Bovie Movie

By the time Sergio Leone made this film, Italians had already produced about 20 films ironically labelled “spaghetti westerns.” Leone approached the genre with great love and humor. Although the plot was admittedly borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), Leone managed to create a work of his own that would serve as a model for many films to come. Clint Eastwood plays a cynical gunfighter who comes to a small border town and offers his services to two rivaling gangs. Neither gang is aware of his double play, and each thinks it is using him, but the stranger will outwit them both. The picture was the first installment in a cycle commonly known as the “Dollars” trilogy. Later, United Artists, who distributed it in the U.S., coined another term for it: the “Man With No Name” trilogy. While not as impressive as its follow-ups For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), A Fistful of Dollars contains all of Leone’s eventual trademarks: taciturn characters, precise framing, extreme close-ups, and the haunting music of Ennio Morricone. Not released in the U.S. until 1967 due to copyright problems, the film was decisive in both Clint Eastwood’s career and the recognition of the Italian western.

Like M*A*S*H and Catch-22, both released the same year, this military comedy takes place in an earlier war but is really a thinly disguised treatise on the modern-day insanity and avariciousness then unfolding in Vietnam. Clint Eastwood stars as Kelly, a former lieutenant whose illusions about the glory of war, if he has any, are lost when he is busted in rank for following some poorly considered orders in World War II France. After capturing a friendly German officer, Kelly learns the whereabouts of millions of dollars in gold bars, earmarked to finance a military payroll. Taking advantage of a three-day liberty, Kelly assembles a motley trio of fellow soldiers to help him sneak behind enemy lines and retrieve the booty. They include Big Joe (Telly Savalas), a gruff sergeant; Crapgame (Don Rickles), a supply sergeant already enriching himself as a black marketer and con man; and the hippie-like tank commander Oddball (Donald Sutherland). Since crossing into enemy-held territory means heading in the opposite direction of the retreating Allies, Kelly and his men encounter armed resistance. Receiving word of their campaign, the vain General Colt (Carroll O’Connor) mistakes the quartet of freelancing scam artists for all-American heroes.

Director Budd Boetticher wrote the story upon which this comic Western was based. Clint Eastwood stars as Hogan, a tough cowboy who rescues a woman, Sara (Shirley Maclaine) as she’s about to be attacked by a trio of rapists. Surprised to learn that his new traveling companion is a nun, Hogan agrees to escort her to a camp occupied by anti-French revolutionaries. It turns out that neither of this pair is what they claim to be: Hogan is to scout out a French military garrison for a future attack, while Sara is actually a prostitute masquerading as a nun. After Hogan spies Sara smoking cigars and drinking whiskey, he begins to figure out she’s not a bride of Christ, and the two team up with the Juaristas to destroy the French fortifications.

An expensive but enormously profitable war picture, Where Eagles Dare centers upon a daring rescue and even more daring escape. Disguised as Nazi officers, commandoes Maj. John Smith (Richard Burton), Lt. Morris Schaffer Clint Eastwood and six other courageous souls parachute behind enemy lines. Their mission: to rescue an American general, held captive in a supposedly impenetrable Alpine castle. Aiding and abetting the commandoes are Allied undercover agents Mary (Mary Ure) and Heidi (Ingrid Pitt). Also on hand is a British officer (Patrick Wymark), who masterminded the mission. Somewhere, somehow, someone amongst the Allies is going to turn out to be a traitor. There’s also a neat plot twist in store when the commandoes manage to reach the American general — which leads to yet another twist. The vertigo-inducing climax has made Where Eagles Dare one of the most sought-after of “early” Eastwood starring features. The film was written directly for the screen by espionage novelist Alistair MacLean.

Clint Eastwood delivers one of his finest performances, as a secret service agent haunted by his past in Wolfgang Petersen’s taut thriller In the Line of Fire. Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a secret service agent who keeps thinking back to November 22, 1963, when, as an agent hand-picked by President Kennedy, he became one of the few agents to have lost a president to an assassin. Decades later, psychotic Mitch Leary (John Malkovich) is stalking another president (Jim Curley) running for re-election. He has spent long hours studying the psyche of Frank Horrigan, and he taunts Horrigan (feeling that there is a bond between them), telling him of his plans to kill the president. After his conversation with Leary, Horrigan makes sure he is assigned to presidential protection duty. Horrigan has no intention of failing his president this time around, and he is more than willing to take a bullet. But everything goes Leary’s way — he is smart and cagey and the president’s aides refuse to alter the itinerary. As the election draws closer, Horrigan’s chances to catch Leary look to be less and less a possibility, and he begins to doubt his own abilities — both now and in the past, when Kennedy was murdered.

In return for Warner Bros. greenlighting his pet project White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), Clint Eastwood directed and starred in this more commercial film, an action caper about a mismatched pair of auto theft cops. Eastwood is grizzled veteran detective Nick Pulovski, who’s determined to bring down the chop-shop operation being run by a pair of German crooks, Strom (Raul Julia) and Liesl (Sonia Braga). Although he’s been officially removed from the case and partnered with a green, recently promoted detective, David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen), the hard-drinking Nick’s not about to let the car thieves get away with murder. David, in the meanwhile, is dealing with his own issues, including the death of his brother (for which he was responsible), his unhappy girlfriend Sarah (Lara Flynn Boyle) and his estrangement from his wealthy father Eugene (Tom Skerritt).

“You’ve got to ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Dirty Harry provoked a critical uproar in 1971 for its “fascist” message about the power of one, as it also elevated Clint Eastwood to superstar status through his most enduring screen persona. Harry Callahan (Eastwood, in a role meant for Frank Sinatra) is a sardonic, hard-working San Francisco cop who can’t finish his lunch without having to foil a bank robbery with his 44 Magnum, “the most powerful handgun in the world.” When hippie-esque psycho Scorpio (Andy Robinson) goes on a killing spree, Harry and new partner Chico (Reni Santoni) are assigned to hunt him down, but not before the Mayor (John Vernon) and Lt. Bressler (Harry Guardino) admonish Callahan about his heavy-handed tactics. Racing against a deadline to save a kidnap victim from suffocating to death, and unbothered by the niceties of Miranda rights and search warrants, Callahan brings in Scorpio, only to see him released on technicalities. “The law’s crazy,” opines Harry in disgust, before taking it upon himself to ensure that Scorpio doesn’t kill again. Directed in violent and efficient fashion by Don Siegel, with a propulsive score by Lalo Schifrin, Dirty Harry was the fourth Siegel-Eastwood collaboration after Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and The Beguiled (1970). Critics at the time strongly objected to the heroic image of a cop’s violations of a suspect’s Miranda rights, forcing Siegel and Eastwood to deny that they were right-wing reactionaries. All the same, Dirty Harry proved to be highly popular and spawned four sequels: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).