To reach Hollywood was to arrive at the glorious gates of fame, ready to etch your name into the history books of cinema. To be well-paid is one thing, to be highly-regarded is another, but to go down in history is what most actors dream of when they arrive in the Californian location. While many tried, most have failed, but a few have become legendary. When it comes to the western film genre, it just doesn’t get more iconic than the name Clint Eastwood.
His is a long and storied career. Beginning with the TV series Rawhide, Eastwood became just as synonymous with the role of the gunslinging outlaw as John Wayne when he performed in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy as ‘The Man With No Name’. It was a role that would catapult Eastwood’s name up on to the Mount Rushmore of the western genre.
Of course, Eastwood has performed in other genres over the years, but it is the western with which he is most closely associated. Eastwood lives and breathes the western and has noted his favourite movies in the genre several times across the decades. Let’s take a closer look at some of them now.
Amongst the collection are two films that Eastwood directed himself. The first, The Outlaw Josey Wales, comes from way back in 1976 and saw Eastwood star in the titular role as a Missouri farmer who is driven to revenge when his family is killed by Union soldiers during the American Civil War.
The other Eastwood-directed movie to crop up on his list of favourites is 1992’s Unforgiven, in which he starred as William Munny, an ageing former outlaw who takes on one final job several years after retiring from the lifestyle and becoming a farmer. He starred alongside Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris.
Elsewhere, we see Eastwood’s love for the works of John Ford, particularly his 1946 film My Darling Clementine and 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra-Madre. When receiving the John Ford Award in 2012, Eastwood said of the director, “Anyone would be flattered to be spoken of in the same breath as him. [I am a] huge admirer of his craft as a pioneer of American filmmaking who broke down all the cliches of his era.” It was Ford who undoubtedly influenced Unforgiven.
Eastwood is, of course, known for his roles in spaghetti westerns, particularly those of Sergio Leone. But he has also expressed admiration for the second most-significant Italian western director, Sergio Corbucci and certainly his 1968 film The Great Silence. Inspired by the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, the film tells of a mute gunslinger who defends a band of outlaws from a group of bounty killers funded by a corrupt banker.
In terms of a recent Western that Eastwood admires, we can definitely pick out the 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. It tells of the dramatic relationship between the two legendary outlaws, Jesse James and Robert Ford, leading up to, as the title suggests, the killing of the former by the latter.
Check out the full list of Clint Eastwood’s favourite westerns below. It makes for one of the most comprehensive lists in the genre, not because it is extensive or is nuanced beyond recognition but because it comes from one of perhaps the ultimate western icon.
Clint Eastwood’s favourite westerns:
The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)
Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943)
The Treasure of the Sierra-Madre (John Ford, 1948)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)
Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)