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Clint Eastwood

See The Classic Clint Eastwood Scenes That Made Him Swear Off A Genre

Clint Eastwood recently wrapped up one of the truly iconic careers in Hollywood, directing and starring in his final movie and deciding to walk off into his own proverbial sunset as one of the best to ever do it on the big screen. With a career of more than seven decades, Eastwood will be remembered as one of the best to ever do it. But when you spend this long in Hollywood, it would be crazy to think that everything going up on the big screen is going to be a winner. Far from it. And Eastwood definitely has a movie on the resume that not only bombed with critics but also had him swearing off an entire genre of films altogether. 

1969s Paint Your Wagon came around when Clint Eastwood was already well-established in Hollywood, having put out a bunch of true classics already. And while this was a Western, something the actor was making his bones on, the movie decided to take a much different tack than some of his other films. That’s because it was a musical that had the actor showing off some of his crooning skills. It didn’t exactly work. Eastwood has talked about the movie in later years, saying the production was sort of a mess, to begin with. According to The Digital Fix, Clint Eastwood even said that the experience filming Paint Your Wagon, and its subsequent reception was enough to turn him off to musicals forevers. Check out the opening scene for Paint Your Wagon and decide whether Clint Eastwood should have kept going in the singing department:https://www.youtube.com/embed/qt9f-wov5MM?feature=oembed

And then there is another Clint Eastwood song, this one leaning a bit more into the love aspect of things. 

Of course now when looking back on this movie, there’s a bit of an uncanny valley thing happening here when you see a guy like Clint Eastwood walking through the woods and singing about how much he loves a certain girl. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just different, especially in contrast to the moderate tough guy the iconic actor has played on the big screen in all manner of classic roles through the years. This is just a much different look for Eastwood, though it doesn’t necessarily mean it was the wrong decision to consider branching out early on. This particular movie just didn’t work even in the slightest, and because it was marred by other production issues (like rewrites and delays) it just likely never stood a chance. 

In Paint Your Wagon Clint Eastwood plays Sylvester Newel who is affectionately known as Pardner throughout. He’s an idealistic dreamer who’s come west as part of the Gold Rush. The story follows his and Lee Marvin’s Ben as they come upon an area that might have some gold in it. Ultimately, Pardner falls in love with a local woman, though the situation around the gold and relationships become a bit fraught over time. And, of course, we have Clint Eastwood singing throughout. 

With Paint Your Wagon Clint Eastwood and the studio pretty much had a bomb on their hands. With a $20 million budget, it only managed to earn back $31 million at the box office. And critics took it to task with the movie scoring just 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. One of the central complaints was that Clint Eastwood was simply miscast in this role, that his vibe didn’t fit with what Hollywood already knew about the actor. And in the end, this one was enough to make sure Clint Eastwood never returned to musicals again. 

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Clint Eastwood

Film Trailer for Ennio Morricone Documentary Features Interviews with Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, & Bruce Springsteen

The trailer for Giuseppe Tornatore’s documentary on the famed Italian film composer Ennio Morricone has been released ahead of its opening in select US theaters on February 9th, 2024. Watch it below.
Titled Ennio, the film traces Morricone’s career from his early work with Sergio Leone to his first Academy Award for Quentin Tarantino’s 2016 movie The Hateful Eight, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in America; Days of Heaven; The Mission; and The Untouchables. It also offered the late composer, who died in 2020, an opportunity to tell his own story and break down his artistic process.
Adding to the portrait of Morricone are interviews with several of his collaborators and contemporaries, including Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, and Bruce Springsteen. Ennio also features appearances from Oliver Stone, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Giuliano Montaldo, Dario Argento, Joan Baez, and more.
Morricone and Tornatore shared a long collaborative history, beginning with 1988’s Cinema Paradiso. From there, Morricone went on to write the music for all of Tornatore’s subsequent films, including his Golden Globe-winning score for 1998’s Legend of 1900.
Ennio premiered at the Venice Film Festival in July 2021 before Music Box Films acquired the US distribution rights in November of this year.
See where Morricone’s work landed on our list of the best film scores of the 2010s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5WBbULw_0U

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Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino and Bruce Springsteen appear in new Ennio Morricone documentary trailer

Titled Ennio, the movie explores Morricone’s illustrious career, from his early collaborations with Sergio Leone to his Academy Award-winning score for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016.
The documentary delves into some of Morricone’s most iconic compositions, including those for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America, Days of Heaven, The Mission, and The Untouchables.
Released posthumously, the movie allows Morricone, who passed away in 2020 at 91, to finally reveal his own life story and expose the nuances of his artistic process.
In addition to Morricone’s personal insights, Ennio features interviews with famous collaborators, including Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, and Bruce Springsteen.
The documentary weaves a comprehensive tapestry of Morricone’s singular impact on the world of film scoring, with further contributions from the likes of Oliver Stone, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Dario Argento, Joan Baez, and more.
Tornatore, famed for titles such as Malèna and Ennio, has a history with Morricone stretching back to 1988, when they collaborated on the former’s hit movie Cinema Paradiso. Morricone went on to write music for each of Tornatore’s subsequent movies, including his Golden Globe-winning score for Legend of 1900 in 1998.
Watch the trailer for Ennio below. See Far Out‘s recent review of the movie here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5WBbULw_0U

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Clint Eastwood

Despite his tough characters, Clint Eastwood was surprisingly tender

All of this considered you might be surprised that the Rawhide star is actually not so hard-hearted as his characters may have led you to believe. One Eastwood anecdote in The Toronto Star exemplifies this, and comes from his script editor Sonia Chernus, who called Eastwood “the gentlest person I know.” She explained, “He can’t bear to kill anything, including a moth which I asked him to get rid of in my apartment.”
In fact, while he’s usually one of the best shots in the West in many of his productions, Eastwood isn’t too keen on violence and killing. He said of hunting, “I never liked killing things. Some people are taken by it. Maybe it’s the form of masculine expression. I don’t know. I’d be interested in speaking to a psychologist about that.”
Even more confusingly, Eastwood, now known as the quintessential Western man, almost refused to act in his series Rawhide when the opportunity presented itself to him. His reasoning? Because it was a Western, of course.
Eastwood said, “I didn’t want to do a western – westerns were dead.” He said of Rawhide, “But then I recognized Yojimbo in it, and you could feel a lot of the black humor. And I thought, nobody’d ever have the nerve to do this in America.”
But while Eastwood doesn’t seem to agree with violence to extreme measures, he now understands the appeal of a good old-fashioned revenge plotline in a Western. He said, “Everybody has a dream about how they’d like to handle certain situations, every boy from nine to one hundred would like to take vengeance into his own hands…’The vengeance is mine.’ People need to see that.”

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