The comments came after Lee attacked Eastwood for not including any black soldiers in Flags of our Fathers.
Lee said Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie “Flags of Our Fathers” lacked a single African-American.
“There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in ‘Flags’ or ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’]. That was his version: The negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version,” Lee said recently at the Cannes film festival in France.
In response, Eastwood told the Guardian: “A guy like him should shut his face.”
However, as history buffs know:
As for “Flags of Our Fathers,” [Eastwood] says there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”
This is more revisionist history; it’s like the flag raising on 9/11, where it was three white guys putting it up, but the SP crowd demanded that they make the statues one white guy, one black guy and one hispanic guy. I mean, come on; there has to be a limit on this kind of stuff. You can’t rewrite history to make it politically correct. It is a disgrace to those who were there and for those that follow that are force-fed this touchy-feely rewritten garbage.
Good for Eastwood for standing up to Lee.
