City Heat ** (1984, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn, Irene Cara, Richard Roundtree, Tony Lo Bianco) – Classic Movie Review 7566

Director Richard Benjamin’s 1984 period crime action comedy City Heat is a fairly damaging moment in the careers of Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood as both stars are forced to flounder desperately in a vacuum between comedy and violence. And unfortunately their acting styles don’t gel on screen, so this is not a marriage made in heaven, and it was their only movie together.

City Heat might just have worked as the Blake Edwards 1930s action comedy with songs that it was intended to be. But Edwards retired because of ‘creative differences’ and it is a fair old mess of a flop as a Benjamin action movie about Kansas City gang wars.

All that is left is the popular stars’ familiar turns over-exposed, with Eastwood as tough hotshot police detective Lieutenant Speer and Reynolds as slick wise-guy private investigator Mike Murphy, former partners who are forced to team up reluctantly to investigate the murder of Murphy’s partner. The McGuffin here that everyone is seeking is a mobster’s secret accounting records, with which Murphy’s partner had tried to blackmail the gangster.

However, even so, with all its weaknesses and faults, City Heat is arguably underrated. And it did not flop at the box office, despite its fairly high cost of $25,000,000, grossing $38,350,000 in the US.

Also in the starry support cast are Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn, Irene Cara, Richard Roundtree, Tony Lo Bianco, William Sanderson, Robert Davi and John Hancock, with Nicholas Worth, Jude Farese, Jack Thibeau, Gerald S O’Loughlin, Bruce M Fischer, Art LaFleur and Jack Nance.

Blake Edwards is credited for the story and screenplay as the fictional ‘Sam O Brown’, with Joseph C Stinson as co-writer of the screenplay. Sam O Brown’s initials are therefore SOB, the title of an Edwards movie.

City Heat is directed by Richard Benjamin, runs 98 minutes, is made by Warner Bros, The Malpaso Company, Deliverance Productions, is released by Warner Bros, is written by Blake Edwards and Joseph C Stinson, is shot in Technicolor by Nick McLean, is produced by Fritz Manes, is scored by Lennie Niehaus, and is designed by Edward Carfagno.

When Edwards was directing, his wife Julie Andrews had Madeline Kahn’s role of Caroline Howley.

Reynolds alleges in his memoirs that Eastwood plotted Edwards’s removal by goading him into quitting, and took on the more compliant Richard Benjamin instead. And Eastwood brought in Joseph Stinson to rewrite Edwards’s script.

Reynolds’s jaw was broken when he was hit in the face with a metal chair while filming a fight scene, forcing him on a liquid diet so he lost 30lb and became addicted to painkillers.

Eastwood agreed to do the movie only if he would be paid more than Reynolds and if his name appeared first on the credits.

Burt Reynolds died of cardiac arrest on 6 September 2018, in Jupiter, Florida, aged 82.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7566

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