JOE QUEENAN: Because he started out as an actor, and very quickly became an actor that a large segment of the population positively adored, in the same way that they adored Jimmy Cagney and Cary Grant and both Hepburns, Eastwood has long benefited from a personal relationship with the American people that no other living director can even dream of. (In my lifetime, only Alfred Hitchcock, who came into everyone’s living room once a week to deliver his weird, deadpan introductions to his creepy TV series, has enjoyed this sort of ongoing, intimate rapport with the American people. But little boys didn’t want to grow up to look like the puffy director. And very few women would have asked Hitchcock to play Misty for them.) Eastwood’s close relationship with his countrymen is the sort of thing that Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and Babe Ruth all experienced. At a certain point, he, like Elvis Presley, crossed over into a land beyond reproach, where no blemish would ever go on his personal record, no matter how many Sondra Locke movies he made. It was OK to dislike this or that Eastwood movie – Pink Cadillac, Tightrope, The Gauntlet – as long as you did not dislike the man himself. Even women who did not like Eastwood expected their men to. The American people might forgive you for being a communist or an atheist. But they would never forgive you for saying you did not like Clint Eastwood. MORE

RELATED: Ever wonder what Leonardo DiCaprio looks like in a dress? We may find out, because he’s set to star in a Clint Eastwood-directed biopic about J. Edgar Hoover, the late FBI director who was rumored to have had a particular fondness for women’s clothing… “We all have these assumptions about Hoover,” says Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the Hoover movie. “Was he this or was he that? Was he a cross-dresser? Was he gay?  “Was he as villainous as we all think he might have been? Was there ever any light to him?” MORE

RELATED: Hoover was reluctant to take on organized crime, perhaps, it was once supposed, because the Mafia had something on him, something with which he was blackmailed into silence and inaction. “No evidence for this has ever been discovered,” Geary says. Hoover never married, lived with his mother until her death, and made a life-long intimate of his bachelor assistant, Clyde Tolson, even going on vacation together. The other canard Geary addresses is the allegation that Hoover was a cross-dresser or transvestite, if not homosexual as well, according to a story about his supposed appearance in dress and wig, requesting to be called “Mary,” at a private party in New York’s Plaza Hotel. But for Geary, the story is without merit. “Told by a single unreliable witness, it seemed, to many, out of character for the obsessively secretive Hoover.” More likely, Hoover simply suppressed his sexuality: “as an authoritarian personality, he was fearful of his own sexuality and would actively suppress any such desires.” MORE

SHUTTER ISLAND (2009, directed by Martin Scorsese, 138 minutes, U.S.)

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC

I’ve never heard anyone accuse Martin Scorsese of coasting, even his least successful films show stretches of inspiration that raise them above mere journeyman work.  His latest, an adaptation of Dennis Lahane’s best-selling Shutter Island is a gorgeously-produced, well-acted film but is unlike nearly anything is Scorsese’s filmography: a predictable thriller’s whose biggest mystery is exactly what attracted Scorsese to it to begin with. Going deep into M.Night Shyamalan territory, Shutter Island is one of our most idiosyncratic director’s least personal films yet.

Scorsese continues his somewhat perplexing infatuation with Leonardo DiCaprio, casting him as Teddy Daniels, a police detective who has teamed up with a new partner (the always ingratiating Mark Ruffalo ) to investigate the disappearance of a patient from an island asylum for the criminally insane. The missing patient is one Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), who drowned her three children in a lake. Her disturbing crime triggers flashbacks from Teddy’s experience of liberating the Dachau concentration camp at the end of WW2. At every turn, Teddy falls deeper into the mystery:  What is really going on with the hospital’s experimental therapies?  Does Rachel Solando actually exist?  Have Nazi doctors really taken over the facilities?  Are assassins being trained?  Can Teddy trust his new, extremely deferential partner?  Is there a plot to have Teddy committed as well?

The flat script by Laeta Kalogridis (whose biggest previous writing credit is on Oliver Stone’s horrible Alexander The Great biopic) chases down these endless loose threads, each painstakingly explained in talky set-pieces with a list of fine actors (Jackie Earle Haley, Michelle Williams, Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, even Max Von Sydow ) yet at nearly two hours and twenty minutes Scorsese is unable to disguise the obvious endpoints of these subplots. This is ultimately a deadly flaw for the film; it is always frustrating to know where a mystery is heading, then having to wait 45 minutes for the protagonist to catch up. Maybe if DiCaprio brought more to his performance than his one-note anxiety. I guess his performance is competent enough, but the real mystery for me is that the ultimate “actor’s director” still feels that there are unplumbed depths in DiCaprio. Maybe it is a paisan thing, I don’t know.

Scorsese dresses up the film in a lot of Hitchcockian stagecraft (a trick he used in his wine commercial short, The Key To Reserva) while examining the overly-familiar theme of men coming to grips with their capacity for violence.  Yet despite its masterful flourishes, Shutter Island never transcends the pedestrian mystery at its center.  The film’s epic score (drawn from twentieth century works by Lygeti, Penderecki and others) and awesomely imposing island locale only serve to dwarf its minor ambitions and meager, rain-soaked rewards.