by BEN TERRALL
The leftist imprint OR Books, which has produced an impressive line of fiction and non-fiction since its founding five years ago, does not typically put out film books. But writer Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Clint Eastwood, Clint: The Life and Legend, is not a typical movie book; McGilligan is right to call it “left wing.” OR has just reprinted the book, originally published in 1999, with a new update to cover Eastwood’s recent life and career.
In the 1990s, McGilligan spent four years compiling material about Eastwood, but after submitting the resulting manuscript had his contract cancelled by unimpressed Norton executives. The book was then published in England in 1999 by HarperCollins. After St. Martin’s Press published the book in the U.S., Eastwood sued to suppress its distribution.
For someone as thin-skinned and prone to cut friends and associates out of his life (and payroll) for minor slights as Eastwood, it’s not surprising that Eastwood took issue with McGilligan’s depiction of him. McGilligan does give Eastwood credit when his acting or directing rises above the level of his more perfunctory work, calling Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) “the real Clint Eastwood masterpiece.” But overall McGilligan sees Eastwood as “a lazy actor and a lazy director,” and cites Sergio Leone, director of the best of the “spaghetti westerns” that catapulted Eastwood to stardom, who said Eastwood “had only two expressions: with or without a hat.”
As a member of the sixties’ New Left generation, McGilligan is more skeptical than most writers about film. McGilligan began his career with a circle of film obsessives who put out a journal called The Velvet Light Trap. He and his fellow leftist cinephiles were inspired by the cultural criticism of the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James, who is reputed to have said, “Our duty is to see the film in the afternoon, picket it in the evening.”
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