‘Pink Cadillac’: The disturbing Clint Eastwood movie Roger Ebert found “idiotic”
By and large, legendary film critic Roger Ebert was a fan of Clint Eastwood. Throughout his time writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert raved about a number of Eastwood’s acting and directorial efforts. For example, he awarded his full four stars to the likes of Unforgiven, Mystic River, and even Flags of Our Fathers, which wasn’t particularly well-received by his colleagues in the critical community. He also called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly a masterpiece. However, if Ebert didn’t like an Eastwood picture, he wouldn’t sugarcoat his opinion – and in 1989, he lambasted one of the granite-faced screen icon’s films, branding it “idiotic.”
When Ebert sat down to watch Pink Cadillac, he was probably expecting another one of Eastwood’s mildly entertaining action comedies. The star made several of these kinds of movies, with varying degrees of success, critically and at the box office. For every Thunderbolt and Lightfoot that was a critical darling or Every Which Way But Loose that dominated the box office, there was always a Firefox or The Gauntlet or City Heat to stink up the joint. In truth, Eastwood tried to mitigate this by hiring the director of The Dead Pool, his most recent Dirty Harry film, to helm Pink Cadillac – but it was still a swing and a miss.
Pink Cadillac is the tale of Tommy Nowak, a master-of-disguise skip-tracer hired to track down a woman named Lou Ann who has skipped bail. It turns out she has stolen money from her boyfriend and gone on the lam – but Nowak soon finds out that her boyfriend is a member of a white supremacist gang that is hellbent on revenge.
As Ebert notes, Eastwood gets a lot of mileage out of dressing up in different costumes and bantering with Lou Ann, played by Bernadette Peters, but those despicably racist villains keep bumping up against the seemingly frothy, light tone. “This silliness might work in a movie like Every Which Way But Loose,” Ebert writes, “but Pink Cadillac has a disturbing subplot about a secret army of white racists – and so the comedy seems out of place.”
Even worse, though, are the stupid decisions made by Nowak and Lou Ann, seemingly with the express purpose of keeping the plot rolling along. “There’s another problem,” Ebert railed, “and that’s the idiotic behaviour of most of the characters in the film. How can we take a thriller scene seriously when the characters don’t?” He poured particular scorn on one scene in which Nowak catches one of the white supremacists and says he’ll drop him off a mile down the road so that he and Lou Ann can be safe. Instead, he leaves him about 25 yards away, plunging the couple immediately into danger again.
Putting aside any nitpicks with the plot or characterisation, though, Ebert simply couldn’t ignore how uncomfortable the racist villains made him feel. He noted that there are many serious, nuanced films about the racism that has always been at the dark heart of America, but using a group of white supremacists as the throwaway villains “in a light little action-comedy seems inappropriate.”
Ultimately, Pink Cadillac wasn’t one of Eastwood’s triumphs, with the box office returns and critical drubbing suggesting Ebert was correct in his criticism. Indeed, in that period, Eastwood had a couple of duds, including White Hunter, Black Heart, that made him wonder if audiences were growing tired of him. In his lower moments, he would reportedly muse, “I don’t know how much longer people can look at this face.”
Of course, Eastwood would rebound in the early ’90s with a string of defining movies that put him back on top, such as Unforgiven, In the Line of Fire, and The Bridges of Madison County. He once revealed that the key to his longevity lay in not thinking too much about the movies that didn’t work – or the ones that offended legendary critics with incongruous white supremacist villains.
“I go back and look at films I’ve made, and I could easily ask, ‘Why the heck did I make this?'” Eastwood said. “I’m sure I’ve had disappointments. If I did, I wouldn’t dwell on them.”
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