The Clint Eastwood movie Roger Ebert hated the most: “How do travesties like this get made?”
No actor is immune to making at least a couple of terrible movies throughout their career, even indisputable icons like Clint Eastwood, although it would be fair to say the good outweighs the bad.
That’s one of the benefits that comes with spending seven decades carving out a legacy as one of Hollywood’s most recognisable stars and accomplished directors: it’s easy to be forgiven for a misstep or two when there’s enough greatness to make it clear it’s only a temporary blip.
Roger Ebert was a big fan of Eastwood’s, generally speaking, both as an on-camera performer and behind-the-camera filmmaker. Obviously, he wasn’t going to let any bias creep into his reviews of his work, but for the most part, the four-time Academy Award winner got passing grades from the industry’s most famous critic.
However, that didn’t mean he would let his weaker features slide by. Buddy Van Horn’s 1989 action comedy Pink Cadillac took a one-star pasting from Ebert, but that wasn’t the worst review he gave an Eastwood picture. Instead, that honour fell to the period-set crime caper City Heat, the movie that almost killed Burt Reynolds.
Pairing up two big-name stars for a breezy buddy flick should have been a slam dunk, only for director Richard Benjamin’s film to underperform at the box office, be greeted with a critical response that could generously be described as less than enthusiastic, and earn Reynolds a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Actor’.
Of course, that was the least of his concerns when he suffered an on-set accident that ultimately left him in a coma, so he probably didn’t care much for what Ebert had to say. Nonetheless, he was in especially vicious form when casting judgment on the only one of Eastwood’s movies he reviewed that he awarded a paltry 0.5 stars.
“How do travesties like this get made?” he boldly asked before answering his own question. “I have a feeling the problem starts at the level of negotiations, in which everybody protects his own turf, and the movie suffers. There are moments here when you want to squirm, especially when Clint Eastwood allows his incomparable screen persona to be parodied.”
Self-parody has been the death of many an actor, and while Ebert did acknowledge that part of the charm of the Dirty Harry franchise was that “the movies themselves border on parody,” the difference between the five-film series and City Heat was that “they know what they’re doing.” Unfortunately, in his eyes at least, the Eastwood and Reynolds team-up “is a movie in which people almost obviously don’t have a clue.”
City Heat will never be remembered as either Eastwood’s or Reynolds’ finest hour, and it’s comfortably one of the most forgettable films he made in the 80s. That said, it did land itself a little piece of historical ignominy by securing the unwanted status of being the one title from his filmography that Ebert panned hardest.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Clint Eastwood Newsletter
All the latest stories about Clint Eastwood from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.