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True prime HE MAY BE PUSHING 70, BUT CLINT EASTWOOD JUST HIT HIS STRIDE WITH "TRUE CRIME." BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | Clint Eastwood is more than a preeminent figure in American movies. At this point, he virtually is American movies. After Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, no other actor has so fully embodied the masculine ideal propounded by Hollywood, that of the rugged individual living by his own perhaps amoral code, untamable by womanly domesticity or flabby-spirited society. But Eastwood has always known consciously what Bogart understood only instinctively and Wayne probably didn't understand at all -- the loner/hero myth is an unstable fiction, at best a self-delusion, at worst a hypocritical mask for stupidity and violence. Which has never meant that either Eastwood or his audience could resist its romantic appeal, of course, only that they saw the poison as poison and drank it anyway. Eastwood's unique ability to undermine and embrace myth at the same time reached its fullest fruition in his multiple Oscar-winning 1992 western "Unforgiven," but it's been part of his persona throughout his long, uneven but mostly honorable career. (Yeah, he did co-star with an orangutan twice, but in 41 films as a leading man -- and 21 as a director -- he's made only a few that are truly unwatchable.) It also helps explain why "True Crime" is so much wittier, more gripping and more honest than anything Eastwood-wannabes like Schwarzenegger, Stallone or Willis have made lately. Remember that Eastwood rose to stardom as a representative of the era of disillusionment, after the A-bomb, Sputnik and JFK. He was already well over 30, and the aquiline face around his piercing eyes was already scarred and weather-beaten. Whether he was riding across the Spanish desert as Sergio Leone's Man With No Name or angrily flinging Dirty Harry's badge into San Francisco Bay, those eyes, and the thin, self-contained smile below them, told us that Clint had looked at the world and looked into his own heart; both were irredeemably fucked. Early in "True Crime," an electrically paced and brilliantly acted death-row thriller, we see our director and star clad only in a towel after Steve Everett, the investigative reporter he plays, has just slept with his boss' wife. What makes the scene seem both genuine and sexy is that Eastwood, although obviously in excellent physical condition, looks every minute of his 68 years. His body, like his face, is now lined with geological seams and crevasses, and the spectacle of this senior citizen determined to keep playing the rake and hellion is both pathetic and admirable. (Yes, gentle reader, it's deeply unfair that no actress Eastwood's age could pull this off without risking vicious ridicule -- but let's give Susan Sarandon a few years before we say it's impossible.) Ev, as everyone calls him, used to be a star reporter in New York, before he ran afoul of a vindictive mayor (what an extraordinary notion!) and got banished across country to hack out metro pieces for the Oakland Tribune. Like any good thriller protagonist, he's struggling to find a moral compass and not doing too well at it: Although he's gone off the bottle since his disastrous crusade to free an accused rapist blew up in his face, Ev's compulsive infidelities are endangering his relationship with his wife (Diane Venora) and 6-year-old daughter. His scabrous, foulmouthed editor in chief (James Woods, in a hilarious performance his fans will long treasure) can no longer protect him from the uptight, cuckolded city editor (Denis Leary, playing against type to good effect). As if that weren't enough, the drunk-driving death of a young female colleague -- just after Ev has attempted to seduce her -- dumps the story of Frank Beachum (Isaiah Washington), a convicted killer who claims to be innocent and faces execution that very night in San Quentin, right in Ev's self-absorbed lap. Acting less out of a passion for justice than a desire to prove his own reportorial virility, Ev attacks Beachum's dubious conviction for a convenience-store murder, playing beat-the-clock with missing witnesses and six-year-old recollections while the gruesome preparations for the execution continue. But God, as they say, is in the details, and "True Crime" (adapted from Andrew Klavan's bestseller by Larry Gross, Paul Brickman and Stephen Schiff) is far more about Eastwood's superior eye for composition and sense of pace, and the extraordinary performances he draws from his cast, than about its predictable plot mechanics. N E X T_P A G E _| The yard at San Quentin: as gray, damp and bone-chilling as the Tower of London