“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.”
- Clint Eastwood
We don't have movie stars anymore. Not like we once did, anyway. We know too much about everyone now. There's no mystique. Now we mostly just have people who are in movies. Part of our loss of stars is that movies don't have the same currency in our culture like they used to. Why? Well, people have short attention spans for one thing. They have trouble sitting through a two-hour film. And, there are countless other entertainment options that vie for their time. But, if it's a movie someone's in the mood for, the dizzying number to choose from can almost bring about decision paralysis. In 1972, there were 244 movies released in U.S. theaters. In 2025, 602 films were released and that doesn't include the thousands that came out on streaming services. Like everything else, when there are endless choices, nothing stands out as special. All in all, bye bye movie stars.
But, back when we had the stars, number one on my list was Clint Eastwood (Jack Nicholson a fairly close second). Coming of age in the 60s and 70, Clint was my man. From his early role as Rowdy Yates on TV's Rawhide, through his many movie westerns, spaghetti and otherwise, to his Dirty Harry period and even the two dumb orangutan ones, I loved every steely stare and clinched jaw he brought to the proceedings. He was always on the right side of justice even if he had to use creative means to see it served.
Those days were rich in character actors, too. Of all of them, Strother Martin intrigued me the most. Whenever he showed up in something on TV or in a movie, I had to watch. He could bring a simmering low-grade derangement to the characters he played. They made me uneasy, in a good way. He had over 170 screen roles in his career, but he is best known for playing The Captain, the harsh prison overseer in Cool Hand Luke: “What we've got here is…failure to communicate." One of his final appearances was playing Tommy Chong's father in Cheech & Chong's movie, Up in Smoke. It was a brief appearance at the beginning of the film, but it's one of those clips I could watch daily and laugh every time. “Son…your mother and me would like for you to cozy up to the Finkelstein boy.”
Here are a couple of songs that reference Eastwood and Martin: The Bottle Rockets you might know are Missouri boys. They hail from Festus.