It did feel like that, only the beginning and ending were any good, the entire middle section was a poorly directed boring slog. That was probably because James Fargo was a TV series director.
shareThat's because Clint is notoriously cheap.
You'll probably recognise the exact same cars used in more than one Dirty Harry or Eastwood film at that time. Sometime they have barely had the dents and scratches repaired from the last movie they were used in.
But Clint didn't direct it, so how could the cheapness be blamed on him?
shareBecause by the 1970's, Eastwood had the star power to work with whatever directors he wanted. He liked working with cheap directors that he could push around and didn't have the attention to detail Sergio Leone or indeed Philip Kaufman on his previous film The Outlaw Josey Wales had.
Ted Post was another mediocre director he worked with which is why Hang 'Em High and Magnum Force look cheap. Read a couple of his biographies they go into far more detail about how cheap he is.
I see. Thanks for sharing.
Edit: BTW, what is the best Bio you've read?
I'd recommend American Rebel by Marc Elliot because he's done several before on people like Jack Nicholson and James Stewart. That's a good balanced one I would say.
There's another one called Life and Legend by Patrick McGilligan which is really jaw dropping about Eastwood behind his public image but that can come across a bit too biased against Eastwood because up until then, Eastwood had only endorsed biographies that didn't say anything bad about him like Richard Schickel's. So McGilligan's, although well researched, and all his sources are verified, can be too much about trying to disprove things from other biographies. And also his is older. Only goes to 2000 I think.
Marc Elliot's goes up to Gran Torino in 2008 and again he's done other well researched biographies about big stars.
I'll try to track those down. Thank you.
shareIt did have a bit of a seventies TV feel, especially the long foot chase and the overly jazzy percussive music.
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