Tag Archives: Lennie Niehaus

Review: Unforgiven (dir. by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on by Arleigh

“It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” — William Munny

There is a point in Unforgiven when the familiar fantasy of the Western gunfighter finally collapses under the weight of what killing actually means. Clint Eastwood’s 1992 masterpiece is a revenge story, a character study, and an unusually merciless critique of the myths that turned killers into folk heroes. It takes nearly every image associated with the classic Western—the lone rider, the righteous bounty, the corrupt frontier town, the feared gunslinger, the climactic saloon showdown—and asks what those images would look like if the people involved had to suffer the consequences afterward. The answer is bleak, often grimly funny, and far more powerful than a simple “anti-Western” label suggests.

Eastwood stars as William Munny, a former outlaw and murderer trying to survive as a widowed pig farmer in Kansas. He has two young children, a failing farm, and little talent for the peaceful life he has supposedly embraced. At the beginning of the film, Munny is practically the opposite of the cool, razor-sharp gunfighters Eastwood played in his younger years. He falls into mud, cannot shoot straight, and looks exhausted before the real journey even begins. That physical decline matters because Eastwood wants the audience to see the distance between a Western legend and the actual, aging human being beneath it.

Munny’s chance to return to violence arrives when the Schofield Kid, an arrogant young would-be gunslinger, offers him a share of a bounty. In the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, two cowboys have viciously cut up a prostitute named Delilah Fitzgerald. The town’s sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, punishes them with a fine paid to the brothel owner rather than giving Delilah anything resembling justice. Furious, the other prostitutes gather money and put out a reward for the men responsible. Munny initially hesitates, but the bounty is enough to draw him out of retirement. He convinces his old partner Ned Logan to ride with him, and the three men head toward Big Whiskey.

On paper, that setup sounds like the start of a traditional revenge Western. The crime is vicious, the local law is corrupt, and armed men set out to punish the guilty. Unforgiven, though, immediately complicates every part of that formula. The women have every reason to be furious, but their bounty does not turn the mission into a clean act of justice. Munny and Ned may be targeting cruel men, but they are still going to kill them for money. The Schofield Kid talks about the bounty like it is an adventure, but he has no real idea what killing another person does to someone. The film keeps refusing the easy emotional release that a more conventional Western would offer.

Eastwood’s direction is particularly sharp whenever violence finally breaks out. There are no elegant shootouts designed to make the viewer cheer. Guns misfire, men miss, people panic, and the victims do not fall over conveniently after being hit. When Munny and Ned shoot one of the cowboys, the sequence is awkward, tense, and almost miserable to watch. The wounded man suffers for a long time, calling out for water while his companions are too frightened to help him. Munny does not suddenly look like an unbeatable hero. He looks like a man who has made a terrible choice and now has to stand there listening to the result.

That approach makes Unforgiven feel much harsher than most Westerns, but it also gives the film its emotional weight. It is not saying that violence is never understandable. The cowboys who attacked Delilah are not treated as innocent victims, and Little Bill’s indifference to her suffering is infuriating. What the movie understands is that a justified act can still be ugly, frightening, and spiritually damaging. Killing someone may solve a practical problem, but it does not automatically restore dignity or erase pain. The movie’s view of revenge is not that it never works; it is that it always costs more than the stories promise.

Eastwood’s performance is one of the reasons the film lands so hard. William Munny is clearly connected to the Eastwood screen persona audiences knew from earlier Westerns, but he is a far sadder and more frightening version of it. Munny’s past is revealed gradually through other characters’ stories. Before he married Claudia, he was drunk, violent, and seemingly capable of killing anyone who got in his way. Claudia helped turn him toward a better life, and after her death he has tried to honor that change. Yet the movie never suggests that redemption has erased who he was. It only suggests that he has managed to keep that part of himself under control.

As the story moves forward, Munny becomes increasingly sick, angry, and emotionally stripped down. His old skills come back, but the return is not triumphant. It is more like watching someone relapse into a destructive part of themselves. Eastwood plays this change with remarkable restraint. He does not overdo the anger or announce the transformation with long speeches. Instead, Munny’s face gets harder, his voice becomes flatter, and his decisions become more final. By the end, he has become the frightening killer people said he was, and the movie makes that feel tragic rather than exhilarating.

