クリント・イーストウッドは５月に80歳になる

承前*1

Joe Queenan “Clint Eastwood at 80: profile of a Hollywood legend” http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/26/clint-eastwood-profile

俳優・映画作家のクリント・イーストウッドにとって今月（2010年４月）は70代最後の月。それを記念して、イーストウッドのキャリアを振り返る包括的なイーストウッド論。
先ず冒頭のパラグラフ；

Directors may occasionally be shown respect, perhaps even asked for their autograph, in America, but no one actually likes them. People may admire or envy James Cameron or Steven Spielberg or Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, and a significantly smaller group of filmgoers may look forward to Woody Allen's next outing, but they don't have much of an emotional connection with them. This is what makes Clint Eastwood's career so singular.

そして、米国の〈国宝〉としてのイーストウッド――

Eastwood's close relationship with his countrymen is the sort of thing that Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and Babe Ruth all experienced. At a certain point, he, like Elvis Presley, crossed over into a land beyond reproach, where no blemish would ever go on his personal record, no matter how many Sondra Locke movies he made. It was OK to dislike this or that Eastwood movie – Pink Cadillac, Tightrope, The Gauntlet – as long as you did not dislike the man himself. Even women who did not like Eastwood expected their men to. The American people might forgive you for being a communist or an atheist. But they would never forgive you for saying you did not like Clint Eastwood.

俳優としてのカリスマ性において米国で彼に匹敵するのはロバート・レッドフォードくらいだろうということが語られ、ジョン・ウェインとの比較；

To the extent that Westerns can be taken seriously, there are only two cowboys worth talking about: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Wayne was the old-style prince of the high chaparral, the hero in the white hat. (Only in The Searchers did he deviate from this role.) Eastwood always played a gunslinger with something dark in his past.

そして、非ジョン・ウェイン的な存在としてのクリント・イーストウッドとジャック・ニコルソン、ダスティン・ホフマン、ロバート・デニーロ、アル・パチーノとの共通性と差異性が語られる。また、メル・ギブソンとの比較。
監督としてのイーストウッド。「恐慌」の1930年代に生まれ育ったということの決定的な影響。また、スタイルにおけるセルジオ・レオーネの影響。ここで語られている『荒野の用心棒（A Fistful of Dollars）』（監督はセルジオ・レオーネ）と『グラン・トリノ』の比較は面白い；

Eastwood, born in 1930, displays a mindset shaped by the decade of his birth and by the 1960s. The best films from the 1930s and 1940s are both entertaining and uplifting, and united by a clear moral vision: good will prevail over evil, but it's going to take a while. In the spaghetti westerns that made him famous, good's triumph over evil takes even longer. Working with the director Sergio Leone had a huge stylistic influence on Eastwood, who has never been in any hurry to get to the point. Spaghetti westerns moved along at a languid pace and so do Eastwood's. Early films such as High Plains Drifter start off with a bang, then taper off, then build to a huge finale; so do Pale Rider and Unforgiven. In A Fistful of Dollars, the movie that made him a household name, a tall, lanky, enigmatic stranger comes to the aid of poor, downtrodden Mexicans. In Gran Torino, a tall, lanky, enigmatic stranger comes to the aid of poor immigrants from south-east Asia. Some things change. Some things don't.

A true child of the Depression, Eastwood understood that the only unforgivable crime was to stop working. So he never did. He made all kinds of movies and he made them fast. He didn't waste much money on co-stars and he didn't spend much money on special effects. He brought his films in under budget and on time. If a film flopped he'd make another one, and if that flopped, he'd try something different. Then, if his career as a director stalled, he'd hire himself out as an actor. Unlike Beatty and Welles, he does not seem to have been terribly afraid of failure, and nor does one get the impression that he ever cared much what the critics thought of his work. His biggest-grossing films – the stupid ones with the orangutan – are among his greatest box-office coups. So there.

