Customer Reviews

Clint Eastwood: A Biography

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an excellent book about the life and work of a legend. Richard Schickel gives us a close look at the free spirited man that's living inside of the veteran actor. Very detail work about Mr. Eastwood's movie making process and his no bulls**t attitude toward the studio execs and anyone who stands on his way. Ms. Pauline Kael should just say it out loud that she's begging for the legend's attention or just shut the hell up. Any Eastwood fan will really appreciate the author's work.

Being a huge fan of Eastwood as well as a close personal friend creates quite the conflict in TIME film critic Richard Schickel as he attempts to write a biography about an artist who closely guards his privacy. This obstacle results in a hap-hazard biography that provides few surprises or insights into the laconic, silent man who has become on of America's true unique artists.

Schickel also drives a stake through the pacing of his writing by providing scene by scene recounts of each of Eastwood's key films. He is overlooking the fact that the majority of his intended audience already has each film memorized. This causes the book to often languish in molasses and cause the reader to skim- never a good thing.

Where Schickel does succeed is in the all-too brief insights into Eastwood's technique and artistic philosophy. Had Schickel chosen to focus in this area, his work would have provided more depth and sustained interest.

As is CLINT EASTWOOD: A BIOGRAPHY is a mixed bag read. Worthwhile only if one is willing to skim.

With few biographies of Clint Eastwood available, Richard Schickel's 1996 effort fills a void. Unfortunately, the void, though smaller, still exists since this is far from an objective look at either Eastwood the man, the star, or the filmmaker. It's certainly not a surprise. Schickel wrote a 1992 TV special promoting "Unforgiven," and also compiled the film clips for the tribute preceding Eastwood's reciept of the Irving Thalberg Award at the 1995 Oscars. Eastwood cooperated with the author for this biography and even did some interviews in tandem with Schickel to promote the book. And when informing us that the critic for Life magazine praised 1968's "Hang 'Em High," Schickel neglects to point out the name of that critic who just so happened to be...duh, Richard Schickel. When biographer and subject are such good buddies, well, you just have to wonder if you're getting anything closely resembling the truth. But...

As an overview of Eastwood's career, particularly his transformation from a superstar in genre movies to respected auteur, it is sufficient, even though some easily detected errors go undetected ("Unforgiven" recieved 9 Oscar nominations, not 8 as Schickel says - doesn't anybody bother to check these things?).

Schickel has a body of intelligent writing behind him. As the years have passed, film criticism and biographies from Walt Disney, James Cagney, Marlon Brando, have shown a slide in quality until we get this: an authorized biography that is poorly researched, shallow, and a long-winded celebration of questionable talent.

Unlike great critics whose ability sharpen with age, Schickel's capacities are falling across the board with choices that have less impact in film art and then "analyzing" with dearth of reason. Eastwood's directorial credibility becomes questionable in light of the failure to appropriately critique even the celebrated "Unforgiven," a flaccid and dark pseudo-Western.

The tone becomes very smug as Eastwood's auteur rating soars in the 1980s through foreign film societies of questionable value. As far as artistic credibility goes, Schickel doesn't dare compare Eastwood to great directors such as Bergmann, Lang or Coppolla. The closest he can come is to mention better American directors like Ford and Huston. As an actor, Eastwood has never come close to an Academy Award and there is a reason for that, but that is something that never crosses Schickel's mind.

Sleep walk through Eastwood's life as he teaches swimming in the Army, hob-knobs with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and becomes mayor of a small California town for two years. If this sounds interesting, there are a lot of other similar details scattered around all of the praise for the Swiss Army Knife of cinema.

This is an embarrassingly fawning biography, uncontroversial and boring. It strongly tarnishes Schickel already eroded track record as an objective, incisive writer. Although there are some nice black and white pictures.

