If the rumor mill is true, then iconic actor/director Clint Eastwood is in the process of directing his final film. He’s certainly earned a retirement after six decades in the business and nearly 50 acting and/or directing credits to his name. The rumored project is said to be a thriller with the working title Juror #2, about a juror on a murder trial who realizes he may be the murderer, which leads to a struggle with his conscience: turn himself in, or manipulate the jury and get off scot-free. It certainly sounds interesting, and Eastwood has often used that internal struggle in his films. But let’s face it: nearing 93, the day is coming when Eastwood shuffles off this mortal coil and passes into legend. When that will be is anyone’s guess, so we ask ourselves how his illustrious career should be capped off. And somehow, “legal thriller” just doesn’t sound right. You know what does sound right? Western. Eastwood’s final film should – nay, must – be a Western.
The Western Is Where Clint Eastwood’s Legacy Begins
Clint Eastwood’s career in Hollywood kicked off with an uncredited role in the 1955 Universal monster flick Revenge of the Creature, a follow-up to the creature feature Creature from the Black Lagoon. He followed Creature up with a number of other uncredited roles before appearing as second lead in his first Western movie, Ambush at Cimarron Pass. The film, made over the course of eight days, was not the big break Eastwood had hoped for. Eastwood himself would appraise the film as “probably the worst film ever made.” But a chance meeting with a CBS executive led to the series that would kick-start his storied career: Rawhide.
Rawhide was a Western TV series, set in the 1860s. It featured Clint Eastwood as young, brazen Rowdy Yates, a drover on a cattle drive under trail boss Gil Favor (Eric Fleming). A shooting break in 1963 gave Eastwood a chance to work on a film in Spain under relative unknown director Sergio Leone. He welcomed the opportunity to play a more sinister character, explaining, “In Rawhide I did get awfully tired of playing the conventional white hat – the hero who kisses old ladies and dogs and was kind to everybody. I decided it was time to be an anti-hero.” It would be a match made in heaven, a partnership that redefined the Western genre under Leone’s spaghetti western ‘The Man with No Name’ trilogy, starting with 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars. If he wasn’t already associated with the Western, he most definitely was now.
Clint Eastwood Can’t Leave the Western Alone
Over the course of his career, Eastwood has played a part in almost every genre of film: war, thriller, comedy, and even – gulp – musical (1969’s Paint Your Wagon). Invariably, though, he kept wandering back to the Western. Out of the 52 films following 1966’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly that Eastwood has acted in, just over a quarter are Westerns (or at least close enough). Even out of the remaining films, Eastwood plays characters that would easily fit into a Western, contemporary cowboys working the plains of concrete and steel. Harry Callahan of the Dirty Harry films is a comparable to the quick-draw lawman of the West. Philo Beddoe, the trucker/bare-knuckle brawler going across the West in Every Which Way But Loose and its 1980 sequel Any Which Way You Can, accompanied by an orangutan, Clyde, instead of a horse. Eastwood’s surly Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, the aged Army veteran who comes to the aid of the persecuted, like an old Western lawman who sets out to do the right thing before his end.
One of his ventures back to the genre resulted in Best Picture winner Unforgiven from 1992. The film redefined the genre, stripping away the glorified rose-colored glasses view of the Wild West to show it as it really was; a brutal, dirty landscape with brutal, dirty souls that paints the damning, staining nature of violence on the morally bankrupt. Unforgiven wasn’t the last Western, but it definitively closed the door on the traditional Western that Eastwood himself helped to popularize, and became ground zero for a new era of the genre.
Returning to the Western Would Bring Clint Eastwood’s Career Full-Circle
Unforgiven gave Eastwood his ride out into the sunset, a Western that saw the genre’s champion calling it quits at the top of his game. Had he retired then, it would have been the perfect ending, with Eastwood’s career having come full-circle. But as we know, he not only continues to make films, but continues to excel in the craft, earning Oscars for his 2004 film Million Dollar Baby and plaudits on his last film, Cry Macho.
But the poetry of seeing an actor end his career in a genre he defined – and then redefined – is just too perfect. And Clint Eastwood, if he so chose, would have a golden opportunity to do something with the genre that has never been done before. Approaching the Western through the perspective of someone over 90 has some interesting potential, and no one would be better than Eastwood to deliver it. What happens with the cowboy that has outlived his friends and enemies by decades, wracked by a survivor’s guilt for a life that should have ended when theirs did? The patriarch who has seen his family through generations of tragedy and triumph, united by blood but fractured by the unyielding injustices of the West? The aged outlaw forced to relive the horrors of his past over and over in his mind, in an old world that has yet to understand what plagues him?
There are so many creative places to go, and Eastwood has proved himself time and again as a visionary that can still follow through. There are no doubts that Juror #2 will be another feather in his cap, but it would be a shame for a career so closely associated with the Western to end on anything else but.