" A Good man always knows his limitations " - The Original punk turns 90

It becomes very difficult when you sit down to pen about a man whose truly larger than life . Similarities can be drawn to Uttam Kumar Bengali Cinema's evergreen hero who even after 40 years of his untimely death has captivated every Bengali mind across the globe and has been a favorite topic for all journalists and film buffs' across world .


Clint Eastwood Jr. was born to hog limelight . The one similarity I proudly can declare that both me and Clint were born 5 kgs + at birth , such has been my fan following and adulation of him.  Unlike most of 30's America's middle class background , Clint had a luxurious life at Piedmont California where each of his parents had a separate car and they had a swimming pool at their place. Much like many of contemporary Hollywood actors  , Clint put himself through a lot of jobs but stuck to none of them for long - he was too fickle minded and didn't know where his future calling was ..

His initial flirtations with Universal Studios' started in the 1950's when he was introduced to Cameraman Irving Glassberg .  From 1954 when he gave his first audition in SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS to 1964 when A fistful of dollars came in , it was a story of failure , scratchy roles in small budget films to rejections and heartbreaks . Its here that we see a similarity of Clint to our Superstar BIG B . Those 10 years of failure, near yet so far made him and prepared him for an unforgettable 5 decades at the top. That he didn't give up was a lifelong gain for us . That he would become an ever lasting pin up cowboy of the glitterati was not indicated in the first decade of his tryst and opportunities at Hollywood.

What makes him such a cult icon ? -  for firsts,  his uncanny height at a staggering 1.93 metres (6 feet 4 inches ) very few hollywood actors are over 6-3" , his tall lanky appearance without a stoop which he held till his 80th year marked him as one of the few WESTERN ACTORS who defied age ... 


A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965). & the final part of the trilogy - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) established Clint as one of the major hollywood stars after a decade old struggle. Although the films' brought Eastwood major commercial acclaim, it failed to attract critical acclaim and thus began Eastwood's long battle with American film critics' to win their respect .  His early films saw him more as a commercial actor who only knew how to appear in Westerners !!! 

"I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement . It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time , keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. "  Eastwood on his larger than life character  in The Good , the Bad and the Ugly where his role of few words were to sum up many of his future roles. 

Many of Eastwood's fans across Globe and his biographers have tried to find the reason for his enduring masculine image that has captivated millions of his followers including yours truly for ages.   

Clint Eastwood occupies the same position in Western Culture as Keith Richard does : he has been around for ever , has done tonnes of amazing work , he embodies the rebellious , iconoclastic spirit of the 60's ; and he has never sold out and become a joke just about everyone else in his genre. Even timid, self-effacing men who have never fired a gun , much less puffed on a stogie , secretly wish that they could just once sport that filthy poncho, bite down on that cigarillo and fill the streets of Laredo with lead . When push comes to shove , Eastwood , the original rock-star cowboy , can always fall back on the statement : " I'm Clint Eastwood , and you are not."

Clint with whom the public has had a love affair for 62 years since he made his debut as high chapparal stud muffin Rowdy Yates in the TV series Rawhide , has probably had the most amazing career in motion picture . There are bigger stars and there are better directors, and there are other stars who have become accomplished film-makers , but none of them can touch Eastwood for the breadth and quality of his work, for his success at box office , and his ability to never go out of fashion.

Clint Eastwood has starred in or directed roughly one movie a year for the past 56 years . Most of them have been pretty good ; some of them have been great. The equally prolific Woody Allen comes closest to Eastwood as a creative double threat , but Allen makes the same movie over and over again, and he cannot act in any way , shape or form. And unlike Woody Allen, the public adores Clint Eastwood .

Though Eastwood is probably best known as the Man With No Name - the mysterious man with the poncho and the cigarillo - he did not make all that many westerns and none since Unforgiven in 1992.
Unlike John Wayne , Randolph Scott and other great Cowboy  heroes of yester years , he brought a new dimension to Sergio Leone's vision - The Man With No Name just sprang out of nowhere with an uncertain pedigree and undefined motivation . He had his own ethos as a loner -  " I want to be left alone to do my own thing and I need not explain to all what I do " !!


At a very early point in his career , Eastwood had decided that he was going to make his own films, blasting off with Play Misty for Me . It would go onto introduce several of Eastwood's trademark themes - men are spectacularly shallow and want women for sex , cops are idiots , when in doubt take the law in your own hands . From here on , the classic Eastwood action film , whether it was Dirty Harry or Pale Rider or Sudden Impact or Unforgiven would be animated by a simple principle: there are bad people out there and eventually I am going to kill them : Just don't  mess with me !!


