MOVIE NEWS – Clint Eastwood is a western icon, and two of his favorite films in the genre have had a huge influence on how he approaches his own films.

Two of Clint Eastwood’s favorite westerns have had a huge influence on his own work in the genre. The popularity of the western genre was already in decline when Eastwood became a movie star in the 1960s, but his work in the Dollars film trilogy or Hang ‘Em High helped keep the genre alive in the years that followed. Clint Eastwood’s Westerns were also darker and more cynical than those made during the golden age of Hollywood, when heroes like John Wayne were almost always morally upright and decent.

In his work, Eastwood often played anti-heroes like the Man with No Name, who was never afraid to betray his supposed allies or shoot people before they drew their own guns. Eastwood is one of the last true icons of the genre, and he left the Western scene for good with 1992’s Unforgiven. Eastwood is unlikely to return to an old-fashioned Western adventure – although 2021’s Cry Macho is a neo-Western of sorts-but his influence on the genre is undeniable.

Clint Eastwood has cited The Ox-Bow Incident and Treasure of the Sierra Madre as two of his favorite films

In a conversation with AFI (via YouTube), Eastwood listed his favorite films and mentioned two classic westerns, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The former stars Henry Fonda as a cowboy who becomes part of a posse looking for a rancher’s killer, while The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is about greed and three men looking for gold in Mexico. Both films are now American classics and made a big impression on Eastwood when he saw them as a teenager.

How did Clint Eastwood’s own westerns, Strange Case and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, influence him?

Speaking about The Ox-Bow Incident in 2003, Eastwood said it was one of the first movies he ever watched with any moral weight. He went in expecting an entertaining piece of work, but instead the movie explored themes of vigilantism, racism, and even toxic masculinity. It showed the young Eastwood that movies could tackle more serious issues as well as entertainment, as seen in films like Unforgiven and even Hang ‘Em High, where Eastwood’s character is the victim of a lynching. Eastwood also acknowledges some of director William A. Wellman’s more experimental techniques, including the framing of certain shots.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also an early example of a Hollywood film that was not afraid to make its protagonists obnoxious, with Humphrey Bogart – one of the biggest movie stars in the world at the time – as a protagonist with few redeeming qualities. This set the film apart from the increasingly clean-cut heroes of the day, and Clint Eastwood himself nurtured and refined the idea of the anti-hero in his many westerns. The star later played a thinly veiled version of director Huston himself in 1990’s White Hunter, Black Heart.

Source: ScreenRant