often less-than-handsome Italian co-stars would only further enhance his visual uniqueness.

With the succeeding For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood in a cowboy hat would become the image of the Western Anti-Hero: unpredictable in his actions, but always of noble intent. It would be the template that would follow him for most of his career. This profile would be passed from Sergio Leone’s “man with no name” to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry.

But Siegel didn’t merely carry on the tradition. He also introduced to Eastwood another artist who would help shape Clint’s persona: Bruce Surtees, the renowned cinematographer called the “Prince of Darkness" in professional circles. Eastwood had strong directorial inclinations by this time. And with his founding of Malpaso Productions, further collaborations with Siegel and Surtees made them grow closer, personally and artistically.

Bruce Surtees's refined use of shadow was perfect for Eastwood’s profile. With Surtees's lighting expertise, Clint’s characters, often half-covered in black, suddenly had the additional qualities of menace (Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter), disrepute (Tightrope), secrecy (Firefox) and struggle (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Honkytonk Man).

Clint clearly learned much from Surtees, as he applied the same techniques to his subsequent films. Who can forget Maggie and Frankie’s conversation about her pet dog while driving beneath dancing lights in Million Dollar Baby? Sgt. Tom Highway’s silhouette while leading a platoon in Heartbreak Ridge? The ominous shadows enveloping Will Munny in Unforgiven? Sometimes Eastwood used his profile in unexpected roles, such as the sleek fighter pilot Mitchell Gant in Firefox, or as the over-aged astronaut Frank Corvin in Space Cowboys. Other times he used it as emotional “filler” for a sparse storyline, embodying it with great pathos despite an economy of style or feeling elsewhere in the movie (Escape From Alcatraz).

Great actors are remarkable in their ability to embody characters that we recognize and believe, simply by looking in our direction. But Clint Eastwood’s face is in a class by itself; astonishing in its capability to serve as both character and cinematic imprint, simply by looking away.

Credits: Thanks to Donald G. Carder (@theangrymick) and Senses of Cinema (@SensesOfCinema) for additional research material.

Michael Mirasol is a Filipino independent film critic who has been writing about films for the past eleven years. He briefly served as film critic for the Manila Times and now writes occasionally for Uno Magazine and his blog The Flipcritic. Last year he was named by Roger Ebert as one of his "Far Flung Correspondents", and continues to contribute written and video essays on film.