TIGHTROPE: DVD

SYNOPSIS: 
Wes Block (Clint Eastwood), a flawed but dedicated homicide cop, dotes on the two daughters he is left with after his wife walked out on him and who is a sucker for sharing his space with stray dogs. While probing the brutal slayings of New Orleans prostitutes, Block reveals a dark side by demonstrating that he is as adept with the handcuffs in bed as he is out of it. He indulges in kinky sex after quizzing the friends of murder victims…then realises that the killer is stalking him, leaving a trail of corpses that not only makes Block seem like a suspect but endangers the lives of his daughters and the rape counsellor he has befriended (Genevieve Bujold).

Review by Keith Lofthouse: 
According to British film writer Danny Peary, this quirky serial killer thriller is the one “that swayed the critics of America to finally take Clint Eastwood seriously.” Always one of Eastwood’s harshest critics, New York Times correspondent Pauline Kael took the film more seriously than most. She dismissed it as unsophisticated and “sexist” and griped that it “has no more depth than the usual exploitation film in which pretty girls are knocked off.” 

I was keen to see the film again, 20 years after I had first written a glowing review in 1984, and was stunned to see how much my perceptions had changed. In the intervening years, the “permissive society” as it was still referred to in the 1980s, had been left behind and our sensibilities were first shaken by an era of political correctness; then rattled by the rampant and sickening reality of serial killings and traumatised by horrific acts of terrorism. 

The film is much darker than I recalled, with 80 percent of it shot at night (sometimes quite muddily) with the hero cop indulging in the very “unusual or aberrant sexual activity” that lures the killer to his crimes. Block is a sleazier extension of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry persona, walking the tightrope between “the darkness inside all of us and the darkness outside.” He is also sexier than Harry, funnier, warmer and more human. As he snoops round the massage parlours, saunas and cesspits of New Orleans, one gets a hint of what drove a wedge between he and his ex-wife who speaks not a word and is glimpsed only twice, staring daggers at the man she so despises that she left her daughters behind. Block might be searching for leads while questioning the gaudy girls of the night (including one who sucks incessantly on a large red icy pole) but he seems motivated more by kinky sex than solving crime. This is the cue for scenes of all-girl nudity, oiled bodies, big boobs and buttocks, but that hardly excuses the gluttony. 

The first time director had a connection to Eastwood as a result of his first screenplay, Escape From Alcatraz (1979), but Tuggle’s Tightrope script was a bi-product of several post-Alcatraz failures and a year’s “lock-up” in which he sweated over 10 drafts and twice as many revisions. Tuggle was determined to direct it himself and got lucky when Eastwood told Warners he was keen to do it…and presumably taught Tuggle all he needed to know about direction. Together they avoid excesses of gash and gore and try to curtail genre clichés: the car chase gives way to the sustained tension of a climactic pursuit of the masked suspect on foot though back streets, cemeteries and railway yards. 

Free to act, as the taciturn actor has rarely acted before, Eastwood delivers one of his sharpest performances as a man grappling with the moral responsibilities of being a good father and the guilt of past and present indiscretions. A streak of dark, sardonic humour courses through his veins. Resisting the temptation of a street prostitute, who offers him a “taste of honey” he quips that he doesn’t “eat sweets.” And when a gay hustler, miffed by Block’s rejection, squeals “how do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it,” Block’s retort is an off the cuff “maybe I have!” 

The film takes risks like this, but it gets a bit untidy at the end. Block’s many dogs are unreasonably silent when frenzied barking might have alerted those inside his house to the menace lurking outside and the dramatic unmasking of the killer is a serious botch-up for reasons that will be clear to the viewer. But despite the flaws, it remains one of Eastwood’s favourite films. He personally campaigned for Oscar nominations and ran 14 ads highlighting his exceptional reviews. The Academy completely overlooked it. Tuggle had wanted Jane Fonda for Genevieve Bujold’s role, but Eastwood, typically, was reluctant to work with a female star of equal stature and Susan Sarandon shunned the part objecting to its violence towards women. Eastwood’s real-life daughter Alison plays screen daughter Amanda - and in one scene dad slips and calls her Alison.

Published May 13, 2004