Breezy Reviews

I picked this originally because of William Holden, since I had just watched him in Picnic from 1955. In Breezy, directed by fellow actor Clint Eastwood, we meet Holden as a grouchy middle-aged man, fairly set in his ways and dancing with a midlife crisis.
Wouldn't you know it, but a free spirited hippy named (a little too on the nose) Breezy stumbles into his life and begins to wear down that dark cloud over his head.
The characters, by and large, are stereotypical, while it felt like this was initially Breezy's story. We are introduced to her as she is drifting through life, hitchhiking from here to there with what seems to be her only prized possession, a guitar.
Predictably, through conversations and a trip to the ocean, the two of them fall in love, but outside pressures and Holden's having to deal with the stigma of dating a much younger woman eventually creates a divide.
Overall, Kay Lenz was perfectly cast as Breezy, and while a little manic in places, did show that young people were more complex than what the older generation was led to believe in the early 1970s.
All told, this was way too formulaic to make it any more than average in my book. Also, the cameo from the director was forced and the final act was rushed and a little odd.

Since it was the last movie directed by Clint Eastwood that I hadn't seen yet, of course, I was really eager to check it out. It is easily his most obscure directing effort and it was not easy to find (eventually, I found a DVD in Amazon coming all the way from Italy). To be honest, it wasn't really good. I mean, it was something really different than his usual work and it was the very first movie he made in which he wasn't starring. It was also the only movie he made with a female main character and pretty much like other masters such as Stanley Kubrick who never made a flick with a woman in the lead (even 'Lolita' doesn't count) and Martin Scorsese who only made one ('Boxcar Bertha' also very obscure), he had some trouble to make her more than just a sexual object. Eventually, I really hard a hard time to care about this Breezy girl who was really invasive, childish and rather annoying. Not surprisingly, William Holden's character worked better. Anyway, at the end of the day, the whole thing was pretty much some old man sleazy fantasy of having a sexual relationship with a very young woman. I mean, it is pretty notorious that Clint Eastwood is/was really a womanizer, having 7 children with 5 different women and his (ex)-wife was 35 younger than him. Still, even though it was really flawed, I can't completely discard the whole thing. Back in those days, it took some guts to make something so uncommercial, making a romance which was something new to him. The directing was also pretty shabby in the first 15 minutes but got better and William Holden was definitely not bad at all. To conclude, even though it is obviously a weaker effort, I still think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Clint Eastwood's work.