Most lives would be more than adequately covered by biographies released when the subject was 67 and 72. Clint Eastwood is not most people. He’s directed 17 films since that latter biography was published, more than many directors make in their entire lives. Eastwood, at 94, was almost certainly the oldest director to helm a Hollywood movie in last year’s Juror No. 2. 

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In author Shawn Levy’s estimation, all of this deserved fresh narration, which is how we ended up with the new work Clint: The Man and the Movies ― A Comprehensive Biography of Hollywood’s Most Iconic Actor-Director. Welcomely, Levy’s book charts a path between the attitudes of the two principal prior efforts. Richard Schikel’s 1996 Clint Eastwood: A Biography was authorized to the fullest extent imaginable, and borders on hagiography. Whereas, the book jacket of Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 Clint: The Life and Legend notes that Eastwood sued the author. That book’s tone is frequently adversarial, to put it mildly. As Levy writes, “If the one book presents Clint as too good to be true, the other presents him as too awful to countenance.” What readers needed was some balance, and that is what Levy achieves. 

It’s easy now to forget just how unusual Clint Eastwood’s rise was. If he gradually acquired general respectability, it was a long and dusty road in getting there. His early years were wandering: childhood in the Bay Area, one semester of college, intermittent work logging or sweeping floors, or as an Army lifeguard. He was athletic but disliked group sports, musical but disliked bands, took to elements of Army life but hated the regimentation. There were other important touchstones, such as buying Blue Note 78s and seeing Charlie Parker in 1946. 

His entry into movie work was entirely old-fashioned, at what was already a relic in the 1950s, the Universal Talent School, with classes in elocution, poise, and stage fighting. Perhaps most crucially, his instruction was decidedly non-Method. He was taught to act, not to channel. This tendency set Clint apart in feelings-bared subsequent decades, but was refreshing. As Levy writes, ”Yes, everyone has inner wounds, but it’s equally true that a great many people spend a lot of time hiding those wounds, staying present in the deeds and conversations before them, simply being rather than being on.”

He was in some truly awful films. Just consider a few titles: Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula, The Last Travelling Saleslady. The series Rawhide was his launch of sorts, better-than-average content in a TV moment crazed for Westerns. And yet this was constraining; his requests to direct were rebuffed. The offer from Sergio Leone was the big break, if that was not at all apparent at the time. 

It’s not clear that Leone knew much about Clint at all — Henry Fonda and James Coburn were too expensive. So he was off to Almeria in 1964 at 34 years old. 

He couldn’t talk to his director or cast members on A Fistful of Dollars. A Polish translator was a feeble medium, but this clearly all worked. It was a hit in Europe, rapidly producing its two sequels. The Dollars trilogy yielded quite a few dollars. Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly salary was 15 times higher than it was for the first film. 

Pause and reflect on this story and the unlikeliness of the rise to moviestardom, and then directorial dominance is yielded. Americans still go to Europe to work in movies, but this doesn’t launch anyone to worldwide fame. With the Dollars trilogy now universally praised, it’s also easy to forget that these were received as lurid pulp upon release. It’s easy to forget that their American release was attenuated. They were all released here in 1967. It took quite some time for Clint to shed the perception as being both lightweight and wooden, heartily accentuated by critical vituperation for his right-wing politics. 

Nonetheless, he was launched to stardom. But his creative instincts had been restrained for years, and he had chafed at both massive studio constraints and production profligacy: countless reshoots or weeks sitting around in trailers or in deserts. 

As a way of addressing these frustrations, he set up his own production company, Malpaso, under Universal’s wing (which he later relocated successfully to Warner Bros.), designed to produce films quickly. His first directorial effort, Play Misty for Me, is an excellent stalker film, delivered quickly and economically. There were more Westerns, some good, some great.

And then the big one. Dirty Harry redefined the actor in many ways for decades. Levy is, in most regards, an unusually fair evaluator of Eastwood’s politics, libertarian in about all contours. But it seems simply impossible for any liberal critic not to condemn vigilante films. “If it’s propaganda, it’s entertaining propaganda; if it’s sadism, it’s candy-coated sadism; if it’s fascism, it’s the kind of fascism that finds otherwise broad-minded people nodding along, unconsciously, until (unless), abashed, they catch themselves.” You’ll find the obligatory critical response with almost every vigilante film ever released. Movies valorizing criminals almost never come in for similar criticism. 

Levy accurately frames Eastwood’s forays into politics as rather intermittent, if maddening for his critics. There was his participation in the Celebrities for Nixon campaign, or calling Ed Asner’s effort to expel Ronald Reagan from the Screen Actors Guild over his air traffic controllers firing, “strictly bulls***.” 

Not every movie that Clint was in was good. Returns are certainly declining with the five Dirty Harry movies, but for decades, his most interesting films were reliably unnoticed. There’s the truly bizarre and excellent Southern Gothic film, The Beguiled, the delightful country music tale Honkytonk Man, his Charlie Parker biopic Bird, and many others. Levy also deftly details the many ways he proceeded to poke light fun at his own image. Bronco Billy, as Levy writes, was “an explicit satire of the whole idea of posing as a cowboy to make a living.” In his excellent White Hunter Black Heart, he plays a megalomaniacal director clearly modeled on John Huston, but also in clear ways himself. 

This journey to revealing new depths continued with perhaps his first unambiguously praised film, Unforgiven, an exploration of the human cost of death largely glossed over in Western cinema. And yet Eastwood’s nuanced later works never come across as apologies for the previous stuff, but rather additional layers and complications. Many more opportunistic actors would have disavowed Dirty Harry and argued that carceral solutions failed to address the root causes of the Zodiac Killer.

As he gradually became appreciated as a truly talented director, with Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, and more attracting substantial plaudits, it has become uncertain whether he will be remembered primarily as an actor or a director. Eastwood has clearly developed a great sense of composition and a natural sense of editing. If he’s not as effortlessly great at shooting from the hip as other no-nonsense directors such as John Huston, he’s certainly become very good at it. 

Alongside the renaissance in his directorial artistry, his acting work gradually became more appreciated. Norman Mailer praised him, writing, “You can see the man in his work just as clearly as you see Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms or John Cheever in his short stories. Hell, yes, he’s an artist.” Years earlier, Richard Burton, his costar in the fantastic Where Eagles Dare, pegged him accurately, placing him in “the great line of Spencer Tracy and James Stewart and Bob Mitchum. They have a kind of dynamic lethargy. They appear to do nothing and they do everything.”

If his roles weren’t all good, he was a good deal more selective than many peers. Levy points out his passing on all sorts of projects from The Great Gatsby to Dick Tracy to Men in Black. A boon was that Clint was different from most actor-directors, who tended to need any grubby paycheck to secure funds for expensive passion projects. Clint always worked exceptionally efficiently. Budget overruns and Clint Eastwood are not phrases that ever appear together. 

THE AMBITIOUS AND DOOMED THE BRUTALIST

There’s much else in Levy’s account: His tenure as mayor of Carmel, California, an anti-NIMBY effort avant la lettre, his car racing, rigorous health and exercise habits, transcendental meditation, and huge jazz enthusiasm. His romantic life has not always been exactly honorable, if by Hollywood standards, nothing is all that bad. 

Most remarkably, he just keeps working, across a vast range of content: Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, Gran Torino, Invictus, J. Edgar, American Sniper, The 15:17 to Paris, Richard Jewell, and Jersey Boys are not a range of content one can file away neatly in any aesthetic or ideological box, and that’s tremendously refreshing. This is, in short, a great American. It would be a surprise if one day we didn’t get a fourth biography.

Anthony Paletta is a writer based in New York.