Gene Hackman gives one of the film’s best performances as Little Bill Daggett, the sheriff of Big Whiskey. Little Bill is cruel, blunt, and completely convinced that he is the only person keeping the town from falling apart. He sees himself as a realist. In his mind, the cowboys have paid for their crime, the prostitutes are causing unnecessary trouble, and every outside gunman is a threat to the peace he has built. But his “peace” depends on denying Delilah justice and beating anyone who challenges his authority. He is not a noble lawman protecting civilization from barbarism. He is a violent man with a badge who has decided that his version of order matters more than anyone else’s pain.

Hackman makes Little Bill compelling because he never plays him as a cartoon villain. The character can be funny, conversational, and even oddly charming when he is talking about building his house or explaining how a gunfight really works. Those ordinary details make his cruelty more believable. Little Bill is not a monster because he twirls his mustache or enjoys evil for its own sake. He is a monster because he has made violence routine. He can beat a man nearly to death, then return to discussing carpentry as if nothing meaningful has happened.

The movie’s fascination with mythmaking is another reason it remains so great. Unforgiven constantly contrasts what people say about gunfighters with what gunfighters are actually like. Richard Harris appears as English Bob, an aging outlaw who has turned himself into a storybook figure. He travels with W. W. Beauchamp, a writer who records exaggerated tales of duels, bravery, and glamorous frontier violence. English Bob wants to be remembered as the sort of man old Westerns love: a polished, fearless killer who can outdraw anyone in a fair fight.

Little Bill quickly destroys that image, humiliating English Bob and explaining that most gunfights are not won by the fastest hand or the bravest heart. They are won by whoever gets lucky, whoever fires first, or whoever is less scared at the right moment. That speech is one of the clearest examples of what Unforgiven is doing with the genre. It does not merely say that the old stories were exaggerated. It shows why people prefer exaggeration. The truth is messy, cowardly, and often too ugly to make a satisfying legend.

The Schofield Kid represents the danger of believing those legends too completely. He talks big about killing men, insists he is a famous gunfighter, and assumes the bounty will make him rich and important. But when the moment comes, he cannot handle the reality of what he has done. After taking a life, he drinks heavily and admits that he has never killed anyone before. His fantasy collapses almost instantly. Munny’s response is one of the film’s coldest and most honest moments: when you kill a man, you take away everything he has and everything he is ever going to have. There is no speech about courage, justice, or glory. There is only the permanent fact of death.

Morgan Freeman is excellent as Ned Logan, Munny’s old partner and closest friend. Ned has a quiet decency that does not erase his violent past but makes clear that he wants no part of it anymore. His scenes with Munny feel lived-in, as if the two men understand each other without needing to explain their history. Ned knows exactly what Munny used to be, and that knowledge makes him nervous about what his friend may become again. Freeman brings warmth and humor to the movie, which makes the eventual loss of that warmth feel devastating.

Ned is especially important because he shows that a person can decide not to keep living by old violent rules. He has a life with Sally Two Trees, and when the killing becomes real, he chooses to leave rather than continue. That choice separates him from Munny. Both men have done terrible things, but Ned recognizes that he has reached the point where he cannot go back. Munny, on the other hand, is eventually pulled all the way back into the identity he thought he had escaped.

Visually, Unforgiven is one of Eastwood’s most beautiful films, although “beautiful” may not be the first word that comes to mind while watching it. The landscapes are often gray, rainy, muddy, and lonely. Big Whiskey is not a romantic frontier town full of colorful saloons and grand main streets. It is wet, cramped, and miserable. The open country does not feel liberating either. It feels empty and dangerous, a place where a wounded man can die slowly because help is too far away. Cinematographer Jack N. Green gives the film a somber, dusk-like look that fits its mood perfectly.

The final confrontation in the saloon is one of the most famous scenes in Eastwood’s career because it briefly gives viewers the kind of gunfighter moment they have been waiting for. Munny walks into Big Whiskey through the rain, enters the saloon, and becomes the nightmare Little Bill and the others have feared. He kills with shocking speed and delivers lines that sound immediately iconic. For a few minutes, the old Eastwood myth appears to return in full. The silent killer is back, the bad men are terrified, and the audience can feel the raw force of the scene.

