Eastwood's many facesAmid all the guns and grit, his characters have made a clear moral progression.Frankie Dunn, in his new "Million Dollar Baby," is among the most affecting.

John Wayne became a legend as the man of action. Jimmy Stewart became one as the man of conscience too paralyzed to act. Clint Eastwood did it as the man of action pricked by conscience.

Million Dollar Baby, which opened Friday, is a couple of yards of deep-creased sinew very much resembling its director/producer/star. A heart-wrenching meditation on morality, mortality and love, the film is the tale of a disillusioned boxing trainer (Eastwood) and the scrappy contender he takes on as a surrogate daughter (Hilary Swank).

Taking stock before taking action is the theme of this twilit mood piece, which marks the distance that Eastwood, 74, has traveled as an actor, a director and a man over his half-century in film.

For many of those 50 years he traveled solo. As the mercenary cheroot-chewing, poncho-wearing Man With No Name of the spaghetti westerns of the '60s. As the Magnum-packing urban cowboy Dirty Harry who shot first and asked questions later during the '70s.

Somewhere between The Gauntlet (1977) and Tightrope (1984), movies in which he played none-too-bright cops reeducated by smart women, Eastwood retooled his loner figure, increasingly exploring the guy struggling to make human connection.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was a 1966 Eastwood triumph. But in assessing his career, it's clear that the good, the bad and the difference has been an Eastwood preoccupation since 1971, when he made his directorial debut and starred as the philandering disc jockey in Play Misty for Me.

Eastwood's characters divide roughly into four types, his career into four overlapping periods. No matter whether he plays outlaw (A Fistful of Dollars, High Plains Drifter), lawman (Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry), vagabond artist (Honkytonk Man, Bronco Billy), or professional at sunset (In the Line of Fire, Space Cowboys), invariably he fights a two-front war, in which right and wrong are lines drawn in shifting sands. The Eastwood character almost always has chosen neither the good path nor the bad, but a third way.

He's not a reactionary. He's not a relativist. He's a revisionist.

In Eastwood's first act, typified by The Man With No Name (who actually did have a moniker, Joe) in Fistful, he was a situational ethicist, blazing a radically middle way between two warring clans.

In the actor/director's second act, he was again a man in the moral shadowlands, Dirty Harry, with one hand battling bureaucrats in a corrupt roundhouse and the other fighting criminals on the mean streets.

Eastwood's characters gained moral complexity in the third act, typified by alcoholic singer Red Stovall in Honkytonk Man (1982) and the sexually twisted cop Wes Block in Tightrope (1984) - sinners contemplating atonement, trying to summon the strength to fight their weaknesses.

In what looks to be his last act, an inordinate number of the characters Eastwood has played or directed - from Forest Whitaker's Charlie Parker in Bird (1988) to Sean Penn's Jimmy Markum in Mystic River (2003) to his own Frankie Dunn in Million Dollar Baby - are sinners who know in their marrow that absolution is not forthcoming. Unforgiven was not only the title of Eastwood's 1992 Oscar-winning western, but also a description of the men in his late-era films.

*

To consider Eastwood afresh requires removing the nettles that have attached to him over the years. Because his career is so long, so various and so disputed, the history of the attacks on him amounts to a history of modern America.

He's been pilloried by liberals who during the Nixon years saw him as the face of the Silent Majority and during the Reagan years of the Moral Majority. And he's been pilloried by conservatives who during the Clinton era found that Mr. Tough Guy had become squishily "politically correct." One of his most perceptive critics noted that Eastwood has devoted the second half of his career to dismantling the persona he had created in the first half.

I'd argue that the actor who achieved immortality playing the guy who shot first and thought about it later devoted the second half of his career to exploring the consequences of that gunplay. A better way of summarizing Eastwood is this: He is an American touchstone, one who helps us understand who we are - and where we are.

*

Eastwood's consideration of truth and consequences was palpable in his debut as director/star, Play Misty for Me (1971), playing a self-assured disc jockey who picks up a woman in a bar, enjoys their one-night stand, and is violently stalked by her after he returns to his longtime lady friend. In the era of casual sex, here was a movie suggesting that no sex is casual.

Then he directed and starred in the revisionist westerns High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). If John Ford/John Wayne westerns were about fighting for traditional values, and the Leone/Eastwood ones were just about fighting, Eastwood's own films challenged the spaghetti-western assumption that staying alive was more important than staying moral.

In Drifter and Josey Wales, the Eastwood figures' lack of certainty about when to pick up a gun and when to pack it in echoed the public dialogue about Vietnam. It was a theme he returned to in Unforgiven (1992), in which his outlaw faces down a corrupt sheriff.

After Dirty Harry partnered with a female cop, Tyne Daly, in The Enforcer (1976), Eastwood made revisionist cop movies such as The Gauntlet and Tightrope in which his alienated, none-too-swift lawmen are resocialized and reeducated by smarter, quicker women, respectively Sondra Locke and Genevieve Bujold. It's hard to name another actor who has devoted himself so fully to redefining masculinity in the age of feminism. Or another whose recurring theme is that of the detached male who reconnects to life as a result of female intervention and attention.

He reprised that theme in In the Line of Fire (1993), the best Eastwood performance prior to Million Dollar Baby, and his biggest box-office hit to date. Fire was the first Eastwood film to explore the older professional who gets a last chance to prove himself, a motif also developed in The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Space Cowboys (2000), and most profoundly in Million Dollar Baby.

Like the best films of Eastwood's late period, Baby is equally about ethical challenges. In Unforgiven, Eastwood is Bill Munny, a reformed gunslinger who backslides into violence for one final payday. His name a homonym for money, Munny doesn't so much face down his demons as succumb to them. Both the underappreciated A Perfect World (1993) and Mystic River (2003) are parables of how violence begets violence, about grown men wrestling with childhood demons that continue to stalk them. Baby, like Mystic River a movie steeped in Catholic guilt, stars Eastwood as a boxing trainer and "cut man" atoning for past trangressions by healing the pain endured by his charges. All of these shadow-ridden movies ask: If a man has done bad in his past, is he capable of doing good? That the films offer neither easy answers nor neat resolutions makes them linger.

*

Although Eastwood is frequently compared to John Wayne (both riding to prominence in westerns, both standing six feet, four inches), for the last 30 years increasingly I think of Eastwood as the anti-Wayne.

Framed and lit like a sandstone-and-shale butte in Monument Valley, the Duke played the assured hero who singlehandedly won the West and World War II. Wayne's impassivity suggests physical power; Eastwood's increasing reticence suggests its psychological opposite. Having directed himself in 22 of his 58 features, Eastwood typically frames and half-lights himself as the shadow-haunted guy struggling to see the light.

The Duke saw good and evil in black and white. The Eastwood moral spectrum ranges from black to gray.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/carrierickey.