Clint Eastwood turns 92: What are the best movies of the movie legend?

From series B to the ‘spagghetti western’, from the violent police to infinity. The toughest old man in Hollywood celebrates 92 years and, probably, he doesn’t care. At most, he could coin another of his irrefutable phrases, in the style “Am I feeling lucky today?”, in the voice of “Dirty Harry” (1971), “Come on, make my day” in “Sudden Impact” or “Little girl, being tough is not enough,” utters the wise boxing coach of “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).

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Indeed, Clint Eastwood He is not one of those who blows out candles wearing a cone hat. When on the red carpet of the Oscars in the early 1970s pickets of outraged protesters were formed with banners saying “Dirty Harry is a disgusting pig”, the actor already showed that what they said or wrote about him did not give a damn. In that he was the same as his character, the hyperviolent police officer Harry Callahan: “First they call me a right-winger. After racist. Now as a macho”, he once told the “Village Voice”. “It’s fashionable to make people feel guilty about different things. I don’t care, because I know where the fuck I am on the planet, and I don’t give a shit.”, he stated without diplomacy.

So, although we are sure that tributes like this do not provoke a smile, the enthusiasm of those summoned by El Comercio, among filmmakers, critics and authors who reflect long before sharing their favorite Eastwood film; brings the emotion that the tough Clint rarely shows. This is a tribute to his 92 years and to his almost two meters, to his genius without imposture, to his human truth. One more anniversary of a protagonist in the living history of contemporary cinema.

Here their answers:

Augusto Cabada (screenwriter): To say that “Unforgiven” is Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece is a truism, so I prefer to deal with a film that was not even directed by him. “Dirty Harry” (Dirty Harry, 1971), a fierce thriller directed with a master’s hand by Don Siegel, cemented the Eastwood myth as much as the spaghetti westerns he shot with Leone. The film – often described as fascist with some reason – presents Clint as the dry and brutal policeman who chases a savage hippy serial killer, without dwelling on niceties such as human rights and replacing the old western revolver with a Magnum. 44. Pure adrenaline.

Hernan Migoya (writer): Eastwood had just starred in his best-written “Dirty Harry” (by Milius and Cimino!) and badly adapted the great Trevanian in “The Eiger Sanction”. “The Fugitive Josey Wales” (1976), also with a prodigious novel behind it, redeems him: a revenge story where the hero is a Southerner and the murderers are Yankees. Eastwood rides and directs with more verve than ever. In passing, he reveals the great truth that we all hide: that a commendable color, party or ideology can harbor a bunch of heartless. Good intentions and packaging do not make the individual and cowards always choose the winning side.

Fernando Ampuero (writer): “The Unforgivable” is Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece and is today considered among the hundred best films in history. It is not a nostalgic classic western that alludes to the epic and the nobility of those who, it seems, built the foundations of the American dream in the 19th century (and they built it, you know, killing Indians and killing each other in the civil war ). More than a dream, that was a nightmare and, from this point of view, “The Unforgiven” qualifies as a twilight western, because the notions of good and evil do not separate their differences, and because the protagonists are old and tired guys, ready to burst bullets into those who prevent them from fulfilling one last redemptive task, before collecting a reward and going into retirement. This film brings unforgettable characters and scenes, but I prefer William Munny (veteran Eastwood), a man spurred on by an unbridled feeling that resembles justice.

Álvaro Velarde (filmmaker): If I had to pick one of the Clint Eastwood movies I’ve seen, it would be “Unforgiven”. It was for me the discovery of how a competent actor revealed himself as a dazzling director while making the dying western shine again. The story – a retired hit man who lives on a farm raising his two children, tempted by a juicy reward to do one last job – takes up classic elements of the genre, such as the open exterior shots and the plot, but gives it a modern approach raising a moral question where there are no defined villains or heroes. Although I rarely coincide with the Oscars, having won the statuette the following year in both the Best Picture and Best Director categories was a success.

Renato Cisneros (writer): I prefer The Unforgivable, the last great western. Especially for the central character, William Munny, the antithesis of the genre. Far from being the wild cowboy who robs stagecoaches and mows down Indians with shotguns on a plain, Munny is a retired bandit, once the most feared in the west, who accepts one last job for economic but also moral reasons: he wants to repay the honor of some prostitutes. I like that he’s a principled gunslinger. It is an epic, pessimistic film that reflects on the almost always irremediable consequences of violence in our lives. In addition, its cast is unobjectionable: Richard Harris, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman. I think it is the film that consecrates Eastwood in Hollywood, and with which he pays tribute to Sergio Leone, the director who launched him to fame in “A Fistful of Dollars”, the mother of westerns. And if all that weren’t enough, it was written by David Peoples, the writer of Blade Runner! Is not sufficient?