But Unforgiven refuses to turn that climax into a victory lap. Munny’s rampage is not heroic liberation. It is grief, rage, alcohol, and guilt exploding through a man who has lost the fragile stability he built after leaving violence behind. He is not reclaiming some glorious identity. He is becoming the worst version of himself again. The scene is undeniably thrilling in a purely cinematic sense, but Eastwood makes sure the thrill feels contaminated. We are watching a legend come alive, but the movie has spent two hours teaching us that legends are usually built on suffering.

That is why Unforgiven became Eastwood’s Western magnum opus. It is not just a great Western made by a star who knew the genre inside out; it is the film where he fully confronted the meaning of his own Western image. Eastwood began deconstructing that image with High Plains Drifter, where the mysterious stranger was less a traditional hero than a ghostly, cruel force of revenge. He continued the process in The Outlaw Josey Wales, a more expansive and emotional film that questioned authority and showed an outlaw finding a kind of community, even while preserving much of the old gunslinger charisma. With Unforgiven, Eastwood completes that deconstruction of the Western film genre.

In Unforgiven, there is no clean heroism left behind the gunfighter’s reputation. The lone rider is exhausted and morally compromised. The sheriff is a bully. The bounty is not justice in any simple sense. The famous gunfighter is often a fraud, a coward, or simply lucky. And the man who really is capable of becoming a legend is also capable of committing horrifying acts. Eastwood does not dismiss the Western’s power; if anything, he understands that power better than almost anyone. He knows why audiences respond to the image of a lone man walking into a saloon to face impossible odds.

What makes the film so enduring is that it asks viewers to look beyond that image. Who dies so the hero can become a legend? Who gets turned into a footnote in someone else’s story? What does the survivor carry afterward? Those questions give Unforgiven a moral weight that few Westerns, revisionist or otherwise, can match. It is a film about violence, but it is also about memory, regret, masculinity, and the lies people tell to make brutality seem noble. By its final fade-out, Unforgiven leaves the Western standing not as a celebration of violence, but as a haunted reckoning with everything violence destroys.

Review: Pale Rider (dir. by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on by Arleigh

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death. And Hell followed with him.” — Megan Wheeler

Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider occupies a fascinating space within the Western genre—both a reverent homage to the traditions that shaped classic frontier storytelling and a quiet dismantling of the myths those stories often upheld. Released in 1985, the film arrived during a period when the Western had largely faded from mainstream prominence, regarded by many as a relic of an earlier cinematic era. Yet Eastwood, by then already firmly associated with the genre through his work in Sergio Leone’s Dollar Trilogy and films like High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales, proved that the Western still had room for reinvention. With Pale Rider, he crafted something that feels both deeply familiar and subtly haunting: a film that embraces the iconography of the Old West while draping it in an almost supernatural atmosphere, creating one of the most enigmatic and compelling entries in his directorial career.

In many ways, Pale Rider also feels like a spiritual successor—or even an unofficial companion piece—to High Plains Drifter. Both films center around a mysterious outsider who seemingly emerges from nowhere to confront a corrupt and morally rotten community. In both stories, Eastwood plays a figure who feels less like an ordinary man and more like an embodiment of vengeance itself, a ghostly gunslinger whose true nature is never fully explained. The similarities in narrative structure are impossible to ignore: isolated frontier settlements under siege, powerful men abusing authority, and Eastwood’s near-mythic drifter arriving as a reckoning for buried sins. But where High Plains Drifter leans into bitterness and outright surrealism, portraying the Old West as a place consumed by cruelty and hypocrisy, Pale Rider takes a more restrained and spiritual approach. The Preacher is still intimidating and otherworldly, but he possesses a moral center that the Stranger in High Plains Drifter deliberately lacked. It feels almost as if Eastwood revisited the earlier film’s core ideas over a decade later with greater maturity and reflection, transforming the wrathful ghost story of High Plains Drifter into something more meditative about redemption and justice.

