The new book Clint: The Man and the Movies—A Comprehensive Biography of Hollywood’s Most Iconic Actor-Director is a wonderful and absorbing account of the life of a Hollywood legend. Clint Eastwood, 95, may be one of the most well-known men in America, but Clint author, Shawn Levy, writes with such insight and nuance that it’s like getting to know the star of Dirty Harry and Unforgiven all over again.
Eastwood was born in 1930 in San Francisco. A troublemaker as a child who was held back in school, he was noticed by a talent scout in 1954 and landed a role on the TV series Rawhide. In 1963, Eastwood was cast in an Italian-made western called A Fistful of Dollars (1964), filmed in Spain by director Sergio Leone. The film was a hit and led to other westerns — For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Hang ‘Em High. Eastwood went on to become an iconic face and figure in the Dirty Harry movies, and won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture for 1992’s Unforgiven.
This is all known to most movie fans, but where Clint the book is arguably most compelling is in its discussion of Eastwood’s politics. Conservatives have long claimed Eastwood as one of their own, and Eastwood has often enriched himself as a libertarian. Yet, as Levy shows, the real story is more complicated. In essence, Eastwood has always been a small-government guy who wants people to be left alone, whether it is running a business or living their personal lives.
What happened, Levy argues, is that Eastwood stood firm to these positions as American culture shifted around him in the 1960s and 1970s. His Dirty Harry character of policeman Harry Callahan expressed the frustration of Americans who witnessed their communities being weakened due to lax law enforcement. Eastwood also depicted the media as callow and irresponsible — this, as Levy notes, “when Donald Trump was still a businessman in New York.”
“He was still a man who felt entitled to define his own time and liberty when it came to sexual relationships and life partnerships,” Levy writes of Eastwood in the 1970s and 1980s. “ And he was still a political Libertarian, voting Republican in accord with his views on economic and defense issues but holding laissez-faire attitudes toward matters like abortion, gay rights, and legalized marijuana and even repeatedly speaking out in favor of stricter regulation of handgun ownership. None of that had changed since the early 1960s. But as he stood stock still, things around him had shifted in a way that made it seem as though he had moved. There had been a time, not very long before, when you could walk into college dorm rooms and see posters of him in his poncho and beard stubble alongside images of Jimi Hendrix and Che Guevara—icons of rebellion and resistance. But as the ʼ80s dawned, he seemed like a standard-bearer for what had become known, in an increasingly common phrase, as ‘traditional values.’ The center of American culture had shifted to the right.”
In the 1980s film Bronco Billy, Eastwood made a film that celebrated the regular working people who had been part of his film crews for decades. “Bronco Billy looked like a statement when, really, it was a movie about dreams and wishes—an effort to evoke the starry-eyed social-commentary comedies by Frank Capra and Preston Sturges,” Levy notes. “The sitcom-ish plot wasn’t what attracted Clint to it. It was the vibe: communitarian, optimistic, starry-eyed, even slightly goofy. In gathering a ragtag team of circus performers, and playing shows in small towns in the inland Northwest, and conveying lessons of hard work and decency and milk-drinking to kids, Bronco Billy was an old-timey cornball, yes, but he was also an emblem of the values with which Clint had been raised and which, in large part, he still believed.”
Eastwood described it this way: “I wanted to say something about everybody being able to participate. America is the maddest idea in the world, put together by madmen. So, here comes this tent. I suppose other people see America as a collage of crazies. Well, maybe we are kind of hard to fathom.”
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There have also been missteps. In 2019’s Richard Jewell, Eastwood missed an opportunity to depict a reporter as contrite and tortured by her decision to defame an innocent man. Journalist Kathy Scruggs pointed at innocent security guard Richard Jewell as the guilty party in an Atlanta bombing. Levy convincingly argues that Eastwood shows her as a monster, when in reality Scruggs was tormented by her false reporting — a show of conscience rare in the media in 2025.
“She was never at peace or at rest with this story,” Mike Kiss, one of her editors, once said. “It haunted her until her last breath. It crushed her like a junebug on the sidewalk.”
Mark Judge is the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. The New American Stasi.