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FIREFOX
Rating: 
USA. 1982.
Director/Producer – Clint Eastwood, Screenplay – Alex Lasker & Wendell Wellman, Based on the Novel by Craig Thomas, Photography – Bruce Surtees, Music – Maurice Jarre, Visual Effects – DreamQuest, John Dykstra & Robert Shepard, Special Effects – Karl Baumgartner & Chuck Gaspar, Mechanical Effects – Bill Shourt & Don Trumbull, Production Design – John Graysmark. Production Company – Warner Bros.
Cast:
Clint Eastwood (Mitchell Gant), Freddie Jones (Kenneth Aubrey), David Huffman (Buccholtz), Warren Clarke (Pavel Upensky), Nigel Hawthorne (Pyotr Baranovitch), Ronald Lacey (Semelovsky), Dimitra Arlis (Natalia), Kenneth Colley (Colonel Kontarsky), Stefan Schnabel (First Secretary), Klaus Lowitsch (General Vladimirov)
Plot: Former Vietnam fighter pilot Mitchell Gant is living in seclusion following a nervous breakdown. He is called back to service by the US government for a top-secret mission. They want him to travel into the Soviet Union and steal the experimental Firefox fighter plane, which has been built for Mach 6 speeds, is invisible to radar and has a thought-controlled missile guidance system. Gant is given false identity papers and flown into Moscow where he is to be smuggled across country to the airfield by the Russian underground. But as the plan progresses, things start to unravel.
Clint Eastwood first emerged as a Universal bit player during the 1950s and then gained recognition as a regular on tv’s Rawhide (1959-66). Eastwood then went to Italy where he starred in a series of Spaghetti Western classics – A Fistful of Dollars (1965), For a Few Dollars More (1966) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967) – where he perfected the role of the tight-lipped, monosyllabic Man With No Name. These and a handful of English-language Westerns made back in the US – Hang ‘Em High (1968), Coogan’s Bluff (1968) – and war films such as Where Eagles Dare (1969) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970) – propelled Eastwood to a big-name box-office star. But it was with the starring role in Dirty Harry (1971) that Eastwood found the part that he became forever after identified with. And by the early 1970s Eastwood’s star had become big enough that he could use his clout to be allowed to make his debut as a director, which came with the psycho-thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). By the end of the 1970s Eastwood was regularly topping the list of No. 1 stars in the world and was appearing in hit after hit with the various Dirty Harry sequels, Escape from Alcatraz (1979) and Every Which Way But Loose (1979). Less effective though seemed to be the occasions when he stepped behind the director’s chair. Here the results – the excellent Western revenge fantasy High Plains Drifter (1973), the acclaimed Western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and peculiarities like Bronco Billy (1980), Honkytonk Man (1982) and White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) – found only middling audience reception. [The sole exception was the fine action film The Gauntlet (1977)].
For the first two decades of his directing career, Eastwood was largely ignored by the critical establishment, even when he made such noteworthy films as Bird (1988). It was not until he deservedly won the Academy Award for the stunning anti-Western Unforgiven (1992) that he began to be taken seriously. Certainly since then Eastwood has matured considerably as a director with thoughtful and intelligent works such as the superbly underrated A Perfect World (1993), and the persistently intelligent likes of The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) and the Academy-nominated likes of Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). But before this Eastwood always had a problem finding respectability and his directorial outings tended to be dismissed along with consideration of him as an actor. Largely, one suspects, it was that he was associated with action movie roles, usually of a rather right wing bent, and the fact that tended to be seen as an actor of fairly limited range. It is worth comparing the fairly negative reception that Firefox received when it came out with Eastwood’s later return to the same hard-science techno-thriller genre, Space Cowboys (2000). While Space Cowboys is an amiable but far lesser film than Firefox, it received likable reviews as by that point in time Eastwood had become critically accepted, whereas in comparison the much superior Firefox was dismissed as uninspired.
Firefox is one Eastwood film that is seriously worth critical re-evaluation. The first three-quarters of the film is one of the best Cold War thrillers of the 1980s. Adapting Craig Thomas’s 1977 novel quite closely, Eastwood does an excellent job at twisting the plot with a claustrophobic sense of mounting paranoia. He continually cuts back and forward between the progress across the country and the pursuing Soviets as they slowly piece together the various pieces of the puzzle in a way that keeps the suspense hanging on a knife-edge. It’s probably a sense of paranoia about the implacable power of the KGB that existed far more as a myth in the eyes of conservative America and thriller writers than it ever did in actuality, but rarely has the obdurate implacability of the police state been evoked with such a sense of omniscient paranoia as it is here. Eastwood, photographer Bruce Surtees and the production design team do a superb job of recreating Moscow, with various locations in Vienna standing in for the real thing.
But it is really the last quarter, where the Firefox takes to the air and with a Russian pilot in pursuit in a second plane, where the film really finds its wings. The effects work here was supervised by John Dykstra. Dykstra shows what the dogfights that he also supervised for Star Wars (1977) would have been like with greater scientific accuracy. The races at Mach speed down canyons, across icepacks, twirling through clouds, across the ocean surface dragging half-mile funnels of snow and water, and the intensely suspenseful landing on the ice sheet at sea are something truly exhilarating. (If possible see the film on the wide cinema-screen as opposed to video where half the seat-edge effects are lost. Watching these scenes on the big-screen back in the film’s original cinematic release, the result was utterly exhilarating). The matte black, sleek, gleaming shape of the Firefox looks stunning – the first view we get of it with its linear beak nose jutting out of its hangar is fabulous.
As actor Eastwood doesn’t stray far from his usual stoic persona – in fact he seems more wooden than usual and quite simply out of his depth trying to portray a shell-shocked Vietnam Vet coping with post-traumatic stress. But there is excellent support from Freddie Jones as the prissy, velvet-voiced British intelligence specialist and Stefan Schnabel, who proves a considerable scene-stealer during the latter half in his scenes as the blustering First Secretary.
Eastwood’s other films of genre interest are:– the female stalker film Play Misty for Me (1971), the supernatural avenger Western High Plains Drifter (1973),
the oldsters in space film Space Cowboys (2000) and the psycho-thriller Blood Work (2002). In acting appearances, aside from all the aforementioned, Eastwood has appeared in Revenge of the Creature (1955), Tarantula (1955), the talking mule film Francis in the Navy (1955), the twisted Southern Gothic horror The Beguiled (1971), up against a serial killer in his most famous role Dirty Harry (1971), the S&M psycho-thriller Tightrope (1984) and the Dirty Harry film The Dead Pool (1988).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2004
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