荒野の用心棒 [DVD]

グラン・トリノ [DVD]

Clint Eastwood falls into the category of artist – like Sean Connery or Judy Garland or Van Cliburn – who does something wonderful early in his career, for which the public believes he is owed a permanent debt of gratitude. The public never forgets A Fistful of Dollars, because it breathed life into a dying genre and because Eastwood – with the poncho and the cigarillo – was just so fantastically cool. (The genre is now even closer to death, only occasionally coming back to life when Eastwood directs a western.) Like Bob Dylan, once reviled for his born-again Christian albums of the early 80s but now thought of as a congenial old coot, Eastwood somehow managed to bury the rightwing Dirty Harry stigma that followed him around in the 70s. (At a time when a lot of people in Hollywood were genuinely concerned that their country might be turning into a police state – during Richard Nixon's administration – Eastwood was making movies lionizing a rogue cop. Talk about politically incorrect.) But Eastwood himself mellowed and grew as an artist with the passage of time: High Plains Drifter (1973) starts with three murders and a rape; The Bridges of Madison County (1995) doesn't.

ここで、『ダーティ・ハリー』シリーズによって、イーストウッド＝「右翼」という「スティグマ」が定着してしまったが、Queenan氏は敢えてイーストウッドを弁護している。曰く、『ダーティ・ハリー』の設定というのは彼が初期において出演してきた西部劇の設定をそのまま現代のカリフォルニアに移し替えたものであって、ハリー・キャラハン（イーストウッド）が同じようなことを19世紀の西部の町でやれば「英雄」として讃えられ、現代で「ならず者警官（rogue cop）」としてやれば「ファシスト」として糾弾される。日本でも、時代劇の設定をそのまま現代に持ち込めば何考えてるんだということになるわな。

ダーティハリー [DVD]

Eastwood resembles the great directors who preceded him, such as Hitchcock and John Huston and Don Siegel, in that he never stopped punching the clock. Unlike sensitive auteurs, who will take a few years off to contemplate their next project, Eastwood has not stopped making films since his debut in 1971. Working with the same collaborators, he has made arty films such as Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, creepy films such as Play Misty for Me, offbeat comedies such as Bronco Billy and Space Cowboys, sentimental films such as Honkytonk Man and Invictus, and epics like Flags of Our Fathers. He has taken a great book and made a great movie (Mystic River), but more impressively he has taken a terrible book and made a great movie (The Bridges of Madison County). Eastwood went through a few stretches where it seemed he might be washed up, but he always found a way to drag himself up off the canvas. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, True Crimes and Bloodwork appeared in rapid succession. They were all duds. Then came Mystic River and Million-Dollar Baby, which were not.

バード [DVD]

ブロンコ・ビリー [DVD]

スペースカウボーイ 特別編 [DVD]

父親たちの星条旗 [DVD]

ミスティック・リバー [DVD]

ミリオンダラー・ベイビー [DVD]

これに続いて、イーストウッドに駄目な映画（bad film）は少ないが、その駄目な映画は「コメディを回避した」ものである。『ダーティ・ハリー』のような「ならず者警官」物もこの類に入る。
イーストウッドにおける政治的要素。保守とリベラル、右と左の微妙なバランス；

Clint Eastwood films are not philosophically dense. He likes to make movies where the little guy is up against it, where the small fry are going to need a champion, a deus ex machina. A conservative himself, Eastwood somehow manages to synthesise right- and leftwing points of view in his films. The government cannot be trusted – a position tenaciously held by Republicans – but the police are invariably brutal and corrupt – the opinion of most Democrats. In Eastwood's world, there is something for everyone, as long as they do not object to a bit of violence.

Like Denzel Washington, a far better actor, Eastwood presents an image of America to the rest of the world that Americans are comfortable with. He is not a gangster (De Niro), not a glamour boy (Richard Gere), not a wiseguy (Bruce Willis), not an orthodontist's dream (Tom Cruise), not a neurotic (Dustin Hoffman). He is not impish (Johnny Depp), not avuncular (Robert Duvall), not sincere (Harrison Ford), not mannered (Tommy Lee Jones), not hysterical (Al Pacino), and not homegrown Hollywood royalty (Warren Beatty). Pundits are always using the term "national treasure" to describe people such as Michael Moore, a fiercely divisive American who is only a national treasure to those who hate conservatives. Eastwood is a conservative, a rarity among movie stars. Yet he is also, without question, a national treasure. Even Michael Moore knows that.

*1:http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20050702 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060207/1139336690 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060915/1158340807 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20061021/1161400718 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080528/1211935612 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080616/1213579904 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080826/1219750277 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20090617/1245209049 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091026/1256580819 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091223/1261534214