TV REVIEW : Interview With Eastwood a Pleasant, Laid-Back Hour

There are no astounding revelations in David Frost’s hourlong interview with Clint Eastwood tonight (at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28), but it’s a pleasant, laid-back conversation pegged to the actor-director’s “Unforgiven,” which has racked up nine Oscar nominations.

Eastwood defends “Unforgiven,” in which he plays a retired bounty hunter forced to take up his old trade one more time, as a film that condemns rather than exploits violence.

As for the enduring appeal of the Western, Eastwood says, “It gives you the size of a man’s relativity maybe to the planet, but at the same time he doesn’t rely on society. He can rely only on his own abilities, and everybody fantasizes that. I think the average male child grows up fantasizing what it would be like if he could be really a very self-sufficient kind of human being, and not to worry about bolting the doors at night. . . . Also there’s a simplicity people crave.”

Although Eastwood regards “Unforgiven” as his “definitive statement on what the West was all about,” he doesn’t rule out the possibility of doing another Western. But he says he doesn’t see himself doing another “Dirty Harry.”

So far, Eastwood says, he hasn’t worried about growing older. “I think there’s a lot of great things about maturity. You sort of become a little more comfortable with yourself, but at the same time, I guess there’s a time in everybody’s life when you say, ‘Boy, I sure don’t feel like I did 20 years ago.’ But right now, I have no complaints.”