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In 1992, after almost forty years in the business, Clint Eastwood finally received Oscar recognition. Unforgiven brought him the awards for Best Achievement in Directing and for Best Picture, along with a nomination for Best Actor. Indeed, this strikingly powerful Western was nominated for no less than nine Academy Awards, Gene Hackman collecting Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the movie''s ruthless marshall, ?Little Bill? Daggett, and Joel Cox taking the Oscar for editing. It seems appropriate, therefore, that this film, which brought him such recognition, should end with the inscription ?Dedicated to Sergio and Don.? For without the intervention and influence of his two ?mentors,? directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, it is difficult to imagine Eastwood achieving his present respectability, let alone emerging as the only major star of the modern era who has become a better director than he ever was an actor.

That is not to belittle Eastwood, who has always been generous in crediting Leone and Siegel, and who is certainly far more than a passive inheritor of their directorial visions. Even in his Rawhide days of the 1950s and early 1960s he wanted to direct; more than once Eastwood has told of his attempts to persuade that series'' producers to let him shoot some of the action rather more ambitiously than was the TV norm. Not surprisingly, they were reluctant, but they did in the end allow him to make trailers for upcoming episodes. He was not to take on a full-fledged directorial chall nge until 1971 with Play Misty for Me, but in the intervening years he had become a massive box-office attraction as an actor, first with Leone in Europe in the three famous and founding ?spaghetti westerns,? and then in a series of films with Siegel back in the United States, most significantly Dirty Harry.

It is not easy to untangle the respective influences of his mentors. In general terms, because they both contributed to the formation of Eastwood''s distinctive screen persona, they helped him to crystallise an image which, as a director, he would so often use as a foil. The Italian Westerns'' ?man with no name,? and his more anguished urban equivalent given expression in Dirty Harrys eponymous anti-hero, have provided Eastwood with well-established and economical starting characters for so many of his performances. In directing himself, furthermore, he has used that persona with a degree of irony and distance. Sometimes, especially in his Westerns, that has meant leaning toward stylization and almost operatic exaggeration (High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, the last section of Unforgiven), though rarely reaching Leone''s extremes of delirious overstatement. On other occasions, it has seen him play on the tension between the seemingly assertive masculinity of the Eastwood image and the strong female characters who are so often featured in his films (Play Misty for Me, The Gauntlet, Heartbreak Ridge and, in part at least, The Bridges of Madison County). It is, of course, notoriously difficult to both direct and star in a movie. Where Eastwood has succeeded in that combination (not always the casc) it has depended significantly on his inventive building on the Eastwood persona.

It is important to give Eastwood full credit for this inventiveness in any attempt to assess his work. His better films as a director have a richness to them, not just stylistically-though in those respects he has learned well from Leone''s concern with lighting and composition and from Siegel''s way with in-frame movement, editing, and tight narration-but also a moral complexity which belies the one-dimensionality of the Eastwood image. The protagonists in his better films, like Josey Wales in The Outlaw Josey Wales, Highway in Heartbreak Ridge, Munny in Unforgiven, even Charlie Parker in the flawed Bird, are not simple men in either their virtues or their failings. Eastwood''s fondness for narratives of revenge and redemption, furthermore, allows him to draw upon a rich generic vein in American cinema, a tradition with a built-in potential for character development and for evoking hu-man complexity without giving way to art-film portentousness.

In these respects Eastwood is the modern inheritor of traditional Hollywood directorial values, once epitomised in the transparent style of a John Ford, Howard Hawks, or John Huston (himself the subject of Eastwood''s White Hunter, Black Heart), and passed on to Eastwood by that next-generation carrier of the tradition, Don Siegel. For these filmmakers, as for Eastwood, the action movie, the Western, the thriller were opportunities to explore character, motivation, and human frailty within a framework of accessible entertainment. Of course, all of them were also capable of ?quieter? films, harnessing the same commitment to craft, the same attention to detail, in the service of less action-driven narratives, just as Eastwood has done most recently with The Bridges of Madison County. But in the end their and Eastwood''s real art was to draw upon Hollywood''s genre traditions and make of them unique and perceptive studies of human beings under stress. Though his directorial career has been uneven, at his best Eastwood has proved a more than worthy carrier of this flame.-ANDREW TUDOR