Old actors never die. They prefer to let their really old film characters die for them.
Movie history is filled with the swan songs of late-life stars, running the geriatric gamut from poignant to pathetic, iconic to ironic. They often come in duets — Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda’s “On Golden Pond” comes to mind, or Kate and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
Sometimes you get a trio, as in “The Whales of August,” somewhat overloaded with Bette Davis, Lillian Gish and Ann Sothern. For the male animal, such tours de force frequently consist of grumpy old men in comic pairs (Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau).
They don’t get grumpier or more grizzled than 78-year-old Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino.” He plays aging Korean War vet Walt Kowalski, a not-so-distant cousin of Stanley — and not so gracefully aging. He’s a bigot in general but particularly abusive and hateful toward his Asian neighbors — until they get in trouble with a noxious gang. That requires him to shift into AARP vigilante mode and gradually reveal his heart of grumpy gold.
Most of his portrayals have been critic-proof over the years.
A child of the Depression, the San Francisco native worked as a lumberjack and gas-station attendant and did a four-year stint in the Army Special Services before becoming a Universal bit player (“Francis in the Navy”) and then landing a nice seven-year run (1959-66) as Rowdy Yates on TV’s “Rawhide.”
From there, he graduated — some might say flunked — to the legendary spaghetti Westerns in Italy, playing “the man with no name” in Sergio Leone’s “Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1966) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1967), all wildly successful at the box office. A partnership with Don Siegel led him from “Coogan’s Bluff” (1968) and “Two Mules for Sister Sara” (1969) to the immortal title role of “Dirty Harry” (1971) and its sequels.
One of his best performances came against type in “Play Misty for Me” (1971), the first film he directed, in which he cleverly undermined his own alpha-macho image. Others of note: “High Plains Drifter” (1973), the eccentric “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976) and the charmingly funny “Bronco Billy” (1980).
He acted in nine of the 10 pictures he made between 1980 and 1990, excluding the excellent Charlie Parker biopic “Bird” (1988). The best, and least appreciated, of those was “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), based on Peter Viertel’s novel about John Huston and the making of “The African Queen.”
Eastwood’s critical and commercial apotheosis was “Unforgiven” (1992), the dark, elegiac, revisionist Western that won him the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. Since then, “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995) showed yet again that he has his finger on the sentimental pulse of the public, while his two staggering Iwo Jima films proved his command of the epic.
Will “Gran Torino” be the old cowboy’s final acting role? Don’t bet on it. His mother, Ruth, just passed away two years ago at the age of 97. In a recent interview with Gail Sheehy, Eastwood recalled one of his last exchanges with Mom:
“I said, ‘C’mon, Ruth, we’re going to make 100!’ But she said, ‘When the time comes that you don’t enjoy it, that’s a good time to give it up.’”
Judging by “Gran Torino,” he’s still very much enjoying it.
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