If you are Clint Eastwood and you plan to leave the kind of action after decades to be one of the most recognizable and most celebrated cinema heroes of all time, you better make sure to go out with a blow. Fortunately, Eastwood’s latest role in action film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, in all honesty, the famous actor would continue to play in films that had their share of action, but “in Line of Fire” from 1993 looked like the latest Action Corntwood in its own right, and it is a Doozy.
After winning the best film and the best Oscar director of 1993 for “Unforgiven”, Eastwood returned to the director’s chair with “A Perfect World”, his long -awaited director of “Unforgiven” who made his debut in November of the same year. The criminal drama led by Kevin Costner was another critical success for Eastwood, but it was not quite the success of the box office that “in the line of fire”, a political action thriller Wolfgang Petersn (“Das Boot”, “The Neverend Story”), had only been a few months before.
In the film, Eastwood played the secret service agent Frank Horrigan, the only agent in an active service remaining who was part of the detail assigned to President John F. Kennedy the day of his assassination. His failure to protect the commander-in-chief that day led Horrigan to alcoholism, which finally cost him his family. But after investigating a complaint concerning a tenant who abandoned his apartment, Horrigan discovers a plot of a former assassin (John Malkovich) to kill the president and sees an opportunity to make amends to his past failure. He is then placed on the protective details of the president to try to thwart the plans of the mysterious assassin.
Petersen’s tense action was a success both in a critical and commercial way. The German filmmaker turned out to have such dishes, making Harrison Ford in one of his best action outings, “Air Force One”, a few years later. With “In Line of Fire”, however, he assured that Eastwood delivered an appropriate action swan song, Horrigan representing one of the biggest roles of Eastwood. But it seems that the film was not necessarily designed as such, and started as a project created for a very different star.
Tom Selleck almost played a Disney version of Frank Horrigan
“In Line of Fire” began as an idea in the spirit of the producer Jeff Apple, who has been trying to make the film since the early 1980s. As a boy, Apple had seen the vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson in person and had a RAM of his details of secret service. Since then, he had wanted to take a step on the men who protect the president and have enlisted some writers to get there. Jeff Maguire was the man who finally cracked the scenario, but before Castle Rock Entertainment and Columbia Pictures accept to produce and distribute, Apple and Maguire bought the script. This included an attempt to sell Disney on the idea of the film as a TV movie starring The Great Tom Selleck. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a treatment for this starry version of Selleck of “In Line of Fire” was rejected by Disney, before the final script caused a tender war that Castle Rock won for seven figures.
Selleck had made his name by playing Thomas Magnum in “Magnum, Pi” of CBS which took place from 1980 to 1988. At the time, Apple and Maguire launched it as the head of a television version of “In Line of Fire”, Selleck was up to his powers. As such, Disney would surely have been ready for an action film with Thomas Magnum himself, but for any reason, he has never passed. Interestingly, it was not the only big role that Selleck missed this decade. The star of “Magnum, Pi” was interpreted as Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (still the best film in Indiana Jones), but his program CBS would not publish it from his contract, which led to his hasty release of the classic of the adventure of Steven Spielberg who caused hasty overhaul for Harrison Ford.
Clint Eastwood was the right man for work
According to the Los Angeles Times, Tom Selleck was not the only other star to have had the chance to play Frank Horrigan. “In Line of Fire” scripts were sent to Robert Redford, Sean Connery and Warren Beatty before Clint Eastwood is on board. When the film finally arrived, Selleck himself had recently played in commercial and critical disappointment which was “Mr. Baseball” and only appeared in another film in 1995.
But since “in the line of fire” turned out to be a farewell suitable for the kind of action for Eastwood, it seems that things have worked for the best. In addition, the film was a critical and commercial success, totaling $ 187.3 million compared to a production budget of $ 40 million. Based on the critical response, it is just to say that a large part of this success was due to the fact that Eastwood was The star. Roger Ebert called the film “An intelligent, tense and well done thriller” and “Eastwood’s best in the genre since” Tightrope “”, while Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times noted how “the film exchanges so strongly on the presence of Eastwood that it is impossible to imagine it with someone else in the role of star.”
“In Line of Fire” won three nominations at the 66th Academy Awards: the best support actor (John Malkovich), the best film editing (Anne V. Coates) and the best original scenario (Jeff Maguire). In addition to all this, it seems that Maguire might not have received that Honor if Eastwood refused to play. According to ThR, the actor convinced the managers of Columbia to keep Maguire on the project after a certain disagreement on the addition of an explosion to the final. As the writer remembered, Eastwood said to him: “You will no longer have problems on their part.”
