Clint & Clyde

The idea of Clint Eastwood teaming up with an orang-utan sounds like the sort of high concept Hollywoodism that frequently gets lampooned, but lo and behold: it really happened. Twice. In every macho screen tough guy's career there comes a point where he has to do a comedy in order to prove his range as an actor. The results range from the bizarrely inappropriate (Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop) to the downright awful (Vin Diesel's The Pacifier) and the surprisingly good (Dwayne Johnson's supporting turn in Be Cool). Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can are very much freewheeling, low-brow products of their time (the late 70s/early 80s - the era of Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run) and critics ridiculed Eastwood for making such films but, as usual, Eastwood laughed all the way to the bankas audiences lapped it up in droves.


Every Which Way But Loose
Philo (Clint Eastwood) is an illicit barefist boxer and professional truckdriver who gets into a series of misadventures as he searches for love and glory in the American mid-west. Accompanied by Clyde (his trusty orang-utan sidekick), his best friend Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) and his feisty grandmother (Ruth Gordon), Philo seeks to beat the legendary Tank Murdock (Walter Barnes) whilst avoiding the wrath of a local neo-nazi biker gang and some corrupt highway cops.

The unusual (or smart) thing about Eastwood doing comedy is that he isn't really funny nor does he try to be. Part of the 'joke' is putting Eastwood in the middle of this madcap 70s comedy and having him react and interact in typical Eastwood fashion despite being in a different kind of film with a different set of rules. When most 'serious' actors try to do comedies they often think they need to try and be funny and usually their dignity suffers if they fail. Eastwood doesn't take that risk, so no matter how silly the movie gets his image remains fairly untarnished.

DIRECTOR: James Fargo
WRITER/SOURCE: Jeremy Joe Kronsberg
KEY ACTORS: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, Ruth Gordon, John Quade, Hank Worden, Bill McKinney


Any Which Way You Can
The sequel is very much just more of the same, it repeats the honourable rival and honour-amongst-fighters theme and chucks in some inept mafia hoods alongside the neo-nazi bikers. Both of these films are very much aimed at a lowest common denominator audience, so there's lots of awful country music peppered throughout. Any Which Way You Can veers into the downright cartoonish and inane sometimes (especially in regards to the bikers) but one thing I will say though is that I never thought I'd see Clint Eastwood playing a sex scene for laughs!

These films won't set anyone's world on fire (some parts are so bad that it's downright painful to watch) and I wouldn't really recommend watching them back to back whilst sober. I guess Any Which Way You Can holds a special place in history as the last true film in the 'ape-thinks-he's-people' subgenre of comedy.

DIRECTOR: Buddy Van Horn
WRITER/SOURCE: Stanford Sherman
KEY ACTORS: Clint Eastwood, Geoffrey Lewis, Sondra Locke, Ruth Gordon, Bill McKinney, Barry Corbin, William Smith, John Quade