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...handled restraint: the horror is implied, with the emphasis on motivation and character. So why do I have a problem with Mystic River? The answer is Clint Eastwood--his vision as actor-director and his history as a film-maker.
There is much to respect: how an actor in a so-so television series--the now almost forgotten Rawhid--starred in a series of Italian Westerns and became a major star and director is one of the great American success stories. Eastwood was never involved in the bitter confrontations between moneymen and creative directors that marked the Hollywood industry in the 1960s and 1970s (in fairness to the directors of the period, many of the executives then were little better than corporate vandals); his production company Malpaso continues to have an excellent relationship with Warner Brothers (the parent company for most of Eastwood's American films), and rumour has it that the studio employs a PR man whose sole duty is to keep Eastwood happy. AU of this would not have happened if the star-director had not produced a series of successful films.
But Eastwood achieved this by being at first totally derivative. This was hardly surprising--the films of his first mentor Sergio Leone, in which Eastwood starred, were close to being outright plagiarism. A Fistful of Dollars is an unacknowledged Western remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo, with Eastwood's ironically detached antihero closely resembling the Japanese film's star Toshiro Mifune. Fascinatingly, when Kurosawa was urged to sue Leone, he replied, "I can't--I stole the plot from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest!"
Leone was, of course, much more than a copyist. He transformed the Western into what film writers were to call "ah opera of violence": movement within the frame was choreographed to Ennio Morricone's music, and gunfights became protracted rituals--with the over-the-top violence close to parody. Critics now see much of this as postmodernist, and certainly Leone achieved many of his effects by drastically simplifying the form. His protagonists--especially Eastwood--had near superhuman powers, disposing of five or six adversaries in a...
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