Modern Pulp

December 5 2024

HOT SHOTS

Two craggy middle-aged guys that go great together.

There are movies, and there are beloved movies. We first saw the Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds vehicle City Heat a long time ago, and it’s been a go-to evening for us since, something we screen every several years. While a comedy, it’s also a period piece set during the Great Depression, thus it falls comfortably within the pulp era and is, doubly, an action flick with plenty of fights, gunfire, and general mayhem. In a similar way as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it tries to push hard-boiled detective tropes to absurd extremes, while wearing a pervasive love for those ideas on its sleeve.

Reynolds plays a low-rent private dick named Mike Murphy who tries to solve a murder, but gets caught between organized crime, the police, and his personal obligations. As we said a while back, anything with Reynolds is worth watching, and this features him at his smart-mouthed best. Eastwood, as Reynolds’ police lieutenant frenemy Speer, mostly channels a 1935 version of Magnum Force, portraying with grim-countenanced perfection the one man in the department with whom nobody in their right mind wants to tangle.

For fans of vintage crime fiction or film noir, City Heat is a must. The slapstick-adjacent fistfights alone—of which there are many—are reason enough to queue it up. With Reynolds carrying the bulk of the film using his incandescent charm, and with contributions from an iconic movie dick in the form of Shaft star Richard Roundtree, plus comic relief from Madeline Kahn, all your bases are covered here. If you know what’s good for you you’ll watch it. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1984.

City Heat, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jane Alexander, Richard Roundtree, Irene Cara, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn, poster art, cinema, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 12

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

February 12

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

February 11

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

February 10

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

February 9

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.

February 9

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.