The Magnum Man

Not that it mattered. For filmmaker Eastwood, 75, is only too familiar with agenda-centric political bashing. As a one-term Republican mayor of Carmel, California, he countered it with a straight-laced no-nonsense approach to politics that centred around a non-interfering government. ‘‘I’ve always said I like the libertarian thing of ‘let’s leave everybody alone and let’s just quit meddling’.’’ But that’s not what’s happening to Million Dollar Baby, the Golden Globes bestowed and Oscar laden individualistic success story of a young aspiring boxer (played by Hillary Swank) and her crusty old trainer (Eastwood), who ultimately chooses to carry out the mercy killing of his charge after she is rendered immobile in a prize fight.

Right wingers insist MDB is promoting assisted suicide and that baffles Eastwood. For this wasn’t intended to be a political film. ‘‘…people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now…everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot,’’ he told The New York Times. And it is this articulated criticism of the ‘‘either you are with me or against me’’ doctrine of today’s America that makes him stand out as a Hollywood Republican.

Of course Eastwood isn’t afraid to speak his mind. He does that pretty overtly in the 1997 Absolute Power, where even as he works towards a reconciliation with his estranged daughter, he pursues his career of a masterly thief who does his bit for the general good by exposing a corrupt presidency. No wonder the plot, centred around the murder of the president’s mistress by his agents, got tongues wagging. Why, you ask? Just who was in the Oval Office in 1997?

EASTWOOD’S straight-laced approach to life is mirrored in his directorial prowess. Legendary for working quickly and unfussingly—‘‘the more time you have to think things through, the more you have to screw it up’’—he is perhaps the only one in a system that prides itself for taking as many as 30 to 40 takes for one scene, to film rehearsals. The extraordinary opening scene in Unforgiven when a woman is cut in a whorehouse is a first rehearsal — it’s over in a jiffy, but to such devastating effect that it shrinks our guts to be forced to agonise over what really happened.

So when Unforgiven, Eastwood’s revisionist take on the western, fetched him his first Oscar recognition as a serious director, he could finally laugh about it.

On his mind surely was his 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, about which critics were harsh: we are not ready for him as actor, much less a director.

For someone whose community-oriented America of yore films (Bronco Billy) and studies in reclusive unfathomable individuals (Charlie Parker in Bird) form the bookends of an extensive oeuvre, it has indeed been a long trail since a A Fistful of Dollars, the first spaghetti western he did with Sergio Leone in 1964. More than five decades later, boy, does he feel lucky!