The Old Man and the Rifle.

Dirty Harry in Detroit: In "Gran Torino," with Clint Eastwood as a retired locksmith car into battle against the gangs of his neighborhood. An ironic elegy from the orphaned heartland of America - the old master brings to his own myth for the route.

 

Is he just a bitter retired or he is the avenger of a declining industrial nation? If Walt Kowalski zusammengekniffenen with eyes and leveled shotgun "Down on my lawn!" towards unwelcome neighbor or teenager growls gangster, is in any case refrain from further discussions. The man knows how to make a banner decorated with star suburban porch of un-American machinations optics.

Once it was so was his neighborhood as the birthplace of the U.S. auto industry. Here slept there, the blue-collar army, the automobile factories of Detroit stopped running. But not only since the bosses of the American PS business with the new president go begging, Michigan is once prosperous suburb World an orphaned region. For many years looking at Kowalski, a veteran of the assembly line of Ford, now with more grouchy visage, as his neighborhood of gangs and immigrants will be conquered.

Later in his garage, a 1972 Ford Gran Torino, which he once screwed together at the factory has on his front lawn pollard equips the old culture to the fight. Black days thieves obstruct the way young women, young Hispanic criminals wave revolvers rum, Asian gang members terrorize their neighbors with Drive-by shooting attacks. The worst of the Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski, however, is that the grandmother of the Asian family next door, chewing his grantig ausgespuckten with a much grantiger brown ausgespuckten surge countered.

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Hart embodies the caricature of Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino" a kind of highly compressed Rächerfigur: He greint, he growls, he attracts the eyes together, as if he wanted to in the role of Kowalski once every taciturn, but the more violent the gunslingers actor career unite . Harry Callahan from the Dirty Harry 'saga over Bill Munny from "The Unforgiven", to name the many lots of the early Italo-Western, he pulls all the registers. And do not forget, of course Boxtrainer his oscargekrönten Frankie Dunn in "Million Dollar Babe", with "Tough Is not Enough" a campaign slogan, has spent the Kowalski also on the door carefully kept his arms hanging cabinet might have.

All the more surprising because it is like this in just five weeks leichthändig Finish film, with all the irony and all the Selbstbeblogsung
Total artwork Clint Eastwood's gradually in depth and tragedy wins. This is naturally due to the fact that the director in his Detroit neighborhood ballad in precisely that American heartland vorgestoßen is where the economic crisis currently the most visible social disruption occurs. This is due to another but also because, as he almost any revolver rhetoric without the devastating effects of violence nachzeichnet.

VIDEOS ON FILM

Photo: Warner
Video: Warner

"Gran Torino"
Trailer and Film Clips

Film clip: "I'm not a hero"
Film clip: "I think it is honest"
Film clip: "Is not your problem!"

Because a proxy for all the avenger and Rechtsbeuger, the untouchables and merciless, in which he embodies his career has demonstrated Eastwood retired to his car screwdrivers that killing is never followed through. To be fair even Walt Kowalski also served on the veranda the Budweiser cans can fizzle - the veteran of Korea is driven by memories that he can share with anyone and wants. No wonder that the young priest, who always invites you to confession, blasphemous sayings virtuosically with the devil sends. The absolution, after which Kowalski longs, there is not for a couple of Our Father.

And yet the developed initially as mild suburb to a veritable portrait of guilt and expiation drama (Book: Nick Schenk). Indeed, as Walt Kowalski, misanthropic and racist as it is now time, a few young Asian gangsters away from his street, he unwillingly becomes a hero of the Asian community. The Hmong-Vietnamese next besiege him henceforth with delicacies and courtesies. Soon it is the xenophobic old bones from the daughter of the house in the strange customs import and advises the spiritual son in life issues.

GRAN TORINO (USA, 2008)

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: Nick Schenk
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang
Distributor: Warner
Production Company: Double Nickel Entertainment
Running time: 116 minutes
Start: 5 March 2009

Official Website

And when a gear hunting on neighboring boys makes equips Kowalski, apparently some people on his conscience, for the last battle. As a moral compensation business, this plot twist arg exaggerated, but undermines the finals all expectations. While the struggle behängt Greis Kowalski here again with cartridge belts and hand guns, it is true as a whole continued to conquer. Alone, he is not a single shot from.

It is as Eastwood disassembled with the passive resistance, he can afford his protagonists, all action heroes are, he has previously embodied. How could the avenger-elegy "Gran Torino," in the U.S. went better than any Eastwood film before, actually the last gig of the 78-year-old as an actor, as is always rumored.

Dirty Harry at the Showdown in Suburbia: Here is a myth itself on track. The blood debt is finally settled.