Yes, it is a Throwback Thursday so your intrepid reporter decides to post about, who else, Clint Eastwood and the films he’s directed. More specifically, what could arguably be called his 10 best directorial efforts. Although I did have some help from HitFix.com, a site described as “the fastest growing entertainment news brand, driving discovery, conversation and choices for passionate entertainment fans.” Take a look and see if you agree with one of boomer males favorite big screen actors (and directors) of our time.
Top 10 Films Directed by Clint Eastwood
“No one’s selection of favorite Eastwood-directed films is likely to look quite the same as anyone else’s, so I thought he’d make an interesting subject for a top 10 list.”
-Guy Lodge, Hitfix.com
Here’s the list in countdown form from Hitfix.com:
10. “High Plains Drifter”
Year: 1973
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill
Key awards: none
Why it’s among his best: Coming from someone who’s seen as such an emblematic figure of the genre, the first western Eastwood ever directed is a mighty eccentric one — an eerie atmospheric exercise that’s part small-town revenge drama, part ghost story, and takes its cue in both respects as much from Japanese stylists like Kurosawa and Mizogunch as Leone, Siegel and other western standard-bearers name-dropped in its cryptic cemetery.
9. “Million Dollar Baby”
Year: 2004
Cast: Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman
Key awards: Best Picture, Academy Awards, National Society of Film Critics; Best Director, Academy Awards, Golden Globes, DGA Awards, New York Film Critics’ Circle
Why it’s among his best: There’s a streak of pure, sentimental emotional savagery that runs through this shadowed boxing melodrama — it’s a film that makes you feel things, even if you don’t much like how you’re made to feel them.
8. “Pale Rider”
Year: 1985
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, Carrie Snodgress
Key awards: Nominated for Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival
Why it’s among his best: A companion piece of sorts to “High Plains Drifter” — with a heavy debt to “Shane” as well — this may be Eastwood’s most austere western, and also seems a formative work toward his current aesthetic: Bruce Surtees’ glorious cinematography plays dingy interiors against misty outdoor sunlight. There’s a quasi-mythic resonance, too, to this story of an enigmatic moral figure (referred to as a Preacher, though his story is as hazy as anything else) rescuing a town from its venal controllers.
7. “White Hunter, Black Heart”
Year: 1990
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza
Key awards: Nominated for Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival
Why it’s among his best: Among the most undervalued of all Eastwood’s “serious” works, this is the film that finds him grappling most testily with the model of conservative American masculinity for which the star himself is a key representative.
6. “Mystic River”
Year: 2003
Cast: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden
Key awards: Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, Academy Awards; Best Picture, National Board of Review; Nominated for Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival
Why it’s among his best: Widely viewed as Eastwood’s artistic comeback after a run of marginal work like “Blood Work” and “Space Cowboys,” this cool-toned but hot-blooded Boston crime melodrama introduced — and arguably still best represents — the most recent phase of his directorial career, marked by hat-in-hand solemnity, studied intensity of performance and the aggressively desaturated visuals of cinematographer Tom Stern.
5. “Bird”
Year: 1988
Cast: Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora, Samuel E. Wright
Key awards: Best Actor, Cannes Film Festival; Best Director, Golden Globes; Best Supporting Actress, New York Film Critics’ Circle; Best Sound Mixing, Academy Awards
Why it’s among his best: Eastwood has often brought dedicated craftsmanship to material about which he doesn’t much seem to care — but that’s not the case here. His non-linear biopic of troubled, legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker is colored by Eastwood’s profound personal passion for jazz: unlikely many stock examples of the fallen-artist genre, it’s a film as fascinated by the music itself as the warts-and-all melodrama behind it.
4. “Play Misty for Me”
Year: 1971
Cast: Jessica Walter, Clint Eastwood, Donna Mills
Key awards: Nominated for Best Actress (Drama), Golden Globes
Why it’s among his best: Eastwood’s directorial debut wasn’t what most would have expected of him at the time: a tightly wound psychological chiller that suggested he’d been taking genre notes beyond his own screen work — taking its own lead from Polanski and Hitchcock, it also spawned its own share of variations on its chilly sexual tension, “Fatal Attraction” foremost among them.
3. “The Outlaw Josey Wales”
Year: 1976
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Chief Dan George
Key awards: Nominated for Best Original Score, Academy Awards
Why it’s among his best: While Eastwood had already taken the genre in a more experimental direction, this feels like his most classical, positively Hawksian western — a triumph of grounded storytelling and burnished craft, though not without its political inclinations. Eastwood himself described it as an anti-war film of sorts, in which his formerly Confederate protagonist comes to terms with the widespread human damage left by the Civil War.
2. “A Perfect World”
Year: 1993
Cast: Kevin Costner, T.J. Lowther, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern
Key awards: none
Why it’s among his best: I’ll just put this out there: in this widely underrated road drama, Kevin Costner delivers the single best performance that has ever graced a Clint Eastwood film, playing an escaped Texan convict (turned improbable father figure to a kidnapped child) with a laconic grace and stubbly wit that resembles a character Eastwood himself might have played, only turned vulnerably inside-out.
1. “Unforgiven”
Year: 1992
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
Key awards: Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actor, Academy Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association, National Society of Film Critics
Why it’s his best: No, not a terribly creative choice for the top spot, but sometimes consensus opinion has it right. Eastwood’s revisionist western is the one that cemented his place in the pantheon of American filmmakers: a complete union of long-considered thematic and aesthetic preoccupations, and a steel-eyed farewell not just to a mode of cinema, but to a subset of American male heroism, and his single best-looking work to boot. Few directors make such an elegiac film at least 20-odd years before their eventual retirement. He’d never return to the western genre after this; he didn’t need to.
You can read the entire post here. Let us know your thoughts. While I agree with many of these choices, I do see a few worthy directorial choices missing including “Gran Torino” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Give us your thoughts. Share with us below.
Live well.
