Clint Eastwood retired so quietly that I didn’t even notice until his birthday came around this weekend, and for the first time in my lifetime — and my parents’ lifetimes for that matter — that there isn’t a Clint Eastwood movie in production.
Well, maybe just one. But I’ll come back to that in a moment.
The Hollywood legend turned 96 on Sunday, making him more than a third as old as the Republic itself. He was born in 1930, just as the Great Depression was really getting going. His first screen appearance was an uncredited role in 1955’s Revenge of the Creature, the quickie sequel The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Small parts on TV and movies followed, until his starring role as Rowdy Yates on the long-running TV western, Rawhide.
Movie stardom eluded Eastwood until he traveled to Italy to headline as Joe in Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars.
He quickly became one of the big screen’s biggest draws, but as the old Hollywood cliche goes, what he really wanted to do was direct. And produce. And continue those starring roles.
Seriously, the man is a machine.
His first directorial outing was 1971’s Play Misty for Me, which scarred the crap out of me when I saw it on TV as a kid and scarred me even more when I finally watched it again as an adult. That film allowed Eastwood his first public expression of his lifelong love for jazz, culminating in his 1988 Charlie Parker biopic, Bird.
He made no fewer than five Dirty Harry movies, but also blew the character apart by showing us what a rogue cop might look like in real life with the criminally underappreciated Tightrope in 1984.
The man who helped reimagine westerns in the 1960s with Leone reimagined them again in 1992 with Unforgiven — and by then he was already in his 60s, with another 30-plus years of moviemaking ahead of him. In 2004, he finally won a belated second Best Director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby.
For my money, Eastwood should have, or at least could have, also won for Play Misty, Bird, and Gran Torino. But he didn’t often make the kind of BIG IMPORTANT MOVIES that Academy members feel like they’re supposed to vote for.
Eastwood just made damn good movies, and his pictures typically came in on schedule and under budget. He rarely budgeted for big money or long shoots. That’s one reason that, despite directing 45 movies and taking some serious chances along the way, he only made a handful that lost money.
Did I mention he’s a machine? And while Eastwood might be done acting and directing, he still has one more upcoming producer credit on IMDB, a remake of his 1977 action classic, The Gauntlet— with Tom Cruise and Scarlett Johansson attached.
But this is starting to sound like an obituary, when what I wanted to do was wish the man (not a machine, really) a happy birthday and a satisfying retirement.
So let’s talk about that for just a moment.
Around the time of 2012’s Trouble With the Curve, I started joking that Eastwood — already 82 — would never retire. My prediction-disguised-as-a-joke was that he’d die on the set of some new movie, and would be working so hard that he wouldn’t notice until St. Peter cleared his throat at him.
But Eastwood did quietly retire after 2024’s Juror #2, although I’m not sure his heart was really in it.
The picture raised a tough moral question, without preaching and without any comforting answers. I still think about that flick sometimes, and can’t wait to go back to it.
With a solid cast — Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Kiefer Sutherland, and J.K. Simmons — and a modest budget, Juror #2 was exactly the kind of taut, engrossing, and clever thriller Eastwood was known for directing, going all the way back to Misty.
But Hollywood murdered Eastwood’s murder-trial flick.
First, Warner Bros. spent maybe $18 on marketing. Me — a lifelong Eastwood fan — only heard of it by accident, and not until it had already ended its theatrical run.
It had maybe a two-week theatrical run.
On fewer than 50 screens.
Even though Juror #2 was considered good enough to cap off the 38th annual AFI Fest — the longest-running film festival in Los Angeles — that’s as much backing as Warner gave it before dumping it to rent on streaming. Even then, you had to squint like Clint to find it.
Is that any way to treat one of Hollywood’s most storied names, who just made a $30 million picture with a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes?
Maybe it was belated payback for that Empty Chair bit Eastwood did for Mitt Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention, I don’t know.
I might hang it up after that, too, even if I did still have another picture or three left in me.
So let me say this directly on his belated 96th birthday.
Mr. Eastwood, if Warner’s poor treatment drove you into an early retirement — if “early” could be at all appropriate for a career as long as yours — then I’ll miss like hell the films you didn’t get to make. But there are an awful lot of us who still appreciate you for all the ones you did.
Happy birthday.
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