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What audiences and fans of Eastwood tend to forget is that he was an
actor first, and actors thrive on challenge. Even John Wayne, to his fans forever
a Western character, wanted change and challenge, agreeing to portray
Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1955), one of the most woeful films ever
made. Wayne, like Eastwood, had no intention of failing; he just desperately
wanted to be challenged as an actor. And Eastwood saw in Honky Tonk
Man s character Red Stovall the chance for this.
Red is accompanied to his Nashville audition by his 14-year-old nephew,
who also will do much of the driving, given Red s poor driving skills and
50 Clint Eastwood
tendency to drink on the road. Eastwood, who believed his son Kyle would
do a fine job in the role of the nephew, had reached a certain standing in the
industry where his casting choices were not questioned. If he wanted his son,
he got his son. Certainly excited about the prospect of directing his boy,
Eastwood went to work on preproduction, scouting locations in and around
the back roads of Sacramento, which would stand in for Oklahoma in the
film.
The five-week shoot, like all Eastwood shoots, was uneventful, and the
film was released in the summer of 1982. The gentle story seemed a natural
for audiences, offering them a different look at Eastwood.
Red Stovall returns to his sister s farm in Oklahoma during the Depres-
sion as a dust storm wipes out the property, leaving her penniless and facing
the prospect of heading to California with the thousands of  Okies who
have already left. Having spent a lifetime working in whorehouses and bad
bars passing the hat for change, Red has become a heavy drinker and devel-
oped tuberculosis, which is ravaging his body. The one thing not dimmed is
his hope for some sort of singing career. When the Grand Old Opry in
Nashville offers him an audition, his greatest obstacle is getting there. Even
though he has a car, he lacks the skill to drive it, and driving drunk will get
him killed. His sister convinces her son, 14-year-old Whit (Kyle Eastwood),
to go on the journey with her brother and take care of him.
During the long trip the two males bond, forging a friendship that will
stay with the boy long after the trip and certainly after the death of Red.
Upon arriving in Nashville, Red attends a recording session, but the cough-
ing (a symptom of tuberculosis) has gotten worse to the point where he can
no longer finish a song. Against the advice of his doctors who fear for his life,
he goes ahead and records the songs, though the pain is excruciating to him,
before succumbing to the disease. As Whit prepares to move his family to
California, Red s song starts playing on the radio with the announcement
that the song comes from a true Honky Tonk Man. In death Red has
become what he always believed he was.
Eastwood s performance surprised the critics because he dug deep and
inhabited the character beautifully, leaving us little or no trace of Eastwood
the movie star, something of a major challenge for him as he was such a
visible star. Being considered a star as opposed to an actor may have made it
a greater challenge for Eastwood to be accepted by audiences in this sort of
role, but he quietly slipped into character and became Red. Through the
course of the film Red evolves and seems to physically deteriorate before our
eyes. Although we understand the hard drinking, which is the result of broken
dreams, it takes some time for us to comprehend his obsession with music.
Only when he is broken, racked with pain and coughing blood, yet insisting
on carrying on, do we understand why he is indeed, first and foremost,
before even being a human being, a honky tonk man. The difficulty in see-
ing a movie star give such a performance is the fact that the audience can
Honky Tonk Man (1982) 51
never quite let go of the movie star persona. Many viewers could not let go
of the fact that the man on the screen was Dirty Harry to them a macho
tough guy more likely to blow someone away than pull out a guitar and sing
a song.
Somewhat ironically, one year after this film was released, actor Robert
Duvall played a similar character in Tender Mercies (1983). He portrayed a
washed-up country and western star who finds happiness with a pretty
widow. This film earned him rave reviews, and he won not only the Academy
Award for best actor but also awards from the Los Angeles and New York
Film Critics Associations. The major difference between these two actors is
that Duvall is an actor through and through, and Eastwood will always have
the stigma of movie star attached to him. There is something rather dubious
in critical circles when someone is the top box office draw, the thinking being
that if they make money, they cannot be making money in good films. Steven
Spielberg represents an example of this. For so long it was thought that if his
films were moneymakers, how could they possibly be considered art? Yet
Jaws (1975) is a brilliantly artistic piece of filmmaking that deserves to be
recognized as such. There are times when critical snobbery (and there is no
other word for it) can truly hurt a film s chances of success. This was cer-
tainly true with Honky Tonk Man, for what the critics missed in their focus
on Eastwood the celebrity was a sensitive and strong performance from a
movie star growing into an actor before their eyes and in a self-directed
performance, which often is even more difficult. In hindsight, the perform-
ances, both very good, are not so very different.
 This is a sweet, whimsical low key movie; a movie that makes you feel good
without pressing you too hard. It provides Eastwood with a screen character
who is the complete opposite of the patented Eastwood tough guys, and pro-
vides a role of nearly equal importance for his son Kyle as a serious independ-
ent and utterly engaging young nephew named Whit, wrote Roger Ebert for
the Chicago Sun-Times, continuing,  This is a special movie. In making it
Eastwood was obviously moving away from his Dirty Harry image, but that s
nothing new; his spectacular success in violent movies tends to distract us from
his intriguing and challenging career as a director and/or star of such offbeat
projects as Bronco Billy (1980) and Play Misty for Me (1971).
Long a supporter of Eastwood s evolution as actor and director, Roger
Ebert might have been the single American film critic who understood where
Eastwood was going with Honky Tonk Man. He saw the stretch, the growth,
and eventually the budding of a new and very fine American director.
Later his biographer, Time magazine critic Richard Schickel, would write
of Honky Tonk Man,  Eastwood has fashioned a marvelously unfashionable
movie as quietly insinuating as one of Red s honky tonk melodies. As both
actor and director, Eastwood has never been more laconic than he is in this
film. It reminds one . . . of Bronco Billy, although it disdains the farce and
romance of that underappreciated movie.
52 Clint Eastwood
 If there are any people left who doubt Eastwood s accomplishment as a
screen actor, they had better come around for this lesson in underplaying a
long, strong scene, Schickel finished.
Writing for the New York Post, critic Archer Winstein struggled with the
film, finding both strengths and weaknesses:  The pace is slow, very country,
but it rises to touching moments. Eastwood never outdoes his acting
maybe he can t always playing it very close to the vest. It works for the
larger portion of the picture, falling somewhere between the Eastwood sin- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]