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Clint Eastwood began his career by playing pieces in monster films, at least two of them for director Jack Arnold. He played a fun laboratory technician in the suite “Creature from the Black Lagoon” “Revenge of the Creature” in 1955And he was a masked pilot in Arnold’s “Tarantula” the same year. He was in comedy films, war images and globetrotter adventures, establishing his career and proving his versatility. He also worked, very briefly, for Universal TV, and had bits pieces in some successful shows in the mid -1950s.
It would not be before 1959, when he won the role of Rowdy Yates in the successful series “Rawhide”, which he would become associated with the westerns. While “Rawhide” was in his penultimate seventh season in 1965, Eastwood was thrown by Sergio Leone in Its Italian Western “has a fistful of dollars”, which would become one of the best Eastwood films. The actor’s taciturn performance has left a deep mark in his career, and has been associated with the genre since. (At least as an actor – as director, he turned out to be more versatile.)
During these first years, however, Eastwood still had to forge an identity and, perhaps surprising, was considered something of a pretty boy. Indeed, in 2015, Talk to the Hollywood ReporterEastwood remembered his first contract with Universal and the way he was avoided between various films, without finding a toe. To provide a calendar, the Eastwood universal contract was terminated in October 1955, shortly after its concert “Revenge of the Creature”. Biographer Patrick McGilligan, in his book “Clint: life and legend,” emphasizes that Eastwood has often been criticized to be something of an amateur and for having spoken too often through tight teeth.
Eastwood also recalled that he could not get parts in the Western of the day because, perhaps above all, the casting directors thought that he looked too much like Gary Cooper. And if there was already a Gary Cooper in the world, Universal did not need a cheap imitation.
