On a beautiful day in Wyoming, in 1880, three men gather on a slight rise behind some rocks, ready to do a bit of killing. Two of them—William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman)—are retired professional assassins, disgusted with their past but broke and therefore willing to shoot a couple of cowhands, unknown to either of them, for cash. The third is the excitable “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), who has read Western dime fiction all his life and is hot to plug someone—pretty much anyone will do. Logan is the best shot, and he raises his Spencer rifle, aiming at one of the men, who are rounding up cattle with some others below. But, after hitting the man’s horse, Logan can’t pull the trigger again; he just can’t kill anymore. As the Schofield Kid loudly complains that no one’s dead yet, Munny takes the rifle and mortally wounds the cowhand, who howls so persistently for water that Munny shouts at his companions, “Will you give him a drink of water, for Christ’s sake? We ain’t gonna shoot.”

The scene, which appears more than halfway through Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, “Unforgiven,” is excruciatingly long—nearly five minutes—and, watching it for the first time, you sense almost immediately that the episode is momentous. The awkwardly insistent realism has a cleansing force: at least for that moment, ninety years of efficient movie violence—central to the Western and police genres—falls away. Old myths dissolve into the messy stupidity of life, which, as rendered by Eastwood, becomes the most challenging kind of art. It’s idiotic to kill a stranger for money, and, not only that, it’s hard. Particularly hard on the stranger, but hard on you, too. The Schofield Kid, it turns out, gets to shoot the other cowhand a bit later, as the guy is sitting in the crapper. But, afterward, the Kid is sickened and scared. Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.

Being underestimated is, for some people, a misfortune. For Eastwood, it became a weapon. Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars, and noodling at the piano—a fun guy to hang out with. Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit TV show, “Rawhide”; appeared in more than fifty movies and directed thirty-one, often acting, directing, and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day,” which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done since John Wayne; served as the mayor of Carmel; won four Oscars and received many other awards, including a hug from Nicolas Sarkozy while becoming commander of the Légion d’Honneur, last November. Those who were skeptical of Eastwood forty years ago (I’m one of them) have long since capitulated, retired, or died. He has outlasted everyone.

Early on, his outsider heroes operated with an unshakable sense of right. Such men were angry enforcers of order defined not by law but by primal notions of justice and revenge. “Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot,” Eastwood’s Dirty Harry said in “Magnum Force” (1973). Removed from normal social existence, these low-tech terminators eliminated “the right people” and withdrew into bitter isolation again. Noblesse oblige—or, perhaps, vigilante oblige. Yet by mid-career, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, even as films in the Dirty Harry series were still coming out, Eastwood began showing signs of regret, twinges of doubt and self-reproof, along with a broadening of interest and a stunning increase of aesthetic ambition. He made comedies, bio-pics, and literary adaptations (and twice starred with an orangutan). The movies shifted from stiff, stark, enraged fables, decisive to the point of patness, to something more relaxed and ruminative and questioning. In “Unforgiven,” he holds scenes a few extra beats, so that characters can extend their legs, scratch behind their ears, air some issue of violence or honor. The movie comments on itself as it goes along.

It’s now obvious that “Unforgiven” was less an end point than a significant way station on an uninterruptible career path. Eastwood’s latest film, “Invictus,” a celebration of the shrewd and noble way that Nelson Mandela united South Africa in 1995, is not one of his best movies—it’s a little too simple—but it’s devoted to a man who is the opposite of isolated, a man whose sense of right changes an entire society. (Eastwood, a moderate libertarian Republican, has acknowledged parallels with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and expressed his annoyance with the “morbid mood” of America and the “teen-age twits” in Washington.) In all, Eastwood has had an incredibly productive long run, and, in honor of it, Warner Bros. recently issued a DVD boxed set of thirty-four movies that Eastwood starred in or directed for the studio. There is also a recent biography, “American Rebel,” by Marc Eliot, although Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, despite the fact that it reflects Eastwood’s views throughout, remains the shrewdest accounting of the director’s films and character. At the end of May, rich, garlanded, and exceptionally busy, Eastwood will turn eighty.

“The kidney you gave the C.E.O., Hayward. It’s not meeting quarterly projections.” Facebook

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He was born big—Bunyonesque big—at eleven pounds six ounces, in 1930, and grew up mostly in Piedmont, California, near Oakland. During the Depression, as his father found and lost jobs, the family was constantly on the move. Schickel has suggested that this peripatetic life may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end. The constant in Eastwood’s early life was his mother, Ruth, who collected jazz records and got her son excited about music. As a teen-ager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool—slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else—is derived from those musicians.

After high school, he did odd jobs for a couple of years, including hard work in a lumber mill and easy work on a beach, as a lifeguard. When he was drafted, in 1950, he was made a swimming instructor, and kept out of combat in Korea. Assigned to Fort Ord, near Carmel, which turned out to be the geographical center of the rest of his life, he worked days at the base pool and manned the piano at local bars on nights off—a relaxed existence that he captured in his first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971), in which he was a Carmel disk jockey, indolent, seductive, and seducible, a character probably as close to the actual young Eastwood as we’ve ever seen onscreen.

At the suggestion of friends, Eastwood sat in on evening classes, taught by a disciple of Michael Chekhov, the acting guru, and in 1954 he came to the notice of Universal Studios, which still had a “school” devoted to the training of young actors. He signed on as a contract player for seventy-five dollars a week. His teachers noted a certain tentativeness in his demeanor—to put it gently, he didn’t project much—but also some interesting corners in his temperament, and for the next few years he had small parts in junk movies. No one much noticed him until he was hired, in 1958, to star (alongside Eric Fleming) in “Rawhide,” one of the many TV Westerns of the period, this one complete with a Frankie Laine theme song punctuated with crackling whiplashes. After a few years, bored and ready to jump, Eastwood received a strange, derivative script by a man named Sergio Leone. It was titled “The Magnificent Stranger” and was an obvious remake of “Yojimbo,” Akira Kurosawa’s bloody but funny 1961 samurai classic. Leone was a second-unit director in Italy who was obsessed with America. He was convinced that the classic Western had turned what was historically a remorseless struggle for commercial dominance into a moralized battle between good and evil. Leone wanted literally to demoralize the Western. He took the deep syntax of the genre (the bare streets, the stare-downs and sudden draws, the high body counts), raised it to the surface, and dropped almost everything else. “A Fistful of Dollars,” as “Stranger” was eventually titled, and its more entertaining sequels, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” was knowing parody, and Eastwood, with his minimalist technique, fit perfectly into the style of unyielding absurdism. As the Man with No Name, he kept his head still, at a slight angle; he narrowed his eyes; he scowled and curled his upper lip. It was an arrogant teen-ager’s idea of acting, but he looked mean, amused, coolly amoral. He understood that, for an actor like him, playing a character was less important than establishing an image of implacable male force.