All quite good on the western front
- Critic's choiceUnforgiven (M) Sunday, 2.50pm, Starpics 4-1/2 starsGran Torino (M) Sunday, 8.45pm, Starpics 4 starsThe Tunnel (M) Saturday, 11.05pm, World Movies 4 starsHigh Plains Drifter (M) Tuesday, 8.30pm, Fox Classics 3-1/2 stars
AN affably eccentric documentary on the career of that sturdiest of Hollywood icons, The Eastwood Factor (Sunday, 5pm, Starpics) does precisely what it says on the tin.
Film historian and longtime friend Richard Schickel, expanding to feature length the 21-minute promotional film he made for a recent DVD boxed set devoted to the star, is clearly more interested in teasing out individual themes of Eastwood's substantial directorial career — 30 films and counting — than following a strict chronological profile. The documentary's disarmingly personal narration is caressed by another close friend, actor Morgan Freeman, and the result largely avoids, or at least contextualises, the hagiographic tendencies so often indulged in these kinds of career portraits.
Inevitably, given Eastwood's prolific output to date, the week's schedule affords ample opportunity to dig deeper into his filmography as actor and filmmaker. He didn't direct the influential 1960s spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars (Tuesday, 10.10pm, Fox Classics) or The Good, the bad and the ugly (Sunday, 10am, Starpics), but learned a great deal about visual framing and narrative pacing from the man who did, Sergio Leone. nor was he behind the camera for the enduringly odd 1969 musical Paint your Wagon (Friday, 7.20am, Showtime Drama), the protracted and chaotic production of which solidified a long-brewing resolve to direct pictures his own way.
It was Don Siegel, who directed Eastwood in four movies, including his 1971 breakout hit Dirty Harry (Sunday, 1pm, Starpics), who accelerated his transition to director. "For Don and Sergio", reads the dedication in the credits of the immaculate, genre-summing western Unforgiven (Sunday, 2.50pm, Starpics), which won Oscars in 1992 for Gene Hackman's vicious lawman, Joel Cox's propulsive editing, Eastwood's direction, and best picture. Another "what were they thinking?" Oscar moment: Eastwood lost as best actor to Al Pacino's scenery-chewing turn in Scent of a Woman.
Representative of Eastwood's formative string of 1970s westerns is High Plains Drifter (Tuesday, 8.30pm, Fox Classics), memorable as the film in which his enigmatic gunfighter instructs the citizens he's protecting to literally paint their town red.
To paraphrase the tag line of the upcoming Facebook movie The Social Network, you don't get to 30 directorial credits without making a few misfires. Chief among these in Eastwood's oeuvre is the 2002 would-be thriller Blood Work (Thursday, 7.15am, Movie Extra), a wan and predictable adaptation of Michael Connelly's much more focused novel. far from discouraging the then 72-year-old veteran, the diffident reception to this minor work seems to have sparked a late-career surge. his next film was the acclaimed Mystic River, and since then he's directed nearly a movie a year. Changeling (Tuesday, 4pm, Showtime Premiere) proved he could still paint on a large cinematic canvas with modest budgets, while the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (Sunday, 6.30pm, Starpics) and possible acting swansong Gran Torino (Sunday, 8.45pm, Starpics) pioneered the successful marketing ploy of holding his films' releases until the last possible minute to whet audience anticipation while still qualifying for end-of-year honours.
Eastwood had nothing to do with German director Roland Suso Richter's gripping The Tunnel (Saturday, 11.05pm, World Movies), yet the film displays the same tough intimacy and economical style of his best work. During its 28-year existence the Berlin Wall inspired daring and inventive escape attempts (100 out of about 5000 who tried were killed). One of the earliest and most spectacularly successful, made shortly after the wall was built, was by Hasso Herschel, then the East German swimming champion, who, disgruntlement over the political situation aside, apparently just missed his sister. The true-life twist is Herschel, who had left his family in the east, burrows back from the west to fetch them under the noses of the Stasi. Actor Heino Ferch channels the determination of vintage Bruce Willis while Richter's nimble skill with split-second action sequences ensure the film never flags over its three-hour running time. Dashing heroics aside, The Tunnel never loses sight of the human toll of that ill-conceived political structure, once formidable and now just a sad, absurd memory.
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