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For a considerable time, Eastwood obliged them. "You have to do what is realistic for you," he said 15 years ago. "You can stretch your machinery, but the audience might not believe you." Baloney, argued Eastwood's friend and director Don Siegel at the time. "It surprises me that he is not more interested in a greater variety of roles. I can't understand why the greatest box-office star in the world doesn't get better material to work with. He persists in doing the same thing."
But in 1980, with the making of Bronco Billy, Eastwood began to reach for a richer cinematic legacy. In this Capraesque comedy about a New Jersey shoe salesman turned Wild West show impresario, no guns are fired in anger. Instead Eastwood began to explore the limits of his often damaged characters in a quieter, more reflective way. Nor were villains dispatched bloodily three years later in Honkytonk Man, a melancholy movie about a drunken musician in which Eastwood starred with his son Kyle. "I'd hate to look back on my portfolio someday and think, 'Well, I did 100 Magnum films and one car-wreck film," he said after Honkytonk Man was released. "I'd like to think that I had a broad career of various types of films and roles." Unfortunately, nobody out there but Eastwood was paying much attention. The film was a bomb.
Not compared to Bird, however. This dense but compelling biography of the saxophone player Charlie Parker disappeared without a ripple after its release in 1990. It was Eastwood's most ambitious and uncompromising effort as a director, shot at length in murky, natural light. If Bird established that Eastwood was willing to take chances behind the camera, White Hunter, Black Heart proved he was willing to take huge and potentially embarrassing risks as an actor. His portrayal of a film director modeled on John Huston was as removed from the characters his public had come to expect as Orson Welles is from Donald Duck. Like Bird, it was a commercial failure.
Yet each experience taught him more about his craft and prepared him for Unforgiven, a lean and provocative antiwestern in which the good guys are not so swell and the bad guys are not entirely deserving of their fate. For Eastwood it was something new, garbed in familiar cowboy clothing. Only after the final gunfight does the director allow his alter ego, the actor, to indulge in a brief valedictory to the satiric excess that characterized the Eastwood of an earlier era. "Any son of a bitch who takes a shot at me," gunman William Munny bellows into the night, "I'm not only going to kill him, I'm going to kill his wife, all his friends and burn his damn house down." As Eastwood likes to say, "Just another one of my flawed characters." Moviegoers were impressed enough to make Unforgiven the biggest box-office success Eastwood has ever produced.