In High Plains Drifter, his second feature, Eastwood once again cast himself as a nameless gunfighter, the Stranger, who appears almost as an apparition, riding out of the desert haze toward the dusty mining community of Lago.Įastwood’s Stranger is far from a typical upstanding hero: In the first few minutes of the film, he orders a bottle of whiskey, guns down a trio of men who threaten him, and pulls a woman off the street to rape her after she insults him. In the early 1970s, Eastwood would move behind the camera to direct his own films, and his work retained the same stoic sensibility.

Eastwood’s mysterious character was a stoic figure with a gift for violence and a finely tuned sense of justice and responsibility, more myth than man. In those films, Eastwood played a gunslinger who rarely speaks and is never identified, known widely as the Man With No Name. Eastwood’s filmography is focused on action and consequencesĮastwood got his start working as an actor in the 1950s and ’60s, most notably in a trio of epic spaghetti Westerns by Italian director Sergio Leone.

Sully may not be Eastwood’s final film, but in many ways it serves as a summary and reflection of Eastwood’s own Hollywood career - and a reminder of why he is one of cinema’s most important and enduring filmmakers. It’s a sober, earnest film about the virtues of quiet competence.

His heroes show up, get the job done, and then go about their business, hoping to leave the world a little bit better in the process.Įastwood’s latest film, Sully, offers yet another protagonist in this mold: Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who in January 2009 crash-landed a commercial jetliner in the middle of the Hudson River outside Midtown Manhattan after a catastrophic engine failure, managing to save the lives of all 155 passengers in the process. For 45 years - longer if you count his work as an actor - Clint Eastwood has been churning out gruff, efficient movies about gruff, efficient men: low-key stories of strong and silent heroes and antiheroes who do their work, mull their regrets, and live with the consequences.

Man with no name series