On its surface, Pale Rider follows a relatively straightforward Western premise. A group of struggling gold prospectors in the mountains of California are being terrorized and pressured by a wealthy mining magnate, Coy LaHood, who seeks to drive them off their land so he can exploit the area’s resources for himself. Into this conflict rides a mysterious preacher, played by Eastwood, whose sudden appearance seems almost divinely summoned after a young girl prays for deliverance. This unnamed “Preacher” becomes the reluctant protector of the miners, standing against LaHood and the corrupt marshal Stockburn and his deputies. The bones of the story echo classic Western structures—outsiders defending vulnerable settlers from ruthless power—but Pale Rider imbues this framework with a somber, spiritual weight that elevates it beyond genre familiarity.

One of the film’s most striking strengths is Eastwood’s central performance. By this point in his career, Eastwood had perfected a specific screen persona: laconic, observant, physically economical, and quietly threatening. Yet the Preacher in Pale Rider may be one of his most mysterious variations on that archetype. Unlike the swaggering Man with No Name or even the wounded determination of Josey Wales, the Preacher seems almost detached from ordinary human concerns. His calm demeanor and sparse dialogue give him an ethereal quality, and Eastwood plays him with just enough warmth to avoid complete abstraction. There is kindness in his interactions with the miners, especially the young Megan Wheeler, but it always feels measured, as if the character is passing through rather than fully participating in the world around him. The film deliberately hints at something supernatural—his sudden arrival after prayer, his unexplained scars, his near spectral presence—and Eastwood wisely resists any definitive explanation. The ambiguity is what gives the character his power.

This supernatural undercurrent is central to what makes Pale Rider unique. The title itself references the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, specifically Death riding a pale horse, and the biblical symbolism permeates the film without overwhelming it. Eastwood uses religious imagery sparingly but effectively, allowing viewers to wonder whether the Preacher is simply a man with a violent past or something more symbolic: an agent of justice, vengeance, or divine reckoning. The film never commits fully to fantasy, but it constantly suggests that the Preacher exists somewhere between myth and mortal reality. This ambiguity transforms ordinary Western confrontations into something more unsettling and poetic.

Visually, Pale Rider is one of Eastwood’s most beautiful films. Shot by cinematographer Bruce Surtees, whose work with Eastwood had already become legendary, the film makes remarkable use of natural landscapes. The mountainous terrain, dense forests, and rugged mining camps provide a setting that feels less romanticized than the sweeping deserts often associated with traditional Westerns. There is a chill to the environment, both literal and emotional. The forests seem shadowed and secretive, and the mining settlements feel fragile, temporary, vulnerable to destruction. Surtees’ lighting contributes significantly to the film’s tone, bathing many scenes in muted, earthy colors and allowing darkness to linger at the edges of the frame. The result is a Western that often feels ghostly, as though the past itself is haunting every image.

Eastwood’s direction demonstrates his confidence and restraint. He avoids excessive spectacle, choosing instead to let tension build gradually through atmosphere, silence, and careful pacing. Action scenes are brief but impactful, and the violence carries genuine consequence. Unlike many earlier Westerns that glorified gunfights as heroic climaxes, Pale Rider treats violence as something grim and almost inevitable. When the Preacher finally unleashes his skills, it feels less like triumphant empowerment and more like a dark necessity. Eastwood understands that his character’s power is amplified by how sparingly he uses it.

Still, despite how effective the film is overall, Pale Rider is not without flaws. Some viewers may find the pacing overly deliberate, particularly in the middle section where the story spends considerable time with the miners and their daily struggles before major plot developments occur. Eastwood prioritizes mood and atmosphere over narrative momentum, which works artistically but can occasionally make the film feel slower than necessary. The supporting characters, while likable, are also somewhat thinly sketched compared to the larger thematic ideas surrounding them. Hull Barret, Sarah Wheeler, and several of the miners are defined more by their place within the story’s moral framework than by deeply layered characterization. They are ordinary people standing against corruption, but the script does not always give them enough individuality or complexity outside of that central conflict.

