Clint Eastwood in the 1990s

This article is part of a series about Clint Eastwood
Early life Personal life Political life Career '50s '60s '70s '80s '90s '00s Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea Mayoralty 2012 RNC appearance Malpaso Productions Filmography Discography Bibliography Awards and honors

Clint Eastwood directed the film White Hunter Black Heart, an adaptation of Peter Viertel's roman à clef about John Huston and the making of the classic film The African Queen. The film received some critical attention but only had a limited release and earned just $8.4 million.

Career

In 1993, Eastwood played Frank Horrigan, a guilt-ridden Secret Service agent in the CIA thriller In the Line of Fire, co-starring John Malkovich and Rene Russo and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Eastwood's character, Horrigan, is haunted by his failure to react in time to save John F. Kennedy's life. Eastwood first received the script in the spring of 1992 and remarked that "Its almost as if it's written for me". As of 2012, it is the last time he acted in a film he did not direct himself. The film was among the top 10 box office performers in that year, earning $102 million in North American ticket sales.

In 1997, Eastwood directed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Eastwood's daughter, Alison Eastwood played John Cusack's love interest.

In 1999, Eastwood directed True Crime. He portrayed journalist and alcoholic Steve Everett who is covering the convicted murderer Frank Beechum (played by Isaiah Washington) execution. The film was a box office bomb domestically and Eastwood's worst performing film during the 1990s.

As actor and director

Later in 1990 Eastwood directed and co-starred with Charlie Sheen in The Rookie, a buddy cop action film. Critics found the macho jiving between Eastwood and Sheen unconvincing and scenario improbable, and believed that many of the actors were miscast. In 1991, for the third time in his career, Eastwood didn't appear in or direct any films. Instead he was a defendant in a lawsuit after he rammed a woman's car while backing out of his parking space in the Malpaso Productions parking lot. Eastwood won the lawsuit and agreed to pay McLaughlin's court fees if she would not appeal.

In 1992, Eastwood revisited the western genre in the self-directed film Unforgiven. He played aging ex-gunfighter William Munny, long past his prime. The film was first conceived of in 1976 under the titles The Cut-Whore Killings and The William Munny Killings. The project was delayed, in part because Eastwood wanted to wait until he was old enough to play the principal character and to savor it as the last of his western films. The film re-imagined Western conventions in a more ambiguous and unromantic light and laid a foundation for later westerns like Deadwood. Production designer Henry Bumstead, who had worked with Eastwood on High Plains Drifter, was hired to create the "drained, wintry look" of the western.Unforgiven was a box office and critical success. It earned over $15 million on its opening weekend, the best opening for an Eastwood film.

Unforgiven was hailed by many critics as one of the best films of 1992. Jack Methews of the Los Angeles Times described it as "The finest classical western to come along since perhaps John Ford's 1956 The Searchers. Richard Corliss in Time wrote that the film was "Eastwood's meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism—on all those burdens he has been carrying with such grace for decades". The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Actor and Best Director for Eastwood. Eastwood won the latter. Eastwood also garnered the Best Director Award from the National Society of Film Critics.

Later in 1993, Eastwood directed and co-starred with Kevin Costner in A Perfect World. Set in the 1960s, similar to Lonely Are the Brave, it relates the story of a doomed character pursued by state police using modern transportation and communication. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that the film was the high point of Eastwood's directing career: "It gives real meaning to the subject of men's legacies to their children". Since its release, the film has been acclaimed by critics as one of Eastwood's most underrated directorial achievements.

In 1995, Eastwood expanded his repertoire by playing opposite Meryl Streep in the love story The Bridges of Madison County. The on-screen chemistry between Eastwood and Streep led the public to believe that the two were having an off-camera affair, although both denied it. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Eastwood had created "a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill", while Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal described The Bridges of Madison County as "one of the most pleasurable films in recent memory".

Eastwood then directed and starred in the well-received political thriller Absolute Power. Eastwood played a veteran thief who witnesses the Secret Service cover up a murder the President committed.

"The roles that Eastwood has played, and the films that he has directed, cannot be disentangled from the nature of the American culture of the last quarter century, its fantasites and its realities."

Edward Gallafent, author, commenting on Eastwood's impact on film from the 1970s to 1990s.

References

This article "Clint Eastwood in the 1990s" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Clint Eastwood in the 1990s. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Clint Eastwood in the 1960s
• Clint Eastwood in the 1950s
• Clint Eastwood in the 1970s
• Clint Eastwood in the 1980s
• List of Celluloid Dreams productions (1990–1999)
• Clint Eastwood in the 2000s
• List of box office bombs (1990s)

---