Clint Eastwood: A Biography (Paperback)

by Richard Schickel (Author) "What an American was Clint Eastwood," Norman Mailer wrote as he worked his way toward the peroration of a 1983 Sunday supplement article on him-as..." (more)
Key Phrases: shady habits, honkytonk man, moth side, Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Schickel, a movie critic for Time magazine, surveys the life and career of Hollywood's laconic macho superstar. Eastwood's career has slowly developed: television success in Rawhide; his icon-defining role as the nameless gunslinger in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns; movie superstardom with the Dirty Harry series; then a softening, and even some intellectual respectability, with his Oscar for directing Unforgiven. Shickel chronicles Eastwood's middle-class upbringing in Oakland, California, details a personal life that included a drive to bed many women, and recasts Eastwood from his role as the male equivalent of the "dumb blonde" to that of "one of the great ironists of the age." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The career of actor and filmmaker Clint Eastwood has been one of the most unusual in cinema history. Starting out as a bit player in such 1950s films as The Return of the Creature and Tarantula, and then as a young hunk in the TV series Rawhide, Eastwood hurtled to international fame in 1964 by starring in an Italian western made in Spain, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. It took Eastwood another 20 years, however, to begin to win over critics. His ascent from critical contempt to adulation, even as he has remained enormously popular with fans, forms the heart of this superb biography. Schickel (Brando), a film critic for Time magazine, is a friend of Eastwood's, but this privilege doesn't blinker his critical eye. The actor's personal life is evoked in telling detail, and Eastwood's relentless womanizing isn't whitewashed. The core of the book, though, is Schickel's passionate defense of Eastwood as actor and director; in fact, he makes a convincing case for Eastwood as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. The production and critical reception of Eastwood's most important films are recounted in detail; especially outstanding is Schickel's analysis of the still-controversial Dirty Harry. Schickel zeros in on Eastwood's appeal, showing through his acute interpretive readings of the films how the actor combines the masculine authority and repressed rage of Gary Cooper and John Wayne with an almost postmodern ironic self-consciousness. Some of Eastwood's most compelling films (The Beguiled; Tightrope; Unforgiven), Schickel contends, have deliberately played with, and even subverted, the usual cliches of masculine film performance. No mere celebrity bio, this is a beautifully written, comprehensive and astonishingly insightful study of a man who, seemingly against all odds, has achieved world renown as both a pop culture icon and an accomplished film artist. Photos, not seen by PW. 100,000 first printing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 568 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 21, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679749918
• ISBN-13: 978-0679749912
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #565,563 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A serious look at Clint, June 17, 2002

By A Customer

There's plenty of opportunity to gripe about this biography: The writing style is ponderous and sometimes downright clumsy, there's not enough details about Clint's private life, there's too much trivia about incidental movie roles (i.e. Witches.) But that aside it is nice to see a serious examination of Clint the Film Maker, which I might add does offer good critical examination of his movies, pointing out many of the movies' weaknesses as well as their strengths, and offering solid reasons for why the theme or story appealed to Clint. Pigeonholed early by narrowminded critics for his supposedly anti-establishment, brutal movies, he had to wait another twenty years for the critical tide to turn and for there to be a re-evaluation of his contribution to cinema (at least here in the U.S. -- in other parts of the world he'd long been recognized as a great director and actor.) And still some of the best movies he's done (whether he directed them or not) are not given the credit they deserve by self-important critics: Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Outlaw Josey Wales, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird all come to mind as well as many others. In forty years of making movies beginning with A Fistful of Dollars, most of the time coming out with a movie a year, he's been involved in less than a handful of mediocre movies, none of them ranking as truly bad. The Rookie and City Heat come to mind as truly mediocre movies, certainly bordering on bad, and there's a couple of others that had good potential but turned out to be bad decisions on his part, but I consider that a fantastic track record. He knows story and he knows how to get the most from out of a movie, and it's the reason he's stayed at the top of the box-office for all these decades despite the fact that he's never done just what "the audience" wants from him.

I recommend the book Interviews, for those interested in Clint the film maker, which is an excellent collection of interviews in which Clint very articulately discusses his ideas of film making.

I can't help but add that I have to wonder about one of the reviewers who wrote that whether Unforgiven was a great movie was "questionable." Then does there exist a unquestionably great movie?

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable read, very informative., July 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Clint Eastwood: A Biography (Hardcover)

This is an excellent book about the life and work of a legend. Richard Schickel gives us a close look at the free spirited man that's living inside of the veteran actor. Very detail work about Mr. Eastwood's movie making process and his no bulls**t attitude toward the studio execs and anyone who stands on his way. Ms. Pauline Kael should just say it out loud that she's begging for the legend's attention or just shut the hell up. Any Eastwood fan will really appreciate the author's work.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Padded and Nonobjective..., August 9, 2004

By	Rory Coker (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you are looking for a thick book about actor/director Clint Eastwood's life and career, illustrated with some unusual photos, then this will fill the bill. If you want an objective biography of Eastwood, together with an objective analysis of his film work, this is not the book you want. Schickel was basically an employee and friend of Eastwood during the researching and writing of the book, and he tends to ignore or downplay the dark side of Eastwood's activities, particularly his alleged "women are like kleenex" philosophy, and his alleged cruelty toward former collaborators.

The long book is made longer by merciless padding, including detailed and completely unnecessary plot summaries of the films.

Viewed from 2004, Clint Eastwood is an important actor--- as good an actor as Jimmy Stewart and as iconic an actor as John Wayne. He is also an important and stylish director, and justifiably famous for his gentle ways with cast and crew, as well as his efficiency in coming in under budget. One of the author's continuing themes, brought up on nearly every page, turns upon the consistent misunderstanding of Eastwood, both as actor and director, by two generations of famous mainstream film critics. This theme wears thin quickly when one realizes that there is probably not a single case in which famous mainstream film critics have had the slightest clue as to the value, importance and significance of any new film or film star.

Eastwood is an important figure in 20th Century cinema, and he deserves an objective, scholarly, independently-researched analysis of all aspects of his life and career. I don't know of one... we'll keep looking.