Miguel Iza (actor): I am not a lover of westerns, but “The Unforgivable” is one of the films that I store most carefully in my memory. Perhaps because it finds three of its protagonists at the maturity of their careers, perhaps because the heroes are monumental antiheroes, perhaps because it finds me back in the career that I had left behind years before, acting. Perhaps because I saw it alone, with a voracity that few movies have provoked in me. The firm hand of the director, portraying every moment, every character, every situation. Loss, hope, belonging, loneliness. Clint-style death.

Chacho León (film critic): It is difficult to venture to say that “A Perfect World” is Clint Eastwood’s best film, but it is one of the endearing ones among his abundant filmography as a director. A story of persecution, but also of the link that is established between the persecuted kidnapper and the kidnapped child on the roads and open landscapes of that deep North America through which the film circulates. It has something of a road movie, a police story, a western, a lyrical drama and it works well no matter how you look at it.

Richard Parra (writer): For the successful tragic containment of its plot, for the simple, although complex, execution of the narrative, a road movie of persecution that, against credulous expectations, heads towards the most disastrous and traumatic, even towards fascism. For the mixture of innocence, tenderness, sense of adventure, eroticism and humor, with the most heinous violence: serial crimes, cold-blooded murders, hostage taking, child abuse, racism and police excess. For the admirable display of a childish gaze that discovers the enjoyment of freedom and the horror of fanaticism and death.

Giovanna Pollarolo (writer): I choose Clint Eastwood from “The Bridges of Madison County”. Difficult choice because his life has not only been long but enormously productive. When other actors were withdrawing due to lack of roles due to their advanced age to represent conventional leading men, Clint consolidated his career as a director that began in the 70s. And in 1995 he directed and starred as a mature heartthrob who was light years away from both the young enigmatic and violent that he represented in Leone’s Spaghetti Western as the authoritarian and macho “Dirty Harry” (which I never liked). I stay, for a long time, with the mature and lonely photographer lost in the fields of Iowa in love with Francesca (Merryl Streep), when it is already too late for both of them.

Leny Fernández (film critic): I usually go back to those Eastwood movies that don’t make the medal table. One is “Blood Debt”, which seems to be just an effective police piece, but whose sadness differentiates it from a simple genre exercise. And it is that Clint made something that he learned from Don Siegel his own: show desolation without fuss, and rudeness as armor. In this film, Eastwood pays homage to his teacher in a night sequence that refers to “Dirty Harry”, and himself incarnating it. Decades later, however, this aging Harry ends up resembling Scottie from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” as an agent retired with a disabling condition, on the trail of a ghostly criminal who challenges him and plunges him into guilt (nightmare included). A self-referential Clint who demystifies himself, who serves the cinema, and uses it without pretensions. Can you ask for more?

Santiago Roncagliolo (writer): “Mystic River” is a movie for men. I don’t mean a macho movie. I mean, it delves into issues that are especially sensitive for our half of the world: male friendship and its atavistic loyalties, the humiliation of the one who should be strong, and the failure to fit into traditional male social roles. He also does it with the rhythm of a thriller, because that is the trademark of Clint Eastwood: unpretentious high-sounding films, in the tradition of the best entertainment, that are good for their extraordinary craft, their empathy towards the characters and their respect for the public. Because Eastwood, like Hitchcock, does not claim to be a genius. He just wants to make movies. But he can’t help but be cool.

Joel Calero (filmmaker): Choosing my favorite Clint Eastwood movie, I hesitate between “The Bridges of Madison County”, “The Unforgivable” and “Mystic River”, but I decide on the latter: under the scaffolding, the adventures and the texture of a gloomy police Eastwood builds a film that, without abandoning the grounds of the genre, is discovered as a moral fable that delves into the motives of fraternal or paternal jealousy that drive and justify homicidal revenge and the pacts of silence that bury a crime, unique and plural. For this reason, “Río Místico” is the endoscopy of the US, that country with no place for the weak.

Rodrigo Nuñez Carvallo (writer): I bet on a Clint Eastwood film that did not convince the critics: “The Mule.” They say that good movies resonate with you in your subconscious, sometimes all your life, and Clint has made some of them. On the plot line of an old flower grower who goes bankrupt and becomes a drug donkey, Clint develops a metaphor of himself, an allegory of old age and his film career. His formal life as a war veteran is nothing but his prestige as the protagonist of the majestic spaghetti western by Sergio Leone. The abandoned affective life does not only reflect his love disorder, but also his foray into the most vain commercial cinema of the “Dirty Harry” wave. After his debacle, his conversion into a mule is a metaphor for his latest production, since “The Unforgivable” in 1992. His capture by the police is a kind of cynical redemption against art and old ideas and decrepit that he professes today. That’s why the image of him, lanky and old, moves me and has stuck to my retinas.