IT MIGHT MAKE HIS DAY... : BUT `EASTWOOD' BIO LEAVES READER WANTING.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``Clint Eastwood: a Biography''

Author: Richard Schickel

Data: Illustrated. 557 pages, Alfred A. Knopf; $27.50

Our rating: Three Stars

For nearly three decades, he has been the screen embodiment of an all-American masculinity: the solitary gunslinger who rides into town to exact his own brand of vengeance; the squinty-eyed cop who defies bureaucratic politesse to get his man; the ravaged Secret Service agent who battles age and memory to protect his president. Lean, lanky and laconic, he has always specialized in loners with a slyly ironic smile: men cut off by temperament and circumstance from the world around them.

This is a minimalist cowboy who could make you feel lucky (or unlucky). This is someone who could make your day.

In his new biography of Clint Eastwood, film critic Richard Schickel writes that the actor has ``taken the American male deeper into the country of disaffection than he has ever ridden before on screen, reversing the great theme of our adventure movies, which has been male bonding, and insisting upon the opposite, the difficulty men have in making connections - not just with other men, but with communities, with women, with conventional morality, with their own best selves.''

Eastwood's screen character, he goes on, ``represents an isolation more radically withdrawn than anyone has ever offered in movies intended for, and embraced by, a popular audience.''

As he has demonstrated in his excellent short essays, (``Schickel on Film,'' 1989), Schickel knows how to use his prodigious knowledge of cinematic history to create portraits of film artists that illuminate their individual talents while at the same time situating them within a social and aesthetic context.

In this volume, he does an authoritative job of tracing Eastwood's development as an actor and director, and he also gives the reader a highly nuanced appreciation of Eastwood's iconographic role as a symbol of American manhood and American individualism as it has evolved in the second half of the 20th century. In addition, he provides a persuasive repudiation of critics such as Pauline Kael, who consistently have underestimated Eastwood's enduring talents.

Unfortunately, Schickel's unabashed enthusiasm for Eastwood - he has known the actor for almost two decades and seems to regard him as a kind of friend - also leads him to hagiographic excess. He devotes pages and pages to lesser films such as ``Every Which Way but Loose'' (in which Eastwood starred with an orangutan) and ``The Beguiled'' (in which he played a wounded Union soldier who recuperates at a girls' school), frequently rationalizing their weaknesses and inflating their importance. Even an early guest appearance by Eastwood on ``Mr. Ed'' (the television series about a talking horse) is carefully assessed.

Schickel tends to be equally verbose when it comes to Eastwood's personal life, repeatedly telling us about his kindness toward animals (``his humane relationship with the lower phyla'') and his loyalty to friends.

On the matter of Eastwood's contentious breakup with his longtime girlfriend Sondra Locke, Schickel portrays the actor as having been remarkably ``indulgent'' over the years, given Locke's continuing relationship with her husband, Gordon Anderson.

The Eastwood who emerges from this book is an agreeably reserved man who usually keeps ``the nuclear capability of his anger'' under wraps. That temper, Schickel suggests, has roots in Eastwood's Depression-era childhood, when economic hardship forced his family to repeatedly relocate and made him feel lonely and displaced.

Those experiences, Schickel writes, taught the actor two lessons: ``Do everything in your power to lessen the impact of mischance, whether it be cosmic or mundane; do not trust institutions to do this job. Or, to put the point more positively, turn yourself into an institution and set your own rules of work and conduct, your own boundaries against intrusion. Then insist that this institution, this lengthened shadow of yourself, devote itself to the celebration of characters variously subversive, antisocial, rebellious. In a phrase, place the rage for one kind of order in the service of a rage against a different sort of order.''

This outlook led Eastwood to form his own production company, and to try, as he gained increasing power and recognition, to achieve a kind of autonomy within the business to direct himself or ``employ people he knew would defer to him.''

As for his suspicion of institutional authority, it would be reflected in Eastwood's choice of movie roles (from the outlaws in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns through Dirty Harry and ``Unforgiven's'' Will Munny), roles that would not only establish his distinctive screen persona, but that also would help revise the genre conventions of the western and the thriller.

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