Clint Eastwood | A Year to Remember

Clint Eastwood has had many great years in his long and celebrated career. There was 1959, in which a little television series called Rawhide premiered, beginning a hugely successful eight-year run. There was 1964, the year A Fistful of Dollars premiered in Italy, and showcased the major star chops of its charismatic lead. There was 1968, which gave us Coogan's Bluff, marking his first collaboration with director Don Siegel, and Hang Him High, his first lead role in a Hollywood production. There was 1993, when he won two Academy Awards for Unforgiven. This is pretty good. This is all right. And 2005, when he won two Academy Awards for Million Dollar Baby. I watched Sidney out there who's 80, and I figure, hey, I'm just a kid. I've got a lot of stuff to do yet. So thank you all very much. I appreciate it. But I would argue the most important year in Clint Eastwood's career was 1971, an astonishing year that gave us his against-type turn in Don Siegel's The Beguiled, the first in the popular and iconic Dirty Harry film series, also directed by Siegel, and the seminal thriller classic Play Misty for Me, which marked Eastwood's feature directorial debut. The Beguiled came first. The story of an injured Union soldier rescued by a young girl and taken into an all-female boarding school, this film followed the modest hits Kelly's Heroes and Two Mules for Sister Sarah, along with the infamous musical box office disappointment, Paint Your Wagon. And working with director Don Siegel again, Eastwood was able to show a darker side to his screen persona. He got to play a role in a quiet, solemn period drama opposite the theater-trained actress Geraldine Page. And he said at the time the film gave him an opportunity to play true emotions and not totally operatic and not lighting cannons with cigars. He's a powerful actor in The Beguiled, extremely unlikable, especially towards the end. Although the film wasn't a major success critically or financially upon its early 1971 release, Eastwood himself became frustrated with Universal's marketing of The Beguiled, which led to his departure from the studio a few years later. The film ultimately showcases dramatic chops in a way few of his prior films had. Later in the year came one of his most famous films and characters, Dirty Harry, a project also directed by Don Siegel. This film is Eastwood at his most tough, confident, dangerous, and charismatic. It includes some truly famous dialogue, and one exciting action set piece after another. If audiences found his role in The Beguiled disappointing, he was back in their good graces with the story of police inspector Harry Callahan, who's assigned to track down a crazed psychopath who calls himself the Scorpio Killer. Surprisingly, Eastwood wasn't the top contender for the part. It was originally offered to such heavyweight actors as John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Steve McQueen. Even George C. Scott was offered Harry Callahan before Eastwood. It was reportedly Paul Newman, who the producers also approached, who recommended Eastwood for the role, and by the end of 1970, the production of Dirty Harry was officially announced. Principal photography took place mostly in and around San Francisco, along with Marin County and Universal Studios, and despite some mixed reviews upon its December 1971 release, the film became a smash hit, becoming the highest grossing film of the year, and further cementing Eastwood's status as a movie star icon in Hollywood. If The Beguiled and Dirty Harry had been Eastwood's only release films in 1971, it still would have been a monumental year for him. But his third release film might have been the most crucial one of all, his feature directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, starring Eastwood and The story of a disc jockey who's stalked by an obsessive fan, Play Misty for Me was the closest Eastwood ever came to making a horror film, and it marked his first time behind the camera calling the shots on a feature film. Eastwood had wanted to direct for a long while, saying soon before Play Misty for Me's production, The studio wanted Lee Remick to play the female lead, but it was Eastwood who chose to use Jess Walter, who had impressed him in the 1966 film, The Group, and what a masterstroke of casting this was, Walter commanding and frightening in her memorable role of Evelyn. Eastwood needed a critical and commercial hit to successfully jumpstart his directing career, and this classic edge-of-your-seat thriller was the perfect one to do it, critics praising his directorial skills and Walter's intense performance. The film would go on to earn more than $10 million on a budget of less than $1 million. If Play Misty for Me had been a failure, who knows what might have happened to Eastwood's directing career. We might never have gotten such great films as High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josie Wales, Bird, Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Letters from Iwo Jima, to name a few. Yes, Clint Eastwood has had some tremendous years in his long career, going all the way back to 1955 in his film debut role as a lab technician in Revenge of the Creature. There's 1995, the year he directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination in The Bridges of Madison County. There's 2014, which saw the release of the Oscar-winning American Sniper, which marked the biggest box office hit of Eastwood's directing career at more than $500 million worldwide. But despite all the highs, and yes, a few lows, and a Hollywood career spanning almost seven glorious decades, Clint Eastwood never had a year quite like 1971. Yes, the year of The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, and Play Misty for Me showed audiences so much of what he was capable of as both a performer and a director, and ultimately foreshadowed all the great things that were still to come.