Eastwood has to his credit violent films, arty films,heartwarming films , and a handful of dimwit comedies. He has made films that are thrilling from the start - ( Pale Rider, Gran Torino, Mystic River, Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josey Wales ) and films that are dead on arrival (Jersey Boys , Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil ). He has made films that are weird ( The Beguiled, High Plains Drifter, Changeling ) , films that are creepy ( The Gauntlet , Play Misty for Me), films that are politically incorrect (Dirty Harry, Gran Torino, Tightrope )  and few films that are delightfully charming (The Bridges of Madison County,  A Perfect Life , Invictus ).  He has made a couple of stupid movies but hasn't made a stupid movie in a long long time.  He has taken good books ( Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil , Flags of our Fathers ) and turned them into not so good movies , and has taken treacly , idiotic books ( The Bridges of Madison County ) and turned them into something wonderful.

Part of his secret is this : Eastwood never stops working ; he is always on to the next project . When a movie flops , he climbs back into the saddle and makes another one . The Hit Space Cowboys follows the Dud True Crime . After the public ignores White Hunter , Black Heart , Eastwood comes back with the Oscar -winning Unforgiven. In Eastwood's world , things are simple. Sometimes the magic works . Sometimes it doesn't .

Eastwood is one of the few directors who have got better as he entered his twilight years. He got a lot better. Most directors play out the string by the time they come to the end , but this is not the case for Clint Eastwood.  Gran Torino in 2008 was oddly moving and timely . 2003 - Mystic River was dark and gripping .  American Sniper in 2015  was disturbing .  2009 - Invictus was inspiring .  

There are certain repetitive themes in Eastwood movies.  Bureaucrats are stupid. Attorneys are scum. Journalists are parasites. The law will not save you from evil-doers.  Women need protection, even the ones who go around shooting men in genitals. Women gets mistreated in Eastwood movies. They get punched in the face in Play Misty for Me, The Gauntlet and Million Dollar Baby.  In fairness to Eastwood , an awful lot of men get punched in the face , too - most especially him.

Eastwood seemed to have decided quite early in his career that the public liked to see him get battered, because he gets worked over good and proper in spaghetti westerns, lynched in Hang'em High, kicked into a near coma in Unforgiven, and shot dead in Gran Torino. He also gets his leg chopped in the Beguiled ( the original 1971 film). This is the only film of his where he made a concerted effort to honestly emote on screen. He wasn't good at it . He was stiff. After Beguiled, Eastwood mostly danced with the one that brung him - frowning and howling . A man has got to know his limitations.

Clint Eastwood as an actor is perhaps the only one who in-spite of being one dimensional ( ie. only cowboy or western roles suited him with the strong exception of The Bridges of Madison County) drew massive crowds whenever his movie was released . Such One dimensional Cowboy Hollywood has hardly ever seen.

Eastwood's themes are archetypal , and he constantly pays homage to those who developed these archetypes. The notion that only an enigmatic gunslinger can deliver the innocent from evil does't originate with Pale Rider; it comes from Shane arguably the greatest western of them all. The Outlaw Josey Wales is a retelling of Gregory Peck's the Bravados, with slightly more blood. And Unforgiven looks back to the unconventional Italian Westerns that launched his glittering career : the Old Man with No Name. Movie making is not so much a process of making new films as remaking old ones . Trouble with the curve is the same basic story as Space Cowboys : being old isn't the same as being dead. J.Edgar evokes Citizen Kane : absolute power corrupts absolutely. Stories work today because they worked yesterday. People never get tired of seeing good triumph over evil, because the only place they ever get to see this happen is the Cinema.

There are several Eastwood movies that deal with explicitly with Politics and in none of them does Eastwood take a uniformly right wing line .  J.Edgar, his biopic  about FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, who is still a hero to many on the US right , depicts the powerful director as paranoid , duplicitous ,closeted, vindictive , hypocritical , cowardly & just plain weird. Absolute Power gives us a White House filled with flag-waving reptiles. Flags of Our Fathers pays tribute to a bunch of courageous youngsters taken for a ride by their own government . Million Dollar Baby was widely perceived as a slap in the face of Bush administration, in that it embraced euthanasia, which Bush did not. American Sniper, regardless of how it was perceived by the US right, does not in any way suggest that invading Iraq was Dick Cheney's best idea. Invictus presents Nelson Mandela as a cross between St.Francis of Assisi and Pericles. whatever Eastwood's politics are in real life , he mostly keeps ideology out of his movies.

