For the last few hundred years or so, artists have been expected to be somewhat confessional in their work. Celebrities, who have a better understanding of the fickleness of an audience's trust, tend to be more wary. Stars aren't required, and neither are they expected, to reveal who they really are in a performance. Consequently, for the handful of genuine artists who happen to become stars, the twin obligations of self-revelation and privacy can become confused in very interesting ways. For me, far and away the most intriguing such balancing act on display today (even more than Woody Allen) is Clint Eastwood.

It may seem an odd claim, because the accepted "serious" films Eastwood has made--The Outlaw Josey Wales, White Hunter Black Heart, Unforgiven--are far from confessional. For those familiar with Eastwood's biography, though, it is the often-ignored "entertainments" that are rife with echoes of his life. It's not just how jazz music pops up everywhere, even in The Rookie's biker bars. No, that's just a personal touchstone, similar--for those who attended the Grand Illusion's recent Sam Fuller series--to the way the name "Griff" keeps popping up in Fuller movies. Instead, it's the way Eastwood and Sondra Locke shack up in a hotel and she ribs him about his wife--this in The Gauntlet, made when Eastwood had all but legally divorced his wife to live with Locke. Or how in Tightrope (in which, like most Eastwood vehicles with "no-name directors" attached, the actor ran things behind the camera as well), he (type)casts 10-year-old Alison Eastwood as a daughter trying to still love her father, even after the marriage has broken up.

Reading Richard Schickel's biography, it's shocking just how much Eastwood slept around--even considering he was a good-looking rich guy in '70s Hollywood. Same goes for his current role. True Crime continues Eastwood's "covert" confessions by having him play a man cheating on his wife with another married woman, along with whomever else will have him. The novel has been altered so that the family's ages, and one child's gender, now match Eastwood's current family. Maybe Eastwood even accepts a bit of public chastisement, because in True Crime he brings in his last premarital fling, Frances Fisher (who had a child by him after Unforgiven), for a delicious scene where she walks right over him.

The point here isn't just to rattle off all the correspondences between the director/actor and his characters (and there are many more); it's to remind you that these "confessions" happen in the movies Eastwood supposedly makes just for the money. The great glory of Hollywood filmmaking--and Eastwood has always understood this--is that after you've given the people what they want, there might be enough room left over to put in what you want as well.