Happy 80th Birthday Clint Eastwood

It is hard to believe that actor/director Clint Eastwood is eighty years old, but he is. Long before there was a Jack Bauer (24), there was Clint Eastwood portraying the character, “Dirty Harry.” The seminal difference between Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer and Eastwood’s Dirty Harry is that the former took on international bad guys, while the latter concentrated on domestic scumbags. Clint Eastwood started out on television but migrated to the big screen to star in what they called then, Spaghetti Westerns, so named because they were shot in Italy and helmed by mostly Italian directors. Eastwood’s character in the Dirty Harry movies was the common guy’s hero, who did not place any credence into the social scientists’ reasons why criminal killed… Eastwood solution was to wipe out the infections in our society with extreme prejudice by way of a 44 magnum.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Clint Eastwood"]
photo credit: Yann de la marne[/caption]

As a boy growing up in the hamlet of St. Paul, St. Kitts, is where I was first introduced to Clint Eastwood by way of these Spaghetti Westerns; The steel blue eyes of Eastwood doling out frontier justice or vengeance in movies such as “Hang Em High;” and “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” are but a few of the movies that Eastwood made in this genre. Later, Eastwood would go on to win the golden statue for directing the Western, Unforgiven. Lest you think that Eastwood’s characters remained one dimensional, like his early acting days, Unforgiven broke that mold.

In Unforgiven, Eastwood was the retired bad guy who had sought a quiet life of farming and animal husbandry, a marked change from his outlaw years of robbing and killing everything, even women and children. When Gene Hackman’s character murdered Eastwood’s friend, played by the venerable Morgan Freeman, Eastwood went on a rampage of Old Testament vengeance, acknowledging that he was the former outlaw who indeed once killed women and children.

Mr. Eastwood is just as renown in front of the camera - as he is behind of it. In movies  he has helmed, such as The Million Dollar Baby, he has helped to garner an Oscar for Hillary Swank and in his latest project, Invictus, this too has garnered an Oscar for Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Nelson Mandela. Mr. Eastwood’s artistic endeavors also include his love for music, specifically classic Jazz; he has even contributed to scoring some of his movies and has even dabbled in recording. Eastwood’s love of Jazz has even been part of his movie making - who could forget Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of Charlie Parker (Bird), which depicted the brilliant, pioneering jazz musician’s decent in heroin abuse and subsequent death.

Even at the tender age of eighty, Mr. Eastwood is not slowing down; he has admitted that he will defer to the younger generation of actors in front of the cameras, but will concentrate on directing. If the hit, Gran Torino is a manifestation of Eastwood’s latest auteur work, we look forward to what is coming from him – happy birthday, Mr. Eastwood.