Clint Eastwood Named This 1950s Western The Worst Movie Ever Made
2025 will officially mark Clint Eastwood's 70th year in the film industry. That's just five years short of the average life expectancy for American men, so you could absolutely call that a magnificent run even if all he ever did was play baddies and barkeeps since the Eisenhower administration. Of course, Eastwood has done a tad more than that. In collaboration with filmmakers Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, Eastwood played a major role in reconfiguring, respectively, the Western and crime genres. He's also won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director twice (for "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby"), and, at the age of 94, will release his latest directorial effort, "Juror #2," this November.
Eastwood's been so successful for so long that it's difficult to accept that he ever truly struggled. But 94 years is a long damn time, and film stardom didn't arrive for this big-screen icon until he was in his 30s. Prior to that, he appeared in a number of forgettable movies, and appeared to be headed toward a typecast future as a television star.
Eastwood believed he was capable of better, but even he began to second guess himself when he caught a gander of one of his first significant film performances in a B Western that, to his mind, ranks as an all-time stinker.
The film that almost made Eastwood quit acting for good
In a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Eastwood recalled toughing it out as a contract player at Universal, which led to him getting third billing in a widescreen 20th Century Fox Western that plays like an episode of "F Troop" minus the intentional laughs. As Eastwood told THR, it almost drove him from the business:
"[F]inally one day I started getting some parts and then I did a little film out at Fox called 'Ambush at Cimarron Pass.' It was probably the worst film ever made [...] But I had the second lead in it and an actor named Scott Brady was the lead. And the film was made in eight days. So it was really el speedo grande. And I saw it. I went to see it, it was playing a second feature in North Hollywood. I went to see it and I saw that film and I said I'm through. I've got to go back to school. I've got to do something else, I've got to get a job of other sorts."
Eastwood wasn't through. CBS liked the cut of his chaps as a Western actor, and cast him as the upstart cowboy Rowdy Yates in the hit TV Western "Rawhide." However, Eastwood quickly grew tired of episodic television, which, while on hiatus from the series in 1964, spurred him to take a chance on shooting a violent-for-the-time Western in Spain with the barely proven Italian director Sergio Leone. The film was "A Fistful of Dollars," at which point Eastwood's amble broke into a full sprint toward international stardom.
"Ambush at Cimarron Pass" is currently available to stream for free at YouTube, but the paint-by-numbers flick is for Eastwood completists only. Seriously, you'd be better off watching "Pink Cadillac" or "The Rookie."