New Essays on Clint EastwoodLeonardEngel, Editor. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012.

Abstract

New Essays on Clint Eastwood Leonard Engel, Editor. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012.As John M. Gourlie and Leonard Engel state in their introduction to New Essays on Clint Eastwood, the intention of this collection of essays to expand our understanding of individual films and to deepen our overall appreciation of Eastwood's artistry as, through the various stages of his career, he becomes an even greater master of his craft (2). In these goals the collection succeeds. essays are not all equal in their value, and the collection lacks an overall unity, but for Eastwood scholars this useful and worthwhile book.Several of the best essays in this collection strive, more or successfully, to find patterns and cohesive elements across Eastwood's career. One of the first attempts at this, Robert Smart's essay titled 'Landscape as Moral Destiny': Mythic Reinvention from Rowdy Yates to the Stranger suggests that landscape provides the backdrop and creates the logic for much of Eastwood's work, including Rawhide and the Leone films. Perhaps leaning of the work of Jane Tompkins, Smart argues that the early parts of Eastwood's career move consistently toward less spoken dialogue, more depiction, greater reliance on landscape as dialogue, and clear focus on character (26). In similar vein, Dennis Rothermel does an excellent job analyzing four of Eastwood's seemingly unrelated films, Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, White Hunter Black Heart, and Bird in terms of their portrayal of creativity and performance. His careful work with both the texts and the contexts surrounding them, including interviews, draws convincing parallels between the lead characters in these films and offers us new view of Eastwood as an auteur focused, at least in some cases, on the nature of creativity generally, and the act of self-creation specifically. Craig Rinne, on the other hand, offers very different overview of Eastwood's directing career, suggesting that he is, in short, a sociopolitical production (131). Rinne argues convincingly that Eastwood's successful late directing (and acting) career partly result of the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of the man of sensitivity. The sociopolitical climate of the early 1990s, Rinne says, is what made Eastwood, his changed star persona, and his films once again relevant (130). In the process of making his case, Rinne offers fine readings of several of Eastwood's films, including Unforgiven. …