Good Ole Burt; Cool-Eyed Clint

Monday, Jan. 09, 1978 By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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A guy sits alone in a theater. He's young and he's scared. He doesn't know what he's going to do with his life. He wishes he could be self-sufficient, like the man he sees up there on the screen, somebody who can look out for himself, solve his own problems. I do the kind of roles I'd like to see if I were still digging swimming pools and wanted to escape my problems.

—Clint Eastwood

I think there's a parallel in my career and Clint's. We both have a particular audience that is loyal to us no matter what the critics say. With Clint, they want him to rip the bad guy's face off. With me, they want me to say those Don Rickles lines to people in authority—the bank clerk who won't cash your check, the traffic cop. And it even goes further, all the way up the lines of authority-even up to the President.

—Burt Reynolds

There speak the last—or any way the latest—American movie giants. They are star-craftsmen who have built, in a dozen years and better than a dozen pictures apiece, a couple of strong film characters, American arche types. Nowadays this is a rarer and perhaps more valuable achievement than making a string of perfect movie master pieces. These heroes—larger than ones found in ordinary life, but not entirely dis connected from it either—are not made in a single film. They grow out of a lot movies and eventually turn them all into mere incidents in the larger and more absorbing drama of the star career. Consider Eastwood's moralistic killer, whose cold eyes are set off by his incongruously boyish voice and smile, or Reynolds' good-ole-boy con man, shooting from the lip as fast as Eastwood shoots from the hip. The comparison is not with their contemporary peers but with the major figures of the great age of screen heroism, to Coop and Gable, Bogie and Duke, those exemplars of the democratic notion that the seemingly ordinary could be, should be, the repository of the extraordinary.

Exaggeration? Hyperbole? Lése-majesté? Not really, for these newer creations are merely variations, updated for life in the '70s, of the kind of durable, reliable characters an older generation of stars created. They are people who suggest simply by their changeless presences that there may be traditions and behavioral conventions that one can rely on in a pinch.