Over the last two nights I re-watched Wolfgang Petersen‘s In the Line of Fire (’93), which I hadn’t seen in over three decades.
Clint Eastwood was 62 during filming, and he looks like a fit-as-a-fiddle 54 or 55, at the oldest. Such a good looking hombre, in such good shape (the old-guy exhaustion bits are just fake acting) and with such a great haircut. The camera loves him.
He’s playing a kind of Clint Hill figure named Frank Horrigan — a haunted Secret Service agent who was riding right behind JFK in Dallas on 11.22.63, and who can’t shake the hilt pangs…a deep-down feeling that after the first shot he could’ve leapt on top of the Presidential limo and saved the day by taking Oswald’s head-shot bullet.
Did I just say that? Yes, I did. The brain-matter blowout shot didn’t come from the grassy knoll.
Frank, in any event, finally puts that Dallas nightmare to bed at the very end.
Horrigan is an old-school sexist who thinks of Renee Russo‘s Lilly Raines, a fellow Secret Service agent, as political “window dressing.” No film made today would even flirt with using a character like Frank, who even in the early ’90s was skirting the edge of uncoolness.
Lilly sees Frank for the dinosaur that he is, but she still finds him charming and even fuckable. (Not an incongruent notion, Russo being 38 at the time.) They don’t quite “do it” in the course of the film, but they’re together at the finale.
Bill Clinton had just been elected when ITLOF began filming in late ’92, and that was a long time ago, you bet. The technical aspects feel quite creaky and analogue-y. The computer screen fonts are positively prehistoric.
John Malkovich, 39 during filming, has enormous fun playing the bitter, unhinged, wackjob assassin, alternately known as Mitch Leary, Joseph McCrawley, James Carney and Booth. There’s a great bit in a third-act scene in which he’s getting dressed for a swanky black-tie party at L.A.’s Hotel Bonaventure. Petersen and dp John Bailey (who became AMPAS president) deliver an insert shot of Malkovich’s hairy pot belly, and he slaps it twice…pohp, pohp!
In The Line of Fire is a flush-looking, slightly above-average, big-studio action thriller…nothing more or less than that. A diverting, highly competent popcorn thing.