CLINT EASTWOOD. A Biography. - Hardcover

[Eastwood, Clint]. Schickel, Richard.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224038117 ISBN 13: 9780224038119

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf,, 1996

Synopsis

"Authoritative . . . highly nuanced . . . gives the reader a palpable sense of Mr. Eastwood's career."
--The New York Times

From the moment The Man With No Name first fixed the screen with his murderous squint, from the first time audiences heard Dirty Harry Callahan growl "Make my day," Clint Eastwood has been an icon of American manhood in all its coolness and ferocity. But that icon is also an actor of surprising subtlety, a filmmaker of vast intelligence and originality--and an intensely private man who eludes the stereotypes with which his fans and critics try to label him.

In this in-depth biography, the distinguished film critic Richard Schickel talks with Eastwood's family, friends, and colleagues--and, above all, with his notoriously reticent subject--to produce a portrait more astute and revealing than any we have ever had.

Following Eastwood from his unstable childhood through his turbulent love affairs, assessing films from A Fistful of Dollars to the Oscar-winning The Unforgiven, and locating the subversive streak of rage and solitude that runs through all his work, Clint Eastwood is candid and endlessly fascinating, an unerring closeup of one of our brightest stars.

"Exhilarating . . . substantial, insightful, and right."
--Newsday

About this title

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."

About the Author:

Richard Schickel has been reviewing movies--first for Life, then for Time--for exactly as long as Clint Eastwood has been starring in them. He is the author of many books about film and filmmakers, among them The Disney Version, the definitive study of Walt Disney and his works; D. W. Griffith: An American Life, which won the British Film Institute Book Prize; and The Men Who Made the Movies, on the directors of the classic Hollywood age. For more than two decades he has been making television documentaries, mainly about the history of movies. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and has taught film history and criticism at Yale and USC. He lives in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf,
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0224038117
• ISBN 13: 9780224038119
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 424