One of the reasons why Clint has remained an enduring hero and a perennial source of joy and bundle of longevity is the fact that he has been a health freak through out his life .  The very fact that most of his contemporaries have not outlived him or if some of them have, they have been confined to bed or have been incapacitated.  The very fact that even till his 88th year he could direct a film and could lead a life like a 40 year old and that he was publicly visible without a helping hand till as late as 2019 is an ample evidence of the fact of the physical fitness this man possess. And it is this remarkable fitness and agility that has made him a LEGEND for all ages and generations.


Eastwood's incredible career as an actor and director goes back six decades from his early spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone to the modern masterpieces that he has directed. While may Hollywood actors have been both actors and directors , Eastwood shines alone in his incredible success at both.  The man who acted in Hang 'em High (1968) , and Where Eagles Dare (1968) ( a movie which truly made him an International Superstar)  is the man who made Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). It is this remarkable elan  with  which he has transformed from a world class actor to a world class director that makes Clint Eastwood Jr. a legend we wont be able to forget in the years to come !! " You want to play the game , you'd better know the rules , love ."  Eastwood has known the rule pretty well throughout his career and as he touches 90, he stands THE TALLEST among the pantheons of some of the greatest names Hollywood has ever produced .. Long Live Eastwood.

  

            

Sahabzade Irrfan

Death is inevitable they say .. Death has many faces but the face of truth it has ... is the loss of value . Irrfan Khan who left us on April 29 ,2020 was a face which was a loss, a clear loss considering the incandescent nature of his versatility. He was a talent which not many had seen or understood before , and his presence in both national and international scene was magnanimous.

Philosophers have debated to death what kind of loss death represents. And for whom. The person dying or those who left behind ? A whole tradition , from Socrates to Montaigne is devoted to preparing us for the good death . For Montaigne , " premeditation of death is a premeditation of freedom  " : Somehow knowing how to die liberates us from subjection & constraint . But even the composed Montaigne , who thought contemplating death made life more vivid & meaningful, could not easily reconcile to the death of his brilliant 32 year old friend, the young La Boetie ,author of  The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude , an analysis of the hypnosis tyrants can produce in their subjects . The fact that La Boetie was only 32 when he died made the grief harder , even in an age where dying young was not rare. Coping with the prospect of someone else's death is, in most cases , harder than contemplating your own.

But what is the loss we mourn , especially in the case of a brilliant genius like Irrfan , who attained the pinnacle of what art could achieve ? He leaves a void in this world. In part, the sense of loss that accompanies every artiste is the sense of their irreplaceability.  They are,  in some deep sense , unique. But it is also a uniqueness that touches everyone. It is universal. What makes it universal is that its achievement and value is something all of us can acknowledge. It lifts us out of our egotisms & narcissisms to give us a glimpse of what artistic excellence looks like. We regret his passing early since the magnitude of his achievement makes you wonder what other possibilities might have been.

It is difficult to write someone's obituary when everything you might want to say is already in public domain. It becomes even more difficult when the actor in question is some one like Irrfan Khan, a rare gem in history of Hindi Cinema , a so-called supporting actor who rose to mainstream stardom , and played lead roles in commercially successful films like Hindi Medium and Piku. Perhaps , only Irrfan could have done that. He created a path for others to follow -  a path cemented with sheer hard work , relentless struggle and redoubtable performances.

His beginnings were far from comfortable . His struggle for recognition could inspire a film script. Many serials, art-house films, years of unending struggle in the ruthless metropolis that Mumbai stands for , finally things began to change for him with Haasil (2003) where he played a dark role. 

If you look at Irrfan's body of work , which spans student diploma films and television serials amongst other things , it is indicative of the most important thing that actors without a pedigree have had to learn in order to survive in Mumbai : To wait . The art of waiting makes for a good teacher, perhaps. Maybe , it is this act of waiting that further magnified his performances. He gave everything to his on-screen portrayals that all those years of waiting had taught him. Of course , lest we forget,behind the success of one Irrfan Khan, there are many stories of failure - however lost in the alleys of Mumbai. 

Irrfan's success story is a testimony to his acting talent , which subverted box - office norms. His work abroad helped to further strengthen his prospects for the country. It is rather sad that some of our finest have to wait for Hollywood or western validation to receive their rightful dues at home. 

Can you think of Life of Pie (2012) without Irrfan? He is barely there in the film, which is otherwise dominated by a blitzkrieg of events and great visual effects , yet it his dialogues in the end that many left the theatre with.   

A lot of Irrfan's admirers and colleagues have said that the news of his death has left them "numb". There is no better word to articulate the sense of abandonment - of being unable to watch him light up the screen anymore. Yours truly also belongs to the same category - the sense of loss is so overwhelming ... It is this vacuum that has put Irrfan in the pantheon of greats of the industry which he has made so poor by leaving !!