It took Clint Eastwood forty years to disarm critics, who considered him an apologist for brutality and machismo. Film historian Noël Simsolo retraces the stages of a trial he witnessed first-hand.
This article is taken from Figaro Hors-Série “Clint Eastwood, the last of the giants”.
Le Figaro
For me, it all started with the credits of For a Fistful of Dollars which obviously featured only Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms. The year was 1966. I was a twenty-one-year-old film nut at the time, and I wondered who the participants in this fake American western filmed in Spain and France might be. Cinecittà. Then public success lifted the secrecy of Italian identities: the director Sergio Leone, the actor Gian Maria Volonté, the composer Ennio Morricone… The only American to appear under his real name was a thirty-four year old actor who shared the starring role of Rawhide, a TV series not yet broadcast in France. His name was Clint Eastwood. He’d been working in Hollywood for ten years without landing a major role, which was surprising given his impressive composition as an unshaven cowboy…
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