It's got horses and cowboy hats and dynamite--it's great!

I am enjoying catching up with the Clint Eastwood movies and the westerns that I should have seen in high school, which I skipped because those things were Not Cool. Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) finds him offering the same generous team-playing spirit he demonstrated in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and this time he's a cowboy. Well, not a cowboy. He's the Clint Eastwood Western Guy. Cynical, this time with more humor than in the Leone films, but with dynamite and a sincere desire to get paid.

So many things about early-70s films are hard to judge today because it is hard to tell the difference between style and laziness. Is Shirley MacLaine's eye makeup overdone because we're supposed to guess she's not really a nun, or is it because we're still in the era when make-up is overdone and scenes are overlit? Actually, the scenes are not overlit, because the film is beautifully shot by the legendary Mexican cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, who made John Ford's The Fugitive so beautiful, he helped ruin a bad film. (That's a story for another time.)

In a similar betwixt-and-between vein, it is hard to tell if the film is meant to be light piffle, counter-cultural, or a bit of genre bending. Today, it feels like a puff pastry that went a little flat, making it a perfectly good croissant. Bring your own butter or jam and you'll have a good time.

Eastwood channels Bud Abbott

I recently finished the engaging but overlong, over- adulatory and premature biography of Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel (it was written in 1996, before Eastwood's directing eclipsed his acting). The most interesting write-up of a film was that of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), which is, as Schickel wrote, a loopy low-rent heist comedy in which Eastwood lays back and plays straight back to an electric Jeff Bridges. This is Eastwood lite--not so much the tight-lipped, sharp-elbowed loner, but a fellow who has long been involved in left-handed forms of human endeavor (to borrow a phrase from Huston's Asphalt Jungle) and has learned to keep his head down.

Most surprisingly, the film is written and directed by Michael Cimino, who thereafter brought forth onto this continent the ponderous but thrilling Deer Hunter and the ponderous and tedious Heaven's Gate. (Cimino has made a few films since, but effectively he has fallen off the planet since Heaven's Gate's failure wiped out an entire studio, United Artists, which had been in existence for 62 years. That is literally an epic fail.) None of his other work would suggest that Cimino had the easy-going sense of humor displayed here; actually, there would have been little reason to expect it of Eastwood, other than the black humor of the Leone films, which could have been ascribed purely to Leone.

Today this film would have to be produced independently, directed by a Rian Johnson or maybe Soderbergh doing a downscale run. Of the big stars, only Clooney or Pitt would let themselves be overshadowed by a supporting player (and let themselves look ridiculous) as happens here. Only an independent film would let the heist go wrong in quite the way it does, nor let the tables be turned the way they are in the end. In one sense, it makes the 1970's seem long ago, in that this was considered a routine studio-star project, even with a brand-new writer/director. In another sense, the film seems eminently contemporary, with neither heavy production or heavy morality imposed on it by the ponderous studio system that reconstituted itself in the 1980's and 1990's. I'm reminded of Charley Varrick or Quick Change, dark comedies disguised as action or crime films.

Here's the best thing I can about this movie: this would be the perfect picture to lay around on a Sunday afternoon watching with my old man. He would really have liked it.

It depends on what you mean by disciplined...

As I said in my earlier post on Gran Torino, I am absolutely staggered by the high level of achievement of Clint Eastwood's last six films as director, and I marvel that I have not seen any prominent critic point that out. Given Eastwood's generally high esteem in the critical community today (a 180-degree reversal since the 1970s, when I remember avoiding his movies), I wondered if I hadn't underestimated his work all these years.

My impression of his films was that they were craftsmanlike, indulgent of actors and a bit lackadaisical in the areas of narrative economy and suspense. I decided to look at one of his best-regarded westerns, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which began the turnaround of his critical reputation.

Eastwood gets a lot of favorable press for being humble, efficient, considerate of the people he works with and with other people's money, always being on time and on or under budget. These are indeed admirable in an age of wasteful and self-important directors. But these fine characteristics have no bearing on the quality of his work. John Ford was often an obnoxious jerk, but he has no serious rival for the post of Greatest American Director. So frequently Eastwood is described as a "disciplined" director. Well, disciplined he may well be in his personal life and in his professional demeanor. But his films, at least until recently, display little or no narrative discipline, meandering around into every little backwater and side event until the main line of the story is almost forgotten or obliterated.

And so, though I had not seen it before, Josey Wales delivered exactly the virtues and drawbacks that I expected. Fine photography by Bruce Surtees, wonderful casting and rich performances, gentle and self-deprecating humor, virtually no narrative drive and overlength. Functionally, the film's story ends about 23 minutes in. Yes, that's when the baddies begin to chase Josey, but Josey doesn't seem to have anything he wants to do or anywhere he wants to go other than to avoid the baddies who want to kill him. So he wanders around, picking up a collection of interesting oddball characters, including Chief Dan George and Sondra Locke, and finally the baddies show up and finally he kills them all, and to whom was that a surprise? [Oops--shoulda had a spoiler alert--oh, c'mon!]

Filmmakers always say in interviews that they were drawn to a project by the great story, and this one is no exception. But so often I have no idea what they're talking about when say there's a great story. A comparison of the running times of Eastwood's films of the 70s and 80s with his current works will demonstrate that his pictures are getting shorter, stories are becoming tauter and he has developed greater skill in maintaining consistent lines of tension and interest throughout his films. The virtues of his mid-career work still seem limited to me.