“Watching
the President, I - I couldn't help wondering why a man like you would risk his
life to save a man like that. You have such a strange job - I can't decide if
it's heroic or absurd.”
Film fans of all ages can have an entirely different view on
Clint Eastwood. The older generation
remember the cowboy, the man with no name, Josey Wales. The younger know the grumpy old man from who
trains Oscar winners to box, who doesn’t want kids in his yard and has trouble
with the curve. My generation knows him
as Dirty Harry Callahan, the bare-knuckle brawler who owned a monkey, the aging
bad-ass cowboy, and of course my favorite role Frank Horrigan in “In the Line
of Fire”.
This 1993
film is ‘Eastwood vs. Malkovich’ it follows a secret service agent (Eastwood) who
was there the day in Dallas in ’63 when Kennedy was assassinated, who now with
a second chance must stop a killer from taking out the current president. Malkovich plays the perfect foil for Eastwood
as he taunts and terrorizes the aging agent as he gets closer and closer to his
goal. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen a
man who doesn’t always make great films like “Das Boot” and “The Neverending
Story”, he does always make entertaining ones.
This is no exception; it’s a fantastic thriller with a tight script with
some great humor supplied by Eastwood and spring of intensity and eerie calm by
Malkovich. The build-up is exciting and
the outcome while a little on the formulaic side is still worth the watch. This film has a Star Trek: Wrath of Khan feel
as the two leads go head to head without actually being in the same room, just
two guys playing a telephone version of ‘cat and mouse’ in fact they are some
of the best scenes in the film.
My favorite
memory though, was before I actually saw the movie, it was when I caught the
trailer in the theater. Back before the
internet, when new trailers could only be viewed on the big screen I was
fascinated watching the teaser of “In the Line of Fire”. It showed a ‘1963’ date in which the ‘6’ spun
around with the sound of a ticking clock until it read ‘1993’ all the while dialogue
of the film along with the iconic “In a world” movie voice telling us, almost
assuring us that Clint Eastwood was gonna save the day. And he didn’t even need a horse or an orangutan
this time.
--Robert L.
Castillo
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