Clint Eastwood is a Hollywood icon, with five Academy Awards, five Golden Globes, and numerous other accolades for his work as an actor, director, producer, and composer. Yet because he rose to fame in spaghetti westerns and Dirty HarryMoreClint Eastwood is a Hollywood icon, with five Academy Awards, five Golden Globes, and numerous other accolades for his work as an actor, director, producer, and composer.
Yet because he rose to fame in spaghetti westerns and Dirty Harry shoot-em-ups, few critics have ventured to explore Eastwoods philosophical, ethical, and artistic agenda as an intellectual filmmaker. Addressing this void, film scholar Sara Anson Vaux analyzes fifteen of Eastwoods best-known films from narrative, artistic, and thematic perspectives. She traces the nuanced development of Eastwoods unfolding moral vision over a forty-year continuum, showing how this vision has grown more sophisticated even as many of the motifs expressing it -- justice, confession, war and peace, the gathering, the search for a perfect world -- have remained the same.