An older gunfighter coming out of retirement for one last hoorah, reflected Eastwood’s own journey as an aging actor playing his last role in the genre that made him famous
If anybody knows Westerns, it’s Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor has over 20 Western credits to his name in a career spanning decades. It makes sense then that TBS would get Eastwood to promote a five-day classic Western movie marathon.
The iconic movie star began his Western career on the TV show “Rawhide,” where he played cowhand Rowdy Yates. From there, he made the leap to films and became famous by starring in Sergio Leone’s groundbreaking Italian Westerns.
In a 1992 TBS commercial, Clint Eastwood talks about an upcoming movie marathon, his lines intercut with scenes from classic Westerns.
“I’m Clint Eastwood. Guy asked me what’s all the excitement. I told him about the classic Westerns coming up on TBS,” Eastwood says in the commercial. “He asked me if he could stay. My advice is never turn your back on a good showdown. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. And TBS has the best.”
The movies mentioned include the likes of “High Noon,” “A Fistful of Dollars,” and “Joe Kidd.” And Eastwood himself stars in many of the films included in the marathon.
Clint Eastwood Won An Oscar For A Western From Same Year of Commercial
In 1993, Clint Eastwood won the best director Oscar for his work on “Unforgiven.” In the movie, Eastwood plays a former gunslinging outlaw named Bill Munny. He returns to the life he left behind in an attempt to bring justice to the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming.
The 1992 film wasn’t just any Western, however. It would be Eastwood’s last.
“I felt like that was the genre I became known in, it had been so good to me, and that this would be the perfect last Western for me, and so far it had turned out that way,” he told Empire in a 2017 interview.
His character in the film, an older gunfighter coming out of retirement for one last hoorah, reflected Eastwood’s own journey as an aging actor playing his last role in the genre that made him famous.
Eastwood worried that he had overstayed his welcome in the Western genre. He feared that he would become repetitive. “Unforgiven” was the perfect one to go out on.
“Westerns are not known for being Oscar winners historically; a lot of great ones have not got recognition, so that made it doubly gratifying,” he said in 2017.
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