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.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

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.

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.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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