Although Roman Polanski and Clint Eastwood could hardly seem more different—Polanski’s a famously diminutive Polish émigré and fugitive from justice, while Eastwood’s a 6’4” Californian who has addressed the Republican National Convention—the two actually have a lot in common. Both are sixties icons now in their 80s. Both have won the Oscar for Best Director. Both have appeared in more than 30 films. And as it happens, both not only have new movies out this week but both movies are based on successful plays—Eastwood adapting the musical Jersey Boys, Polanski transposing Venus in Fur to Paris. To be honest, neither comes close to being either man’s best work, although Venus in Fur does hold you with its nasty charm and Jersey Boys is a solid old-fashioned entertainment—Eastwood directs musical numbers with far more skill than, say, Rob Marshall.
Naturally, such synchronicity got us to wondering which of them was actually greater. And so, with Vogue.com’s customary rigor, we came up with ten scientifically calibrated points of comparison.
1. Biography: Eastwood has had a remarkable life, from his itinerant blue-collar childhood through his early years on the show Rawhide to achieving box-office stardom via Italian “spaghetti westerns” to returning to America as the world’s number one screen actor to becoming an acclaimed director to even being elected mayor of Carmel, for crying out loud. Yet such a history seems positively normal next to Polanski’s. He was a Holocaust survivor (his mother died in Auschwitz) who roamed the murderous countryside alone as a boy; went from the fire of Nazism to the frying pan of Soviet communism; emigrated to the West; wound up wowing Hollywood; endured his wife, Sharon Tate, being murdered by the Manson gang; pleaded guilty to having sex (to put it kindly) with an underage girl; fled back to Europe, and made movies for nearly four more decades. The guy’s a one-man miniseries. Winner: POLANSKI.
2. Acting: Although he’s had roles in scads of movies, many people don’t realize that Polanski is an excellent actor, whether he’s slicing **Jack Nicholson’**s nose in Chinatown or going berserkers in The Tenant. Still, you could hire lots of people to do what Polanski does on-screen. Not so Eastwood, a good (not great) actor who has that special something that makes him an international movie star. Everybody knows that raw voice, and he’s just loomingly there—like a face on Mount Rushmore. Winner: EASTWOOD.
3. Artistic Growth: Back in 1971, Polanski (who’d just made Macbeth) was widely thought a genius, where Eastwood (who’d just made his filmmaking debut, Play Misty for Me) was reckoned a slightly wooden actor and uncool right-winger who thought he could direct. Nobody would have guessed that, forty years on, Eastwood would not only have outlasted and outshone such peers as Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, but that he’d have carved out one of the most interesting careers in Hollywood history—making movies about Charlie Parker and J. Edgar Hoover, and rewriting his tough guy image in everything from comedies with orangutans to romances with Meryl Streep. Where Polanski has done good work since those days, Eastwood has kept pushing into his 80s. Who’d have imagined he’d wind up making a musical about the Four Seasons? Winner: EASTWOOD.
4. Originality: Eastwood is great at tweaking genre material to find something revelatory, but his artistic approach is steeped in his work for terrific commercial filmmakers like Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. Polanski, in contrast, is a child of tormented Eastern Europe who, almost from the beginning, filled the screen with his own distinct vision of the world—kinky, paranoid, darkly funny. If a friend says of an experience, “It was like being in a Polanski movie,” you get it—the words call up a whole distinctive mood. If a friend says, “It was like being in an Eastwood movie,” you wonder what that might mean—did your pal shoot somebody? Winner: POLANSKI.
5. Defining Theme: From the beginning, Polanski’s work has been obsessed with dominance and survival in a paranoid universe that is mockingly cruel—small wonder, given his childhood. Eastwood’s own major subject—the many whorls and vicissitudes of masculinity—grew from his own experience playing macho heroes like the Man with No Name and Dirty Harry right before the dawn of the women’s movement. Both are serious themes rooted in history, and I can’t choose between them. Winner: TIE.
6. Five Best Films They’ve Directed: Polanski’s five finest are his Polish debut, Knife in the Water; his two Hollywood classics, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown; his Thomas Hardy adaptation, Tess; and his delightful autumnal thriller The Ghost Writer (I hate leaving out Repulsion and Macbeth). Eastwood’s best are The Outlaw Josey Wales, his deconstruction of Dirty Harry in Sudden Impact, his Oscar-winning Western Unforgiven, his heartbreaking Million Dollar Baby (which a friend jokingly describes as “Old Yeller but with Hilary Swank”), and Letters from Iwo Jima—where he actually worked in a foreign language! It would take too much space to argue this out, so I’ll just deliver the verdict. Winner: POLANSKI.
7. Three Worst Films They’ve Directed: Polanski has made his fair share of clinkers, but the three worst are his duff comedy What?, the long-gestating (and stillborn) Pirates, and one of his recent adaptations of a rotten play—let’s say the cringeable Carnage. As a lifelong studio stud, Eastwood has been able to make many more films and, predictably, this means he’s made more bad ones. The worst? Others will disagree, but I think it’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Changeling, and Invictus—three botched “prestige” projects (Hereafter was slightly redeemed by that cool tidal wave). Whose are worse? Well, if I had to choose, I’d say that Polanski’s duds are less fun to watch. Winner: EASTWOOD.
8. Most Overrated Film: With every top filmmaker, there’s always a movie or two that you just can’t understand why people think is so great. With Polanski, that film is Cul-de-sac, a claustrophobic comic thriller that quickly starts feeling like yesterday’s idea of the avant-garde. For Eastwood, it’s Mystic River, a crime story inflated to zeppelin-size proportions by **Sean Penn’**s gassily grandiose performance—think of the camera rising up to the sky so we can better see Sean overacting a scream—and Laura Linney making like she’s Lady Macbeth. Still, as above, if you had to watch one again. . . . Winner: EASTWOOD.
9. Movie to See Before You Marry the Director: Both have had more than their fair share of women, although Eastwood’s failings pale next to Polanski’s—when he’s in court, he’s merely being sued by one of his exes, not being charged with sexual abuse. And each has made a sleazy erotic tale that should serve as a kind of warning to women. Polanski’s is Bitter Moon, a twisted, wickedly funny tale of dominance and submission between a writer (Peter Coyote) and his mistress, who the movie takes no small delight in degrading, even though she’s played by Polanski’s real-life wife, Emmanuelle Seigner. The sexual politics may be even nastier in Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me, in which he stars as a cocky Carmel disc jockey who has a one-night stand with a psychopathic stalker played with unnerving brilliance by Jessica Walter, who makes Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction seem as grounded as Katniss Everdeen. While both movies are shot through with male sexual paranoia, Eastwood seems far less aware of this fact than Polanski, whose Bitter Moon has fun with watching male privilege take a fall. Winner: POLANSKI.
10. And So? If we’re judging their careers by commercial success and worldwide reach, the greater figure would be Eastwood. I’ve watched his movies in Nairobi bars, Hanoi cafés, hotel rooms in Tokyo and São Paulo. But if we’re judging by whose work will last, that gets trickier. You see, much of what makes Eastwood special is the way he keeps refining and redefining his screen persona—it’s fun to see Dirty Harry turn into a defender of immigrants in Gran Torino. But if you never saw Dirty Harry (and increasingly few people have), it’s less fun. As Eastwood’s stardom fades, his films probably will too. While Polanski’s own visibility is kept afloat by his fame—or, more accurately, notoriety—movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown create a mental universe uniquely their own, a universe that feels if not timeless, at least self-contained and fresh. Of the two, he’s the one likely to last. Grand Winner: ROMAN POLANSKI.