What ultimately compensates for this is the strength and sincerity of the performances themselves. Michael Moriarty gives Hull Barret a gentle awkwardness and vulnerability that make him feel genuinely human rather than simply “the good-hearted miner.” There is an understated sadness in the way Moriarty carries himself, as if Hull already expects to lose against forces larger than himself, which makes his gradual courage more affecting. Carrie Snodgress similarly brings warmth and grounded realism to Sarah Wheeler, helping the character feel emotionally authentic even when the screenplay does not explore her inner life in great detail. The miners as a collective also benefit from Eastwood’s direction, which emphasizes camaraderie and shared hardship through small interactions and visual storytelling rather than extensive dialogue or backstory.

In many respects, the relative simplicity of the supporting characters may even be intentional. Pale Rider operates less like a conventional ensemble drama and more like a mythic folk tale or ghost story, where ordinary people encounter a figure who seems larger than life. The miners are not meant to overshadow the Preacher’s mystery; they function as representatives of vulnerable frontier communities trapped between survival and exploitation. Their emotional straightforwardness creates a contrast with Eastwood’s enigmatic presence. Because the supporting cast plays these roles with sincerity and restraint rather than melodrama, the film avoids feeling emotionally hollow even when some characters are not deeply developed on the page. The performances ground the story just enough to keep the supernatural and allegorical elements emotionally believable.

The film’s thematic concerns are nevertheless surprisingly rich. At its heart, Pale Rider is a story about greed and resistance. Coy LaHood represents industrial expansion and unchecked capitalism, using wealth and intimidation to crush smaller, independent prospectors. The miners symbolize ordinary people fighting to preserve their livelihoods and dignity. This conflict gives the film a subtle populist edge, framing the Western frontier not merely as a site of adventure but as a battleground between concentrated power and communal perseverance. Eastwood does not overstate these themes, but they lend the story a resonance that extends beyond genre convention.

There is also an interesting undercurrent of moral ambiguity. The Preacher protects the innocent, but he is hardly a traditional moral hero. His past appears stained by violence, and the scars on his back suggest suffering, punishment, or perhaps sins that remain unresolved. The film implies that redemption may be possible, but only through confrontation with one’s own darkness. This is where Pale Rider aligns with Eastwood’s broader body of work, which often interrogates the mythology of masculine heroism. His protagonists are rarely clean symbols of virtue; they are damaged, haunted men whose capacity for violence complicates their acts of justice.

Richard Dysart makes Coy LaHood more than a simple villain, imbuing him with entitlement and cold pragmatism rather than cartoonish cruelty. But perhaps most memorable among the antagonists is John Russell as Marshal Stockburn, whose quiet menace and personal history with the Preacher add another layer of mystery and inevitability to the film’s final act. Stockburn in particular feels almost like a mirror image of the Preacher himself—another ghost from a violent past returning for unfinished business.

What makes Pale Rider endure is its ability to function on multiple levels simultaneously. It works perfectly well as a classic Western, complete with horseback arrivals, frontier justice, and dramatic showdowns. It also succeeds as a meditation on mortality, redemption, and the fading mythology of the American frontier. Eastwood understands the genre deeply enough to honor its traditions while gently questioning them. The Preacher is both an embodiment of the old Western hero and a ghostly reminder that such heroes may never have truly existed outside of legend.

In many ways, Pale Rider feels like a bridge between Eastwood’s earlier Westerns and the more explicit deconstruction he would later achieve with Unforgiven. Where Unforgiven strips away nearly all romanticism, Pale Rider still allows for mystery and myth, but it tempers them with melancholy and introspection. It recognizes the allure of the gunslinger while quietly suggesting that such figures are often defined by pain and isolation.

Nearly four decades after its release, Pale Rider remains one of Clint Eastwood’s most compelling achievements, both as actor and director. It is a Western that understands the power of silence, shadow, and suggestion. It trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty and to appreciate heroism that comes wrapped in ambiguity. More than just a revival of a fading genre, it is a thoughtful and atmospheric meditation on justice, violence, and the strange figures we summon when ordinary courage is no longer enough. In the vast landscape of Eastwood’s Western legacy, Pale Rider stands as one of his most haunting and quietly profound works.

