Clint Eastwood is a Hollywood icon, with five Academy Awards, five Golden Globes, and numerous other accolades for his work as an actor, director, producer, and composer. Yet because he rose to fame in "spaghetti westerns" and Dirty Harry shoot-em-ups, few critics have ventured to explore Eastwood's philosophical, ethical, and artistic agenda as an intellectual filmmaker.
Addressing this void, film scholar Sara Anson Vaux analyzes fifteen of Eastwood's best-known films from narrative, artistic, and thematic perspectives. She traces the nuanced development of Eastwood's unfolding moral vision over a forty-year continuum, showing how this vision has grown more sophisticated even as many of the motifs expressing it -- justice, confession, war and peace, the gathering, the search for a perfect world -- have remained the same.

Reviews

Jolyon Mitchell
-- author of Media Violence and Christian Ethics"Engaging, fluent, and original, this book is a 'must-read' for film scholars, movie enthusiasts, and anyone interested in Clint Eastwood's films. Covering over forty years of his creative cinematic work, Sara Anson Vaux provides an insightful account of Eastwood's films and his journey from Spaghetti Westerns, via Pacific war movies, to more recent productions such as Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino. Vaux provides fresh and thought-provoking perspectives on Eastwood's ethical vision."
Christopher Deacy
-- author of Theology and Film: Challenging the Sacred/Secular Divide
"A beautifully written, challenging, erudite -- while also deeply personal and moving -- engagement with Eastwood and his films. The precision of Vaux's writing is matched by the wisdom and the penetrating theological eye that she brings to this study. . . . I liked this book enormously. It bridges the popular and acad