Nostalgia: Firefox

I got the idea from Melvel, our newest blogger, about including films that have moved us or we just liked, and made a special “Nostalgia” category for it. I’m encouraging all of the contributing bloggers to occasionally make their own, and here’s mine:

There are a lot of bad reviews for the 1982 Firefox, one of Clint Eastwood’s “failures” as a Director, but for me, obviously since I’m writing about it here, I’ve a far different view.

See, spy-thrillers are my thing. Either in books or movies, the Cold War imho, inspite of it’s many tragedies, managed to produce one positive, and that is the spy-thriller. And so while it was still in fashion, I couldn’t get enough of it. From Frederick Forsyth to Ken Follett to Graham Greene, Robert Ludlum, John Le Carre and Tom Clancy, I lapped it all up. Guilty pleasure, I’m sure. But regardless, if it has espionage, spies, quiet deaths in the night and many crossings of borders, usually European or the occasional Chinese one, I want to read about it, and mostly I did.

So here comes Firefox, and with it Clint Eastwood, the prototype American hero, forever squinting as if looking into the sunset while his horse gallops into it, hand quick to reach into poncho for his six-shooter, to shoot lead into anyone unlucky enough to get in the way. The perfect opposite, it seems, of the European hero-spy, either played by underacting types as the French Inspector who hunted the Jackal in “Day Of The Jackal” (couldn’t find his name), or the nerdy but sharp academic John Ryan of Tom Clancy fame.

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