Warner Bros | 1968-2008 | 19 Discs | Rated R
These days, Clint Eastwood is considered an American institution. With his 80th birthday nearly upon us, it’s amazing to realize he’s been an actor since the mid 1950’s, with a list of credits that spans for pages. By the 1970’s Eastwood had added director and producer to his name, and his legend only grew. While many slow down in their seventies, Eastwood has continued to work, producing some of the best material of his career. In 2003, he directed, co-produced and scored Mystic River, which earned Academy awards for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins and a Best Director nomination for Clint. In 2004, Eastwood directed Hilary Swank to a Best Actress Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, and notched another Best Director nomination.
With such an impressive resume, it should come as no surprise that Warner Brothers recently released a massive box set—35 Films 35 Years at Warner Brothers—that includes some of his best films for the studio. Spanning from 1968’s Where Eagles Dare to 2008’s Gran Torino, the set gives viewers a sense of the remarkable breadth of interesting roles and projects that pushed him as an actor, and helped him join the ranks of the best directors working in Hollywood today. That the set doesn’t include Eastwood’s MGM, Universal and other studio work, including the Man With No Name trilogy as well as more recent efforts like Changeling, is bound to be disappointing for completists, but hardly a travesty, since many of them are available for individual purchase or parts of other box sets.
Included are his Dirty Harry movies, his Best Picture Oscar dramas and nominees, his Westerns, his war movies, his comedies, and more. (A complete list is available at the end of this review.) What makes this set particularly notable is the fact that it doesn’t shy away from some of Clint Eastwood’s less successful films, or the ones that might not enhance his legacy. 35 Years includes both of Eastwood’s monkey movies, Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, along with Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, True Crime, and Blood Work. While many people have come to respect several of these films, many of them are the most critically panned of his career. It seems appropriate that they are included here, because you get to decide if the movies were deserving of the critical reception they got, and their inclusion only helps to paint a more complete picture of Eastwood as an artist.
The 35th film is The Eastwood Factor, an intimate short film from Time magazine critic and film historian Richard Schickel. The film gives viewers a fairly personal look at the star. We get to observe as he visits locations where his movies were shot, travel with him to the Warner lot costume department and Eastwood Scoring Stage, and see him at home. Eastwood’s candid, intelligent and often humorous interviews about his body of work and the choices he made, along with Schickel’s selection of scenes from his movies, results in an up-close and personal portrait of one of the great icons of our era.
The set also includes a short text excerpt from Schickel’s Eastwood Factor companion book, as well as a small collection of reprinted photographs as well as some studio correspondence. Clearly, 35 Films 35 Years, would be a great addition to the library of any film fan.
Here’s the full list of films:
• Where Eagles Dare, 1968
• Kelly’s Heroes, 1970
• Dirty Harry, 1971
• Magnum Force, 1973
• The Enforcer, 1975
• The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976
• The Gauntlet, 1977
• Every Which Way but Loose, 1978
• Bronco Billy, 1980
• Any Which Way You Can, 1980
• Honkytonk Man, 1982
• Firefox, 1982
• Sudden Impact, 1983
• City Heat, 1984
• Tightrope, 1984
• Pale Rider, 1985
• Heartbreak Ridge, 1986
• Bird, 1988
• The Dead Pool, 1988
• Pink Cadillac, 1989
• White Hunter, Black Heart, 1990
• The Rookie, 1990
• Unforgiven, 1992
• A Perfect World, 1993
• The Bridges of Madison County, 1995
• Absolute Power, 1997
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997
• True Crime, 1999
• Space Cowboys, 2000
• Blood Work, 2002
• Mystic River, 2003
• Million Dollar Baby, 2004
• Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006
• Gran Torino, 2008
• The Eastwood Factor, Short Film, 2009
