Clint Eastwood, Rallying 'Round 'Flags'

"It wasn't a 'combat' photo," says Clint Eastwood of the image at the heart of "Flags of Our Fathers," his new film. ". . . It emphasized the togetherness of the men." (By Carlos Puma For The Washington Post)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

Something familiar about the guy in the chair. Hmm, what is it? Is it the lanky, slouchy spread of body draped helter-skelter across seat and back and arms? Is it the lack of pretense, so that even in a luxury suite of the Four Seasons on Doheny you feel as if you're talking tractor oil selection with a smart mechanic in Iowa? Is it the Sunday-go-to-meeting suit in a tone that might be called "bright gray," that recounts the town garb of Joe Kidd between gunfights? Is it the small, tight mouth, the leanness of cheek and jaw?

Well, all those things are indeed familiar. But it's something else. It's the eyes. Most of us have seen those eyes a hundred or so times: watchful, wary, smart but not intellectualized, a hunter's eyes, a soldier's eyes, a survivor's eyes. And a director's eyes.

Oh, hell, it's just Old Clint, as he calls himself.

Clint Eastwood, 76, all dressed up but ever laconic, ever inscrutable, ever interesting, sits before us without a movie-star-big-director affectation anywhere in sight, ready now to chat up his sensational movie "Flags of Our Fathers," opening nationwide Friday.

Eastwood -- God, what a career! -- has so much to boast about, to feel triumph and old-lion lazy majesty about, but is instead modest and charming, just a slight bit uneasy, not quite a party wit (the humor is sly and dry) and allows only that on this one, he worked pretty darned hard.

He's bemused by the lubricant of praise that opens the exchange, even if in this one rare instance the reporter actually means it. But there's no smugness, no sense of having beaten the world on its own terms, to now sit back and enjoy the accolade shower. No: Old Clint, reg'lar guy, squinty eyes, don't say much, could almost still be a man with no name all these years later.

And, again appropriate to his sense of quiet gentlemanliness, he's not using the film as a pulpit for any political grandstanding, any Big Statements he thinks he's entitled to make.

"It's just going to lay there," he says, of the movie's "message" to America's viewers. "You have to provide your own beliefs."

The movie, by far the biggest, grandest, most tragic, most complex of his career, is derived from the 2000 bestseller by James Bradley, which chronicled the story of 1/400th of a second in his father's life, when that fine man, John Bradley, a Navy corpsman inevitably nicknamed "Doc," serving with the Marines on Iwo Jima, helped shove a pole upright.

The pole planted, Bradley went on with more important duties, mainly tending to Marines hit in the devastating battle, which claimed more than 6,000 American and 21,000 Japanese lives. He did that duty for two more weeks until shell fragments tore up his leg and hip and he was invalided off the island for recovery.

It was only then that he realized that the 1/400th of a second had been recorded by an Associated Press news photographer named Joe Rosenthal who hadn't even been looking through his viewfinder. What resulted, however, was an almost perfect image of what Hemingway called grace under pressure: six men fused into one lyric whole, festooned with weapons, tired as hell yet wearing the nobility that battle for something bigger than self confers, struggling to get the damn pole into the damn hole. This image, of course, transcends grunting men, pole, fabric and breeze to become metaphor: It's an idealized image of a nation fighting to win a global war mainly on the grit of its youngsters, all of whom would rather be elsewhere, but by God, since they're here, they'll do the job. Unaccountably, the entwined bodies form a perfect expression of teamwork, valor, duty and disregard for self. Omitted detail: On the pole is an American flag and again by the kindness that God sometimes shows to photographers, that Star-Spangled Banner is caught at the exact half-furl as it unleashes itself into the stout North Pacific wind. It stands for victory, hard-won on blood and guts and the M1 Garand rifle, about to be achieved. Magic, almost unbearably beautiful, the photo is a piece of accidental art that even these many years and 5 billion or so kitschy reproductions -- on black velvet, say, or on lighters or pistol grips or mugs -- still moves profoundly.