Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho, based on a long-percolating script by the late Richard Nash (the novel version dates back to ’75) and co-written by the still-kicking Nick Schenk, was originally slated to open on 10.22.21. Then it was shuffled around and will now open on 9.17.21 with a simultaneous HBO Max release — Clint’s first streamer.
That’s two weeks before The Many Saints of Newark opens on 10.1, and the trailer for that just dropped. So where’s the Cry Macho trailer?
Cry Macho is essentially an older guy-younger guy relationship story…a piece about values, regrets, admissions, looking forward, wild roads. There’s an extensive synopsis for Nash’s 1975 novel on the Wiki page. Eastwood’s character, called “Miko” in the film, is a crusty old cuss; in Nash’s book he was a 38 year-old rodeo rider named Michael “Mike” Milo. Over the years various big-name actors including Roy Scheider, Burt Lancaster, Pierce Brosnan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were seriously interested in playing Miko/Mike.
Eastwood almost committed to starring in a film version in ’88, but he bailed in order to do The Dead Pool, a Dirty Harry film.
Here’s a shorter Amazon synopsis:
“Mike’s best years are behind him. There was a time when he was the best rider in the circuit, but a divorce and years of hard living have worn his body down. After an accident, his career comes to an abrupt end, but his boss gives him one last job: he must cross the border into Mexico, kidnap his boss’s son, Rafo, from his boss’s ex-wife, to be used as leverage in their ongoing divorce.
“Mike arrives to find the boy has already run away, and his plan is immediately exposed to the local police. When he finds Rafo living on the streets of Mexico city, supporting himself though petty crime and winnings from the occasional cockfight, Mike convinces the boy to come back to Texas. Still running from the law, the two set out on a journey northward that forges an unlikely friendship and forces both to reckon with the choices they’ve made in pursuit of being ‘macho.”
This is Schenk’s third collaboration with Eastwood after Gran Torino (’08) and The Mule (’18).
