• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 642 0

“old Hollywood” joke that proliferated at the height of Brando-mania. A director tells an actor to cross the set, and the actor asks what his motivation is. “Because I told you to do it!” replies the director. Eastwood not only did it but learned from it, and laid out a plan for himself that would take him from acting to producing, to directing, to acting in films he produced and directed, to forming Malpaso, a production company that operated like a mini-studio and became his Hollywood powerhouse. Ultimately, Eastwood was a businessman who used films to make money, and he was good at doing both. He rarely challenged his own image, and he played essentially the same easy (for him) character over and over again, honing and perfecting it to broaden his films’ appeal to the everlasting delight of his enormous fan base.

When Eastwood hit upon the character of Dirty Harry, a rebel detective with virtually no insight or visible sensitivity—a living manifestation of his Magnum .45 who enjoys blowing away bad guys (a contemporary version of the Man with No Name)—he churned it into a mini-franchise, and made a fortune doing so. And he never broke a sweat over how to “act” the character. “Acting” to Eastwood was, in truth, almost beside the point. Eastwood is known for first takes and making it to the golf course in time to play a full thirty-six. If Harry Callahan’s eyes are vacant, it’s because Eastwood didn’t feel the need to provide them with anything beyond his famous squint.

McQueen, too, created his own company, Solar Productions, but was fatally hampered by the residue of his Method-induced integrity that insisted he make personal films to show off his acting abilities even if those films broadly distorted his persona to the point of unrecognizability (The Reivers and An Enemy of the People, to name two). Steve wanted to make a movie about auto racing, and built and operated Solar for the sole purpose of raising the money to make it the way he wanted, even as more commercial opportunities either passed him by or were let go by him.

When McQueen made Bullitt, three years before Dirty Harry, it was the closest he would ever come to melding his turbulent personality with his on-screen persona, and the film was a huge success. However, McQueen felt the character of Frank Bullitt was too intense, too aloof, too internal, too Method for him to take it any further, and he turned away from what would have been a franchise that might have rivaled the success of Dirty Harry. He also feared he would become trapped within the same single-character gerbil cage his TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive had put him in, and that his reputation as a real actor would suffer as his reputation as a real action star grew. To McQueen, Bullitt was about acting, not money.

To Eastwood, Dirty Harry was about money, not acting. With an eye toward a franchise, Eastwood saw Dirty Harry as a step into his future, a new beginning. And while Eastwood would happily turn Dirty Harry into an icon that would spark a social debate about violence in film and create for himself a lucrative franchise, McQueen never again made a movie that even remotely resembled Bullitt. Nonetheless, it remains his most original, complex, and memorable character and movie. Moreover, Dirty Harry was clearly derivative of Bullitt, the true original that has no easy or obvious cinematic antecedents. Clint Eastwood loves the game and knows how to play it. Steve McQueen hated the game.

There are two other reasons McQueen’s body of work does not have the kind of staying power Eastwood’s does. First, from an auteurist perspective, while McQueen worked with a number of competent directors, including Robert Wise, John Sturges, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and Peter Yates, several of them more than once, his career suffered from almost never having worked with one whose personal vision was strong enough to push McQueen’s acting beyond the limits of his formidable star power. McQueen’s directors were simply not as forceful or charismatic behind the camera as he was in front of it. They couldn