In a surprise undercard to McCain-Obama, the flap started last month at Cannes when Spike Lee pointed out that neither of Clint Eastwood's two Iwo Jima movies -- "The Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" -- featured black actors. Lee made his comments while promoting "Miracle at St. Anna," (pictured above) his own upcoming WWII drama about the all-black 92nd "Buffalo" Infantry Division and the four of its soldiers who save a boy in a Tuscan village. Lee's observation set off a firestorm that's still burning. Eastwood himself responded in a very interesting interview published Friday in the British newspaper The Guardian. ?The story is ?Flags of Our Fathers,? the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn?t do that,? Eastwood said. ?If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they?d say, ?This guy?s lost his mind.??
Now the controversy's focal point is Eastwood's insistence that "a guy like him should shut his face." Lee, in turn, responded with a comment published on ABCNEWS.com. "First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either," he said. "He's a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn't personally attack him. And a comment like 'a guy like that should shut his face' -- come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there."
The argument between these two is a lot less ridiculous than it seems. Some observers want to frame the disagreement, unfairly, as a matter of Lee's envy with Eastwood's Oscar success. What's being debated is the factual record as refracted through the movies. Where's the line separating historical accuracy from artistic license? Eastwood's defense of his casting makes sense: Where in his films would these omitted black soldiers go? In bit parts, most likely. But Lee's greater issue, while aimed at Eastwood's movies, is really about the movies themselves: Why haven't black soldiers figured into more WWII films. "St. Anna" could work as both a rebuke and the beginning of some larger, necessary expansion.
What's really incredible to me in that Guardian interview is how animatedly aggravated Eastwood sounds. It's been a while since we've seen that Clint in a movie. He's miffed about Lee in a way that underscores an interesting difference in perception.
In 1999's "True Crime" Eastwood directed himself as a disgraced reporter redeemed by his efforts to get a black guy (Isaiah Washington) off death row. The movie is about Eastwood's character more than it is Washington's and at some point he tells one character that none of this business has anything to do with race. Eastwood's stance in that film sounds defensively full of hubris. He could hear what the black characters were saying to him. He just didn't buy it.
It'd be terrific if some of this fight about race made into Eastwood's planned next movie about how Nelson Mandela parlayed South Africa's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup to promote national unity.
