THE SOFTER SIDE OF EASTWOOD

Directed by Eastwood directly following High Plains Drifter Breezy was a commercial flop at the time of release - The film's early reviews were unfavorable, which caused the studio to initially shelve it. After a year had passed, Breezy was quietly released, with little marketing fanfare. It was not a commercial success. Eastwood also thought that Universal had decided the film was going to be a failure long before it was released. He has said of the film that "the public stayed away from it because it wasn't promoted enough, and it was sold in an uninteresting fashion."

Even today the movie remains Eastwood's hidden film.



It's one of those Lolita type things - ageing but cool businessman, William Holden meets dippy but beautiful hot hippie chick, Breezy played by Kay Lenz. The title character, a disaffected young hippie who hides out on the property of the middle-aged divorcé played by Holden. May-December romances have been a staple of American movies from the start, but they’ve rarely been this subtly drawn. Rather than a titillating diversion, Breezy is a movie about a human exchange between people from different generations, when the gap between them was at its widest. At this point in his career, Holden had achieved a level of eloquence that put him in a class by himself, and this is one of his best performances. Watching the movie you get the impression that Eastwood would have liked to have played the Holden character himself, but at the time he was far too young for the part.

Clint often refers to the film has one of his favourites among the movies he has directed. It certainly shows a softer side to his character and he handles this story of a man learning to love again with great sensitivity and style. Perhaps Eastwood's most personal film - William Holden's character certainly shares some of the weaknesses that would be attributed to Clint himself by several of his biographers. Holden's womanising hides his loneliness, and if the film does have a message it is that true love should be seized in whatever form it appears.


If I'm honest I would have to say that I would never watch this kind of movie and that it was only the fact that Eastwood, the man, directed it that made me do so. In fact I think the only other romance movie I've ever watched is Bridges of Madison County and I enjoyed that too. This one, I think, is better. The romance between the gorgeous youthful Breezy and Frank Harman (Holden) doesn't come across as at all tacky and is allowed to develop in a believable way. By the time they share their first kiss the viewer totally believes that two such people, such opposites, could truly be in love.

Breezy is, then, the girlie film that it's OK for guys to watch. Well worth seeking out - it may have been lensed in 1971 but the film's spirit is very much of the previous decade. And making it must have seemed for Clint, at the time, to be every but as revolutionary as the counter culture the movie celebrates. And the fans reacted pretty much as expected and stayed away in droves. Eastwood doesn't appear on screen, other than in an Hitchcockian camera wipe, and there's no gunfights or horses. Still it's well worth seeking out, if only to see a early example of how refreshingly straight forward a director Eastwood is.





TRIVIA: Sondra Locke auditioned for the part of Breezy but Eastwood rejected her in favour of the equally waif-like Lanz.