City Heat

Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, the two biggest male movie stars not only of 1984 but of the prior decade and a half, seemed like a dream team when they signed up to finally star in a film together. But this troubled production, originally written by Blake Edwards in 1970, was doomed from the start. Set in 1933 Kansas City, the film stars Reynolds as a former cop turned private eye whose partner (Richard Roundtree) is involved in a shady deal. When the partner gets killed, he reluctantly teams up with a police lieutenant, played by Clint Eastwood, his former friend back when they served on the force together. Though now bitter enemies, the two men work at cross purposes to take down a mob led by crime boss Primo Pitt (Rip Torn).

Encouraged by his wife, Julie Andrews, who thought City Heat was his best-unproduced screenplay, Edwards set the project up with himself as director in 1984. Warner Bros. was naturally over the moon about the opportunity of pairing the two mega-stars in the same picture. But from their very first meeting, Clint clashed with the exacting, well-established Edwards. Already notorious for only wanting to work with directors who obeyed his laid-back approach to picture-making, Clint was just coming off Tightrope, where he had essentially taken over from writer/director Richard Tuggle without formally replacing him (due to the director's guild's "Eastwood Rule" created and named for Clint because of his tendency to do just that).

Edwards was fired off the project, and Richard Benjamin, fresh off his other '84 feature, Racing with the Moon, was brought in to replace him. Benjamin may have been a gifted comic actor who made some solid pictures, but he was not the type of director who could make something imperfect sing the way Edwards often could. Plus, while putting the two macho actors together might have seemed like a great idea, their screen personas couldn't be more different. Even their styles of machismo are like oil and water. Reynolds's cornball, good ol' boy impishness is a terrible fit with Eastwood's stoicism. And Coolhand Clint had always resented having to share the title of "most popular leading man of the '70s and '80s" with Beefcake Burt, so appearing together in a movie wasn't something Clint was all that excited about to begin with. It turns out audiences weren't all that excited either. The film made its money back, but viewers and critics didn't especially want to see these two stars in a light, 1930s-period romp. They might have faired better if the two had teamed up Tango and Cash-style for something set in modern times with a little more edge.

Watching City Heat, you can picture what Edwards might have done with it had he gotten the chance. It has a very similar vibe to the writer/director's 1988 backstage-Hollywood period film Sunset. That crime mystery comedy western, which paired veteran movie star James Garner, playing an aging Wyatt Earp brought to LA to serve as a technical advisor to silent pictures, and Bruce Willis, then a TV star trying to break into movies, as legendary western actor Tom Mix, is less a comedy and more a whistful mood-piece that lovingly recreates a bygone era. The comical, cathouse climax of City Heat also feels right out of a Blake Edwards farce. Edwards retained story credit under the pseudonym Sam O. Brown, or S.O.B., a reference to his 1981 film based on his prior worst experience in showbiz, the making of his 1970 Academy Award-nominated mega-flop, Darling Lili. Edwards claimed he wrote a script for S.O.B. 2 in response to seeing this project, which he had so much affection for, turned into something so awful.

While I can't say City Heat is awful, it's just kind of nothing—some good actors wearing snappy costumes waiting around in elegant sets for a story to happen that never does. The supporting cast is packed with faces you're always happy to see, like John Hancock, Irene Cara, Tony Lo Bianco, William Sanderson, Robert Davi, Beau Starr, Hamilton Camp, Nicholas Worth, and Jack Nance. Jane Alexander gets a plumb role as Reynolds' secretary and Clint's would-be ladyfriend, but this is a movie that has absolutely no idea what to do with Madeline Kahn!