The flop movie Burt Reynolds wanted to be his ‘Dirty Harry’: “A ballsy character”
Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds go way back, and while they were on an even keel for a while in terms of star power, the former eventually outstripped the latter and left him lying in the Hollywood dust.
They first met in the early 1950s when they were trying to get their foot in the acting door, with the two unknowns under contract with Universal. They didn’t last too long, though, with the future silver screen icons both being fired on the same day at the same time.
Eastwood and Reynolds would remain friends until the Smokey and the Bandit star passed away in 2018, but they only made one film together. 1984’s City Heat was nothing special, and it may have been better had they never joined forces in the first place, with the picture having a lasting impact on one of them.
During a stunt sequence gone wrong, Reynolds was cracked in the face with a chair, which necessitated surgery that saw his jaw wired shut and realigned. To combat the pain, he relied on painkillers, which eventually became a full-blown addiction that became so bad he fell into a coma and almost died.
Reynolds may have ruled the roost as America’s number one box office draw for five consecutive years between 1978 and 1982, but once he fell off, he fell off hard. Meanwhile, Eastwood continued going from strength to strength as both an actor and a filmmaker, enjoying the sort of longevity his old buddy could only dream of.
Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry pushed the future four-time Academy Award winner over the top as an A-list leading man, and it inevitably spawned a slew of pale imitators. As tended to be the case once his star power began to dim, Reynolds was far too late to the party, not arriving until 1989.
Directed by Michael Crichton, the crime thriller Physical Evidence cast him as Joe Paris, a hard-drinking, rule-bending, rugged, and no-nonsense police officer, who wakes up after a night on the tiles to discover that he’s covered in blood and being framed for a murder that he’s adamant he didn’t commit.
“Joe is a ballsy character, kind of like Dirty Harry gone amok,” he said at the time. “He’s around the edge of having a nervous breakdown, but he has a strange sense of humour about it all.” Whereas Eastwood’s original was a genre-defining classic, Reynolds’ attempts to channel the same spirit went off the rails.
Physical Evidence made a meagre showing at the box office, barely recouping a quarter of its production budget in ticket sales, and it was forgotten about almost as soon as it had arrived. Had he tried to make his own Dirty Harry in the ’70s when he was a big deal, it might have worked, but he was a man out of time in more ways than one.
