From guns to roses, it has been one long haul for the flint-hearted man. His on-screen, granite-faced, monosyllabic tough guy persona once prompted a critic to assign him to the Mount Rushmore school of acting. As a producer-director, they said, he could not think beyond his guns. So when he mused aloud, “I just do my thing… eventually you do something that someone thinks is okay,” cinema savants did not give it a penny’s thought. But this turned out to be one Cassandra’s prophecy when the US...