The Clint Eastwood movie that left Roger Ebert morally outraged: “I felt uncomfortable”
Clint Eastwood has had a remarkably stellar track record as an actor and a director. In fairness to his fellow filmmakers, he probably benefits from having such a lengthy career. When you’ve been working steadily for nearly seven decades, it’s easy for people to forget all the missteps and remember the triumphs. But you don’t just accidentally wander into four Oscars and seven further nominations, either.
Throughout his career, Eastwood has starred in action movies, westerns, and tender romances, and he’s proven to be spectacularly skilful at making mid-budget movies that soar at the box office. He rocketed to fame in the 1960s playing stoically silent gunslingers in movies like Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and Hang ‘Em High before transferring his talents to playing hardened cops who play by their own rules in movies like Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry.
While many of these films were wildly successful, several were met with a much frostier reception. One of them was so terrible, in fact, that it dismayed film critic Roger Ebert not just on a cinematic level, but on a moral one. According to him, it undermined its attempts at charm by making one huge mistake.
Released in 1989, Pink Cadillac was an action comedy directed by Buddy Van Horn and starring Eastwood as a bounty hunter chasing a woman (played by Bernadette Peters) who is running away from her white supremacist husband in his Cadillac. Unbeknownst to her, she is also bringing along a stash of half a million dollars that belongs to his racist gang.
It’s set up to be a light romantic caper, but for Ebert, it was problematic on too many levels to be anything close to light, let alone fun. On a basic level, the characters acted illogically, the plot machinations were far too predictable, and the chemistry between Eastwood and Peters was nonexistent. But it was the dark undercurrent of racism that stuck out to him like a sore thumb.
“I can imagine, and have seen, serious movies about outlaw racism in America,” he wrote in his one-star review, “But to use a racist army as material for the villains in a light little action-comedy seems inappropriate.”
It wasn’t just the fact that there were white supremacists in the film, it was the way in which the script gave them a platform to tout their hateful beliefs. “When the racist leader’s dialogue ran down the usual litany of racist slurs, I felt uncomfortable,” Ebert explained. “In the times we live in, the offensiveness of such words should be observed, and they should not be used thoughtlessly.”
Perhaps the most annoying part of all of it was that racism was completely unnecessary for the film’s plot. Villains come in many forms, and the script could just as easily have made them run-of-the-mill mobsters, drug runners, or hapless conmen. To shoehorn white supremacy into an otherwise bubbly comedy and then completely fail to interrogate or justify its presence was beyond the pale for Ebert, and, needless to say, has aged very poorly.
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