Schickel seems more interested in demonstrating his 'closeness' to Eastwood and demonstrating his psychoanalytical powers rather than writing an objective biography. Boring! I could hardly stay awake while reading it and I am still having trouble finishing it. And I have always been a Clint Eastwood fan from the days of Rawhide

Richard Schickel's biography of Clint Eastwood is very informative and immensely readable, though Schickel's critical distance may be marred by his closeness to Eastwood. (This book is sort of an authorized biography and had Eastwood's cooperation.) An interesting look at the last great icon of American cinema.

If you have trouble going to sleep, read this book. It's really dull.

This is no biography. It's a compilation of reviews from the author and a bunch of incidents in Eastwood's life that sounds like a copy-and-paste from press releases. As far as the reviews go, Eastwood does not star in bad movies. So, just rent the movies, and don't buy the book. I didn't buy it. I borrowed it from the library.

I read his Disney biography and some people say that is garbage. The Disney biography was interesting. This isn't.

According to Eastwood's friend, Richard Schickel, Eastwood is an auteur. There is a lot of Eastwood-butt kissing going on in this laughable "authorized" biography. That's to be expected but it is too over the top. The strange thing is that Schickel get's his facts screwed up on the films as if he has only seen them once and a long time ago. Was the editor asleep at the wheel? After the bomb of Eastwood's "Blood Work", I think that people do not care, anyway.

There's plenty of opportunity to gripe about this biography: The writing style is ponderous and sometimes downright clumsy, there's not enough details about Clint's private life, there's too much trivia about incidental movie roles (i.e. Witches.) But that aside it is nice to see a serious examination of Clint the Film Maker, which I might add does offer good critical examination of his movies, pointing out many of the movies' weaknesses as well as their strengths, and offering solid reasons for why the theme or story appealed to Clint. Pigeonholed early by narrowminded critics for his supposedly anti-establishment, brutal movies, he had to wait another twenty years for the critical tide to turn and for there to be a re-evaluation of his contribution to cinema (at least here in the U.S. -- in other parts of the world he'd long been recognized as a great director and actor.) And still some of the best movies he's done (whether he directed them or not) are not given the credit they deserve by self-important critics: Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Outlaw Josey Wales, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird all come to mind as well as many others. In forty years of making movies beginning with A Fistful of Dollars, most of the time coming out with a movie a year, he's been involved in less than a handful of mediocre movies, none of them ranking as truly bad. The Rookie and City Heat come to mind as truly mediocre movies, certainly bordering on bad, and there's a couple of others that had good potential but turned out to be bad decisions on his part, but I consider that a fantastic track record. He knows story and he knows how to get the most from out of a movie, and it's the reason he's stayed at the top of the box-office for all these decades despite the fact that he's never done just what "the audience" wants from him.

I recommend the book Interviews, for those interested in Clint the film maker, which is an excellent collection of interviews in which Clint very articulately discusses his ideas of film making.

I can't help but add that I have to wonder about one of the reviewers who wrote that whether Unforgiven was a great movie was "questionable." Then does there exist a unquestionably great movie?

Richard Schickel can be long winded,especially when he is trying to explain the motives behind Clint's films. I was a little let down when he would dish up some behind the scenes stories on some of Eastwood's films but would say nothing about many of his other films. Well at least he did not leave out the affairs with other weman he was haveing, or cover up some of the mistakes Clint has made along the way. But there are times when Schickel goes deep in thought on some of the roles Clint has played, saying that they represent what Americans are saying and thinking and so on, when reading him explaining all this in his style of high intellectual writing, I just wanted to say at the end of each sentence, oh yeah he looked really cool doing it too. It is clear that Eastwood's life is not full of a lot scandels and strange events and he views most of his films as just a job,not a great artistic event like a Fellini film, he makes his films easy to follow for entertainment with a few social statements here and there. Sometimes they work sometimes they fail, but he always puts in a good performance, and in his later films he has taken more chances in acting and it has worked very well for him, and oh yeah he looks realy cool doing it. This book does bring some new tales to the table,making it a must for fans and even nonfans.