When I was a kid back in high school, my friends and I were absolutely, totally, and completely obsessed with Clint Eastwood. I can vividly remember our mile-high stack of Spaghetti Western VHS tapes. We watched “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly,” and a half-dozen others until the tapes were practically worn out. At one point, my buddies and I even picked up some of the little cheroot cigars Eastwood smoked on screen and clowned around pretending to be as cool as he was.

Looking back, I think I got hooked on those movies because they were classic battles of good versus evil, and I idolized Clint Eastwood because he always played the good guy. Sometimes he was a police detective, other times a soldier or just a man on a mission, but he was always the one decent dude in the movie who was trying to take care of the scumbags and protect the innocent. No one was better than Clint Eastwood with a pistol. Plus, he looked pretty cool shooting people down in his cowboy hat and poncho!