Year of Eastwood #16

Pale Rider (1985)

Starring: Eastwood

Directed by Eastwood

Life in a gold mine town is pretty sweet livin. You spend most of your day playing in the dirt. You get a steady diet of beans, work flex-time hours, and showering is optional. In fact, if you want to take a day off and get drunk - that’s ok because really all you need to do is find one good-sized nugget and you’d be set for the whole winter. Then there’s all that singing and dancing in the mud. But once in a while a pack of thugs will ride into camp and stake their claim on your land and shoot your dog.

Most of the prospectors pick themselves up, dust themselves off (why bother) and start panning for another day. Some dude named Ulrik decides he’s had enough and packs up his sleepin mat and heads for the hills … those Ulrik’s have a tendency of being kinda flaky when the going gets tough. A young girl, who had to bury her dog, prays to God to send down an angel to protect them from danger. Enter Clint - the Pale Rider himself.

That’s a heck of coincidence - or is it? Is Clint a do-gooder Preacher who happens to ride into town to save the day or is there a higher power at play here to exact vengeance for this girl’s dead dog? Well it’s up to you to figure it out because Pale Rider doesn’t provide the answers. There’s no back story for this Mysterious Stranger, oddly enough, he doesn’t even seem to have a name.

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There is a quick glimpse at a possible clue, Clint’s back is splattered with bullet hole scars that would have killed any normal man. But Lesson 1 of Eastwood 101 is that Clint is no normal man. He can wield an ax handle like a Samurai and he can smack a giant in the berries with a sledge hammer and still have enough oomph to crack a large boulder in two.

Into town rides the crooked Deputy and his gang of six gunslingers. The Deputy and Clint have a history, but don‘t expect the movie to tell you what it is. Maybe he’s the guy that put those scars on Clint’s back? Well the Deputy seems to be under the impression that Clint is dead. I have a sneaky feeling he was the one that done done the killing, so needless to say, he’s a bit surprised when Clint puts a bullet in his head.

Pale Rider has an ambiguous style that is more successful than the actual execution of the film. By the time the late 80’s rolled around, Westerns were pretty much a dead horse. Pale Rider was hyped as the great return of the classic American cinema style … it didn’t turn out to quite be the savior that Clint was riding in on his spotted white horse.

Denver Churches

Year of Eastwood #15

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Starring: Eastwood
Directed by Eastwood

Clint is the Stranger in town. The townspeople of Largo don’t take too kindly to strangers. Something about outsiders makes them nervous. Clint drifts by after a long day of riding across the high plains and all he’s looking for is some whiskey and a hot bath, and maybe some munchkin to light his cigar. Three guys from the Welcoming Committee stop by to greet Clint, but he ends up shooting them. Turns out the guys were the goons the town hired for protection against the bad guys. So the town decides since Clint killed their protection, he's qualified for the job.

The women in Largo (both of them) are wild - kinda like those stray cats you find out in the barn. They scratch and claw, but after a tumble in Clint’s bed, he tames them but good. The men in the town are yeller and they promise Clint anything he wants in return for his protection. Clint takes them up on their offer which equates to a handful of cigars, fried chicken, and some gumballs and blankets for the town Indians. Clint's always nice to them Indians. Clint trains the men to fight the bad guys - which involves some target practice and painting the town red. When the moment of truth arrives, the town rolls over like a sack of potatoes, so it’s Clint to the rescue.

High Plains Drifter, like many of the American Westerns, is a version of the morality play. The perils that can be faced in the undiscovered country, where pioneers looking to lead their own way of life end up paying a high price for making up their own rules. The townspeople are trying to cover up a dirty secret and Clint is part of that past. In the same way that High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, involves the sheriff protecting a town that doesn’t deserve his help - Clint gets involved with a town that clearly doesn’t deserve saving. But he does his duty, leaving the town in shambles, and off he goes into the sunset. I’m sure the next town he stops at will be glad to see him.

Go Rockies!

In one of the most amazing story in sports, the Colorado Rockies will be playing in the 2007 World Series. The Rockies have been in existence for little over a decade and have spent many of those years near the bottom of the league. Even this year, the Rockies struggled to play .500 baseball. Then in an amazing run to end the season, the Rockies won 13 of their last 14 games to force a one game play-in game for the wild card spot.

In that game, the Padres took a 2 run lead in the top of the 13th inning - and the Rockies scored 3 runs in the bottom of the inning, in what should be considered the greatest play of the year as Holliday took a face plant into homeplate as the catcher blocked the plate and then dropped the ball. Then the Rockies carried that momentum into sweeping the Phillies and the Diamondbacks.

What has made this season even more amazing is that this team that is pretty much ignored by all MLB media - and the team may end up not only as World Champs, but also the NL MVP (Holliday), Rookie of the Year (Tulowitzki), and Manager of the Year (Hurdle). Go Rockies!

Year of Eastwood #14

Paint Your Wagon (1969)

Starring: Eastwood, Lee Marvin
Directed by Joshua Logan

Three words that will instantly divide the legions of die-hard Clint fans: Paint Yer Wagon. Love it or hate it - it’s seemingly impossible not to have a strong opinion on this musical Western. Some fans proudly declare Paint Yer Wagon as the best Clint movie ever with a kick ass soundtrack to boot and others will spit in your eye if you start singing a few lines from Wand’rin’ Star. The film has even so inspired some middle school English teachers to sing a few ditties from the Wagon during class.

