2025 will officially mark Clint Eastwood's 70th year in film. That's five years less than the average American male life expectancy, so even if all he did after the Eisenhower administration was playing paddies and barkeeps, you could call it an amazing run. Of course, Eastwood has done a little more than that. Along with filmmakers Sergio Leone and Dan Siegel, Eastwood was instrumental in deconstructing the western and crime genres, respectively. He is a two-time Oscar winner for best picture and best director (“Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby”), and, at age 94, his latest directorial “Juror #2” will be released this November.
Eastwood has been successful for so long that it's hard to accept that he really struggled. But 94 years is an awfully long time, and movie stardom didn't come to this big-screen icon until his 30s. Before that, she appeared in several forgettable movies and seemed headed for a typecast future as a television star.
Eastwood believed he could do better, but he began to second guess himself when he landed one of his first notable film gigs in a B Western.
The film that almost made Eastwood quit acting
In a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Eastwood poignantly recalled being a contract player at Universal, which led to him getting third billing in a 20th Century Fox western widescreen, minus the deliberate laughs of an episode of “F Troop.” As Eastwood told THR, it nearly put him out of business:
“[F]One day I started getting some parts and then I did a small film on Fox called 'Ambush at Chimaran Pass'. It is probably the worst film ever made […] But I was the second lead in it and an actor named Scott Brady was the lead. And the film was made in eight days. It's actually the El Speedo Grande. I saw it. I went to see it and it was playing a second feature in North Hollywood. I went to see it, I saw that film and I said I'm done. I have to go back to school. I need to do something else, I need to get a different kind of job.”
Eastwood was unsuccessful. CBS liked his chops as a western actor and cast him as upstart cowboy Rowdy Yates in the TV western “Rawhide”. However, Eastwood quickly tired of episodic television, which prompted him to take a chance on a violent-period Western in Spain with the then-unproven Italian director Sergio Leone, when he took a break from the series in 1964. That movie was “A Fistful of Dollars,” at which point Eastwood's ambulatory streak toward international stardom broke into full swing.
“Ambush at Cimarron Pass” is currently available to stream for free on YouTube, but the paint-by-numbers film is only for Eastwood completists. Seriously, you'd be better off watching “Pink Cadillac” or “The Rookie.”