Pale Rider (dir. by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

We continue the Shattered Lens’ celebration of Clint Eastwood with 1985’s Pale Rider, one of my favorites. This was a film my long time friend Jay shared with me many years ago, as he owns most of Eastwood’s library of films. I like to think of it as a softer version of Eastwood’s own High Plains Drifter, which my father loved, but I couldn’t really get. It’s a tale of vengeance, but wrapped more in miracles. 

You should first know that Westerns aren’t really my genre when it comes to film types I often watch. I don’t have a lot of historical background when it comes to Westerns overall. If you asked for a short list of my favorites, I’d give up Rustler’s Rhapsody (it’s a fun comedy), The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (my Dad watched it often), Blazing Saddles, and in terms of books, the first few books of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. I only recently watched Shaneafter Logan was first released, and I love the Red Dead Redemption games.

Pale Rider takes place in California around the time of the gold rush. Outside the town of LaHood, named after the wicked Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart, The Thing), we have a group of miners settled in that are hoping to strike it rich. It’s somewhat difficult with LaHood’s henchmen trying to drive them out at every turn, to steal the land. Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty, Q The Winged Serpent) hopes to be successful, living with his fiancé Sarah (Carrie Snodgress, The Fury) and her daughter, Meghan (Sydney Penny, The Wife He Met Online). The most recent attack from LaHood’s men has shattered the miners’ morale and few are spared. Even Meghan’s dog is killed, causing her to wish for a miracle.

When LaHood’s son, Josh (Chris Penn, True Romance) and some other baddies (including The Thing‘s Charles Callahan, reuniting with Dysart) confront Hull, a stranger steps in. He handles them all easily with an axe handle, and as thanks, Hull welcomes him to the Miners area for room and board. Of course, having a stranger brings up all sorts of questions from the townsfolk, who don’t appear to be too trusting. Is he an outlaw, possibly? Even Meghan’s a little apprehensive at first, with her quote from Revelations 6:8 forshadowing the Pale Rider’s presence. Everyone is put at ease when they find our stranger is actually a Preacher, though Hull is still a bit curious about the six bullet sized scars on the man’s back. Can the Preacher help the Miners keep their land and stop LaHood? 

From a casting standpoint, Pale Rider is damn near perfect. Although Eastwood is the main star in his own film, he comes across more as an accessory for everyone else in scenes. Moriarty does most of the heavy lifting, as does Snodgress and Penny. Their characters are all easily likable and the supporting cast (particularly Doug McGrath’s Spider) shine in their parts. Dysart’s LaHood is a dark character and there’s a wonderful verbal conflict between him and Eastwood in one scene that’s just sweet to watch to see who loses their cool first. 

Pale Rider is both pretty simple and well executed from a story standpoint. It bears some similarities to Eastwood’s other film, High Plains Drifter. Though the town isn’t painted in red, there are allusions to the idea that the Preacher may be something of.a specter or ghost of vengeance. We’re not given any kind of full story as to why the Preacher’s here. We are shown that both The Preacher and LaHood’s Marshall, Stockburn (John Russell, The Outlaw Josey Wales) share a history, but that’s it. The story, like the Preacher and the events around him, moves in mysterious ways. 

What I love the most about Pale Rider is the way the Preacher changes the minds (and hearts) of those around him. The miners learn to fend for themselves. His enemies are often in shock over what he does (and at least one flips from bad to good). It kind of reminds me of Wild West version of John Wick or Nobody, with a character whose reputation precedes him. 

Bruce Surtees was the Cinematographer for Pale Rider, who also worked on a number of Eastwood’s earlier films, including The Outlaw Josey Wales and Play Misty for Me. Pale Rider has some beautiful landscape shots of the West (as the film was filmed in Idaho). Despite all the well lit shots, there are still moments where faces are obscured by the brim of a hat or the contrasts in a candlelit room. 

The story isn’t without some dark areas or some odd moments. A dog is killed, and there’s a scene where Meghan is nearly raped, but there’s some intervention before things can get out of hand. Both instances help to show how dark the villains are in the overall tale. Both Sarah and Meghan seem to take their own shine to The Preacher, one already in a relationship and the other too young for what she’s asking for, but I took it to just be that their both a bit mesmerized by the Preacher’s presence in different ways. 

Overall, Pale Rider is a wonderful offering by Eastwood, with fine performances by everyone involved. The Preacher does what he can to make things better around him with a peaceful approach. When push comes to shove, however, the guns come out blazing. 

