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When Hollywood actors play against type—when the hunk plays a drunk, or the leading lady a slattern—they can count on critical raves and Oscar nominations. Clint Eastwood has tried something more dangerous in Tightrope: he has dared to play into type, to bring to the surface certain disturbing aspects of his Dirty Harry character.
Wes Block (Eastwood) is, to be sure, a tough, taciturn, street-wise (or, in this case, brothel-wise) detective, investigating a series of sadistic sex murders in New Orleans. But there are two major differences between Harry and Wes. The former has always been rootless as well as ruthless, whereas Wes' unhappy divorce has left him with the custody of two daughters, to whom he can rarely devote the attention they need. And if Harry is brutally casual about sex, Wes is brutally obsessed with it. Since his divorce he has fallen into the habit of visiting the prostitutes he encounters in his work and paying them to submit to him in bondage.
Because the killer he is stalking is also stalking him, and knows they share this kink, it makes Wes' job fatally risky. But that is minor compared with the risk Eastwood takes in acknowledging the secret pathology of his basic screen character: cruel, dominating, sexist.
Writer-Director Richard Tuggle sets forth Wes' adventures in the skin trade unsensationally, in the manner of a police procedural, and deals with his aberrance with near clinical understatement.
Tuggle also provides Wes with a feminist rape counselor (played with gentle force by Genevieve Bujold) to lead the detective back from his nightmare. Until its weak and unconvincing climax, Tightrope offers more intricacy, suspense and atmospheric color than most of Eastwood's other gumshoe safaris through the urban jungle. More important, it represents a provocative advance in the consciousness, self and social, of Eastwood's one-man genre. —R.S.
CLOAK AND DAGGER
The fantasy life of any film extends only from the movie projector to the screen.
Even children know this. Though they may scream and goggle at the antics of Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker, they understand that their Hollywood heroes are two-di mensional toys to be left in the theater, not lived with. The mod est achievement of Cloak and Dagger is to dramatize this dis tinction. Davey Osborne is a boy who, after the death of his mother, has retreated from home-life into the derring-do world of a video game and its hero, Jack Flack. When Davey gets embroiled with some genuine spies and thugs, no one believes him, least of all his gruff but caring father. Because both Dad and Jack Flack are played by Dabney Coleman, the viewer can easily compare the strengths and limitations of these two fantasies: the film fantasy of a rogue ad venturer vs. the domestic fantasy of an everyday hero like Dad. "Heroes don't just shoot people," Dad tells Davey. "They put supper on the table."