Clint Eastwood doesn’t seem to have any interest in retiring. At age 91, Eastwood is the director and star of the new Warner Bros. movie Cry Macho, which will be released September 17 in both theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max. He is also one of the film’s producers.
This is a movie that has been trying to get made for a long time now, and with some rather heavyweight names attached to it. It took Eastwood’s legendary clout and prodigious talent — he’s got two “Best Director” and “Best Picture” Oscars — to finally get it done.
With his latest film “Cry Macho,” Clint Eastwood treads where many men have tried, but failed, before. The neo-Western is based on a book by N. Richard Nash from 1975, and since then, a handful of Hollywood leading men have tried to tackle the role of a washed-up horse breeder on the road to redemption, from Roy Scheider and Burt Lancaster, to Pierce Brosnan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The IndieWire article goes on to say Eastwood was considering starring in this movie back in the late 1980s but decided to do one last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool.
I like the term “neo-Western,” which is much more concise than my “modern-day cowboy movie” label. Those of us who are Western fans haven’t had much cinematic fare to enjoy here in recent years. In fact, I think the last new-release Western that I saw in a theater was Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven, and that was 29 years ago. We’ll take a Western no matter what era it’s set in. Cry Macho takes place in the 1970s, which have been in the rear-view mirror for a lot longer than those of us who grew up then would like to admit.
Clint Eastwood has been playing cowboys on screen for 62 years, ever since he was cast as Rowdy Yates on the television Western Rawhide in 1959. No modern living actor is more associated with the Western genre, so it’s fitting that he’d be the one who finally gets this picture made. You’ll see in the trailer that Eastwood still has plenty of swagger in his 90s. In an era when Instagram is filled with memes about 30 being “old,” Eastwood is a real inspiration to people who have actually aged a little.
It’s no big secret that Eastwood is a particular favorite of those of us over here on the conservative side of the aisle. He’s too big to be canceled, so he’s never been shy about his politics. My only fond memory of Mitt Romney’s 2012 slog for the GOP was Eastwood at the Republican National Convention, talking to an empty chair that he said was Barack Obama. My conservative activist friends of mine and I got a lot of social media mileage out of Eastwood’s “Oprah was crying…” line from that speech. It was perhaps the only laugh in that miserable campaign season.
Just a week ago, I was complaining to a friend that I was in the mood to see some new movies but almost everything released this year has been utter garbage. At a time when America seems to be slipping through our fingers, it will be nice to see a towering, thoroughly American icon like Clint Eastwood in a movie we can be reasonably assured won’t beat us over the head with woke messaging.
I think I might even get an American flag shirt to wear while I’m watching it.
Here’s the trailer. Enjoy.
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