ABSTRACT
As I suggested earlier, the most important member of the Malpaso “family business”—in its early days, certainly-was Don Siegel, the man who directed Eastwood in his second major American film, Coogaris Bluff (1968), and in several other of his post-spaghetti movies, including his perhaps best-known film, Dirty Harry (1971). Of the eight movies with which Eastwood was associated in the years 1968-71, four were directed by Siegel: Coogan’s Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), The Beguiled (1971), and Dirty Harry. A fifth SiegelEastwood collaboration appeared in 1979 with Escape from Alcatraz. While Dirty Harry is, even two decades after its release, probably Eastwood’s most popularly significant film, it is by no means his only formative collaboration with Don Siegel. Together these movies have certainly played a large part in the shaping both of Malpaso’s success and of Eastwood’s career and in the making of his popular-cultural image-not least because these are the movies that consolidated his presence in the public eye most immediately after the unexpected successes of the spaghetti westerns. But at another level their importance resides in their embodiment of a practice of film-making that is, by and large, unusual in relation to Hollywood’s standard methods; this practice becomes the model for Eastwood’s in his later career and becomes, too, the origin in a sense of the style of his later movies.
