cityheat

Clint Eastwood couldn’t beat the typecasting as the hard-boiled cop. He tried valiantly with “Every
Which Way But Loose,” but it just didn’t happen. “Dirty Harry” was still his legacy. In 1984, he tried
to meet his destiny halfway with “City Heat.” This film is an oddity, but it’s one for the books.
Eastwood plays Lt. Speer, a Police detective in Prohibition era Kansas City. He’s a tough guy,
obsessed with his job, kinda like “Dick Tracy.”

Burt Reynolds is a private detective named Murphy who constantly gets in Speer’s way. One
evening, Murphy’s gumshoeing partner, played by Richard Roundtree, is murdered when
attempting to hoodwink two gangland mafias. Murphy has to find out what his partner was lugging
around town that had all the crime lords worried and willing to kill. Speer tails Murphy, hoping it will
lead him to said crime bosses to weed them out.

What follows is a light comedy of gangsters, flatfoot, molls and Model As. The problems with the
film, while small separately, unfortunately add up to compromise the films intentions. “City Heat”
rides the fence between a serious detective story and an all out satire.

With the plot straightforward and rather shallow, it depends on Eastwood and Reynolds to really
bring it to life. These two play well together on screen, but for some reason their antics aren’t
enough to engage the viewer. Juxtapose that with some serious violence on the part of the
gangsters as guys are chucked from fourth story windows onto pavement and automobiles run into
helpless women and you have a film that’s caught in limbo.

Director Richard Benjamin can’t seem to commit to the farce, so when farcical elements rise to the
surface, it plays off as weird and stupid rather than hilarious. For example, throughout the entire
film up to a certain point, all of the gunfights have been fairly conventional, aside from the fact that
the jokers on both sides of the law can’t hit anything, except for Eastwood. Suddenly, Reynolds and
Eastwood are in a firefight and they start drawing long barrel revolvers, each one of them trying to
outdo the other with Eastwood finally pulling the biggest one out of his jacket and winning the
impromptu contest.

In another random incident, it takes eight direct hits from Eastwood to kill one single thug, and it isn’t
eight shots in rapid succession. Rather, it’s eight shots with long intervals in between as Eastwood
watches the poor guy wheeze and stumble and try to shoot him again. It’s weird. There is one truly
funny scene in which Reynolds hits two gunmen simultaneously in their faces with a baseball bat.

Atop that add the historical inaccuracy of some of the main characters, who are black, being
allowed to sit in the movie theatre with everyone else, even though segregation was the name of the
game back then. It also feels like the movie was shot on two sets, continually redressed, which it
probably was. Then of course, there’s the fact that the whole story takes place at night, a device
certainly used to hide the edges of the backlot stages. Perpetual night bothers me in most films.

“City Heat” has some good moments, but nothing stellar. It tries hard but frankly isn’t memorable.
The characters are charismatic but the story is tepid and the movie lacks stylistic confidence, flip-
flopping between drama and satire without a commitment.