One of the preeminent contemporary documentary filmmakers and a specialist in jazz, Bruce Ricker was an inspired choice to direct this "American Masters" profile on actor-director Clint Eastwood. The two had met while Eastwood was in pre-production on Bird and encountered Ricker’s celebrated film on Kansas City jazz, The Last of the Blue Devils. Eastwood would later serve as executive producer on Ricker’s feature-length portrait of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. For this newly completed film, Ricker had access to Eastwood and to many of the directors and actors with whom he collaborated over the years, as well as to an extensive archive of both on-screen and off-screen material, from his earliest Universal-International B-movies (Eastwood played a lab assistant in Revenge of the Creature and a fighter pilot in Tarantula) through the Rawhide years, the "spaghetti westerns," and the American features he has acted in and directed. The result is a thorough and thoroughly engaging work.