(To mark the occasion, Schickel, who wrote the standard Eastwood biography in 1997, has also put together a smart and sumptuous photographic assessment of Eastwood's entire career, Clint: A Retrospective.)

The 35th film is a short documentary, The Eastwood Factor, directed by Richard Schickel, which is an excerpt from a feature documentary of the same name in which Eastwood gives his Boswell a walking tour through the Warner lot and his filmmaking past. These discs have been long available here they are double-sided and wedged into cardboard slits that defy you not to leave fingerprints. This release is something of a corporate celebration, and not an occasion for refurbished prints. In celebration of his milestone birthday, the studio where he has spent much of that time has issued a handsome DVD omnibus: Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros., consisting of 34 Eastwood films made between 19-19 directed and starring him, 4 just directed by him, 11 just starring him.

He is a genre champ who questions the verities of genre the Man with No Name who celebrates the necessity of nontraditional families the commercially savvy action figure who relishes artists functioning in the absence of commercial dictates the killing machine who comes to abhor violence and, most surprisingly, the youthful vigilante-agnostic who takes the law into his own hands, only to accept, with maturity, the implacable burden of mortal sin. Though, at this point, one might argue, that they are largely indistinguishable from each other: Eastwood is always Eastwood. lot as perhaps no other director-star has, he remains a paradox-alternating (much as Graham Greene once insisted on labeling his novels as either 'serious' or 'entertainments') box-office bonanzas and defiantly personal projects. The ultimate insider, who bestrides the Warner Bros. (Credit: Warner Bros./Photofest)Īs he approaches 80, Clint Eastwood is a living testament to good genetics, relentless work, and a devotion to cinema bordering on religious avowal.

Man with no name series