Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Madelaine Kahn, Rip Torn, Richard Roundtree. Dir. Richard Benjamin, Warner Bros., 1984
7 lbs of movies, #6
What might have been. When the preproduction lore is the best thing about your movie, you're in trouble. City Heat started as a screenplay Blake Edwards wrote but never sold, entitled Kansas City Jazz. His wife, Julie Andrews, thought it had something and encouraged him to develop it as his next project. He did, and Warner Brothers hit on the bright idea of teaming the two top box office stars, Clint & Burt, who wanted to do a picture together. Warners execs must have been counting the money. Blake Edwards writing and directing his dream project, starring the two biggest movie stars in the US. What could go wrong?
Blake Edwards could decide Clint Eastwood was an idiot for disagreeing with his vision of how Eastwood's character should be played. Eastwood, a director, himself, and a fan of Edwards, could be so disappointed by his meeting with Edwards he refused to do the movie with Edwards directing. Warners could hire, instead, Richard Benjamin, a talented director in his own right (My Favorite Year, Racing with the Moon) who had no feel for the material or stars and mostly did it as a favor to the studio. Blake could write the screenplay under the pseudonym Sam O. Brown, the initials of which spell SOB, a reference to his earlier film, and to City Heat's role in getting him to write SOB 2. The movie, shot on a $25M budget, could scrape in at $38M box office.
These represent the most, and only, interesting things about City Heat. Like all shoulda-beens, I feel tempted to drill down into all the ways this picture fails, but that would require me to watch more of it and wouldn't be any more interesting.
That's correct - I am writing about a movie I stopped watching after 20 minutes. Truth is, I already had this on bluray, and I made it through once, not on my first attempt. Since it came in the 7 lbs., I figured I'd watch it again and have another writeup for the blog.
Which I do, only not based on a complete viewing. I still can't figure how drunk I was to make it all the way through at all, because this time I had the exact same problem as my abortive first try. City Heat is supposed to be a comedy-action caper, set in the '30s, featuring snappy comic repartee and great gangster gun battles. At times within the first 20 minutes, I recognized dialogue as allegedly comic, allegedly hardboiled, but I didn't laugh or appreciate good crisp writing or really even respond at all. If the lines have any humor, they need to be delivered with timing and investment, and they're spoken with all the sincerity of reading cue cards.
Eastwood's a straight-arrow police lieurenant. Reynolds is a flashy former detective running a dying detective agency. They don't like each other. When Reynolds's partner in the agency, Diehl (Richard Roundtree) gets in trouble with the KC mob, the unlikely allies will work together to yada yada. We've been here before. It's a buddy-picture, a riff on every unlikely-allies story ever, this one set in Prohibition-era Kansas City. And it's not a good one. It's slow, flatfooted, the characters are cardboard cutouts, and in 20 minutes I didn't find myself engaged by any of it. Compare that to Blood Work, which had me before the opening credits ended.
Even before its opening credits ended, City Heat tired me, had me feeling listless and alienated and unwilling to continue. I watched it once. I did my bit for humanity.
This dvd did come in what's called the "bookbox format." The case is made of cardboard, like digipak cds, but a black flap swings and snsps shut, giving the case a book aspect. I like the old bookboxes, they're usually attractive packages, and they weren't around long. I'm always a little jazzed to find a new title in that format. That's the one fullthroated compliment I will pay City Heat. Great lookin' box.
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