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.