I review TIGHTROPE (1984) – starring Clint Eastwood! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

In TIGHTROPE, a psychiatrist makes the following comment to New Orleans police detective Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) while he’s trying to catch a serial killer who’s targeting sex workers:

“There’s a darkness inside all of us, Wes; you, me, and the man down the street. Some have it under control. Others act it out. The rest of us try to walk a tightrope between the two.”

This statement definitely hits home to Wes, whose personal life has gotten rather dark. His wife has recently left him and their two daughters (Alison Eastwood and Jenny Beck), and the detective seems to be drowning himself in his work, at times in a bottle, and at other times in the arms of some of the local ladies of the night. Whenever he does try to plan something with his girls, his job always seems to get in his way. As he investigates the murders in a variety of the seediest locations in New Orleans, we learn that Wes is very much into the kinds of women who inhabit these places, and he gives into his secret desires on multiple occasions. This becomes personal when the killer, who knows that Wes is the detective in charge of the case, begins targeting and killing some of the very same women who helped ease Wes’ emotional pain, and then taunts him about it. It becomes even more personal when the killer goes after his daughters and his new “legitimate” lady friend Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold), a rape counselor Block has gotten to know as part of the broader investigation. As the bodies continue to pile up, will Wes be able to stop the killer in time to save the most precious people in his life?!!

TIGHTROPE is a special movie to me. I’ve mentioned this before in other reviews, but FOX-16 out of Little Rock played a lot of good movies in the mid to late 80’s when I was a teenager. Some of those movies hold a strong nostalgic value in my life because I first discovered them and my true love of movies during those years. The channel advertised and showed TIGHTROPE, and many other Eastwood films, quite often. Of course, the movie broadcast on FOX-16 was heavily edited, and I didn’t realize the true sexual complexity of detective Wes Block until I was quite a bit older. In the original DIRTY HARRY, there’s a running gag where different people ask Eastwood’s iconic character, “Why do they call you Dirty Harry?” From what we see in TIGHTROPE, if someone asked, “Why do they call you Dirty Wes,” the answer would be more than obvious as he engages in various kinky forms of sexual relations with at least three of the sex workers he hits up for information. The killer knows of his sexual activities with these women, even watching on occasion. The movie leans hard into this connection between Wes’ kinky sex that often involves handcuffs, and the kinship that the killer feels with Wes when he’s perpetrating violence on these same women. It adds an uneasy and unsettling quality to the proceedings when the killer publicly taunts his rival, who understandably doesn’t want his peers to know of his more private nocturnal activities. He can’t fool his new lady friend, the tough as nails Beryl Thibodeaux, who senses his hidden desires and accepts him for who he is, especially after spending some quality time with him and his daughters. I like Genevieve Bujold in the role and the French-Canadian actress is able to even nail the local accent on a couple of occasions. I also wanted to mention the excellent chemistry between Clint Eastwood and his real-life daughter Alison, who play father and daughter in the movie as well. Alison was only 12 years old when TIGHTROPE was released, but she gives a strong performance as the older daughter who’s still trying to come to terms with her parents’ divorce. The killer really messes up when he targets her. 

I’ll tell anyone who’s willing to listen that I love the city of New Orleans as a movie location. I personally love to visit the city and partake in its fun atmosphere and wide variety of excellent cuisine. TIGHTROPE hits many of the highlights of New Orleans in 1984… Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, the Super Dome, the Creole Queen, a warehouse full of Mardi Gras floats, the famous cemeteries, Randi Brooks in a hot tub, etc. etc. One thing about New Orleans is that its famous streets like Bourbon Street have not been cleaned up or become “family friendly” in the same way as a place like Times Square in New York City. To this day, it retains that same feeling of sexual decadence that is portrayed here in 1984. 

I personally consider TIGHTROPE to be a must-see film for fans of Clint Eastwood, as Wes Block is a wholly unique addition to his cavalcade of tough cop characters, and he makes us justifiably uncomfortable at times. Eastwood’s conflicted performance, the serial killer storyline and the fun New Orleans locations add up to a very good movie that’s aimed squarely at adults.