Clint is Pardner with Lee Marvin, searching for gold and escaping all those pesky social norms of livin‘ with the civilized. They strike it rich and life is high - living with hundreds of other men, dancing in the mud, and singing about beans. But when one of them there Mormon travels into town with his two wives, the men suddenly remember the one thing missing from their Utopia … the friendly comfort of the female persuasion. Marvin (playing the same drunken character that won him an Oscar in Cat Ballou) outbids all the other fellas for one of the Mormon’s wives. When he sobers up, Marvin angers up his blood over the lusty way all the town folk look at his lovely, young bride. So the men decide the only thing better than a mining town in the hills full of hairy men is to build themselves the best little whorehouse in Gold Country.

Paint Yer Wagon is really a feminism picture at heart. Sure there’s all that prostitutin’ and ownership of women’s mineral rights - but when Marvin’s wife falls in love with both Clint and Marvin, she reckons there ain’t no reason she can’t be married to two men. While the threesome lives in marital bliss, the town of No Name (nudge, nudge) prospers with it’s gambling, drinking, and gold dust women. But when the townsfolk start meddling in the trade of fighting bears against bulls, the town sinks into the mud … same thing happened to Michael Vick.

The 1960’s saw the rise of gritty, auteur-style film-makers creating realistic dramas, but the box office records rolled in by the 99 44/100% pure Sound of Music opened the eyes of Hollywood producers that there was still buckets of money to be made with musicals, so they were slapping together anything Broadway had to offer. By the end of the decade, the public’s interest in musicals began to fade, but not until there was one colossal failure to put the nail in the coffin … enter Paint Yer Wagon. Over budget, over schedule, and over the top - Wagon was a complete flop when it was released.

The measure of any musical’s success is its hummability. There ain’t much to hum about in Paint Yer Wagon. Most of the songs are sung by a men’s chorus with a dull collectiveness that might play well in bingo halls, but for the rest of us it signals a good opening for a bathroom break. Yes, Clint does all his own singing and he certainly doesn’t embarrass himself what with the squinting and singing despite the fact that he’s singing about talking to trees.

Clint’s covered just about ever genre: action, comedy, romance, western, and musical. A few years ago there was even a techno dance tune called Clint Eastwood by the animated hip hop group Gorillaz. You pretty much know you’ve made it to icon status when a group of cartoon rock stars sing about what a bad ass you are … unless of course it’s the Banana Splits.

Year of Eastwood #13

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Starring: Eastwood
Directed by Sergio Leone

Clint starred as the Man with No Name in a trio of Spaghetti Westerns for director Sergio Leone. Fistful of Dollars was the first of the trilogy but there isn’t much of a connection between the films. Clint wears a poncho and squints a lot but since his character doesn’t even have a name, it’s hard to really create much of a character development.

Actually, there’s some debate on Man with No Name topic. In the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Wallach refers to Clint as Blondie, but that seems more like a nickname. And in Fistful, there is a guy that calls him Joe a couple of times, but there really isn’t any basis to think anyone in town checked Clint's ID.

Just like how many of these films start out, Clint wanders into a mysterious town and quickly learns the townsfolk ain’t too friendly to strangers. Some thugs insult Clint’s mule and after they refuse to apologize, Clint’s shoots them. Clint had no idea that shooting a bunch of guys would get him into so much trouble. The men he killed were part of a ruthless family that runs the town of San Miguel. Clint is immediately a hero to the other ruthless family that runs the town. (The town seems pretty small so I’m not sure how it exactly can support two ruthless families, but I’m sure they put their differences aside every year during the holidays.)

Clint soon realizes that neither family is worth spit, so he begins his scheme to pit the families against one another so he can take his rightful spot as the main man in town. Actually, that wasn’t his plan. How about Clint realizes if he can destroy both families he can make off with the booty of gold. No, I guess that’s not really the plan either. To be honest, I was pretty confused with most of what was going on in this movie. There was some lady who was with some guy but she was being forced to be with some other guy, but I couldn’t really tell the two guys apart, so it was hard to know who to root for. There was some scenes with a couple of dead guys in a cemetery but Clint kept telling everyone that they were alive - and then some guy shot them again. It was even difficult to tell whether it was night or day in some of the scenes.

In the end both families were dead, some guy rang the church bell, and Clint rode off in the sunset.

Leone considered several actors for the role of the Man formerly known as No Name. Among the actors who turned down the role - Henry Fonda, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson. After Richard Harrison declined, he suggested that Leone check out Clint, the rising star of the TV Western Rawhide. After being turned down by pretty much every star in Hollywood, Leone offered the role to Clint and the rest - as they say - is history.

Initially the film was called The Magnificent Stranger, the title wasn't changed to A Fistful of Dollars until just days before the movie premiered in theaters. In fact, nobody had bothered to inform Clint of the name change, and as a result Eastwood wasn’t even aware of the positive buzz surrounding the movie until an agent pointed it out to him in Variety three weeks later. A few years later, the producers of Rawhide tried to cash in on Clint’s popularity by releasing a compilation of a couple of Rawhide episodes as a theatrical release, naming it The Magnificent Stranger … real original guys.

Fistful of Dollars is raw, gritty, and definitely violent. The film was produced on a much lower budget than Good, Bad, and Ugly - but the film also lacks in other areas, mainly the infusion of comedy into the storyline. Fistful doesn’t really stand as one of Clint’s most entertaining films, but holds a special mention as the film that helped Clint transform into a superstar for the next decades to follow.