Eastwood takes his brand of heroism to the Marines

Press, 5 January 1987, Page 14

Eastwood takes his brand of heroism to the Marines

at the cinema

hans petfovic

HEARTBREAK RIDGE

Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by Janies Carabatsos Clint Eastwood is a “genre” man who likes to burnish his films about the heroic individual to their ridiculous extremes. His High Plains Drifter reached his fine, almost perfect, shoot-out in “Pale Rider”; and nobody can make a cop’s day better than Dirty Harry. In “Heartbreak Ridge” (Avon), Eastwood gods to the Marines in the ultimate of movies about that sergeant who takes charge of a broken-down platoon of no-hopers who would have no idea of whether to lick or polish the boots on the hill. There have been plenty of films like this before, and no matter what the scene in those barracks, you cannot escape the Reeling of deja vu. The men are a disreputable bunch of grunts who make the cadets of “An Officer and a Gentleman” look like the top of the tree of human evolution. Eastwood plays Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway, who has fought his way through Korea, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and three times in Vietnam. “He carries so much shrapnel that he could not pass a metal detector,” says one admirer. Sergeant Highway is a complex character emerging from an extremely narrow focus: there is a correct way to handle every situation if you can keep it within the length of your understanding. When there is no war on, he has to go out and

find his own. Now, Highway is a soldier without a war, a man whose values are based on combat readiness and the psychological attitudes that support it. He likes pub brawls and boasting about the crabs he caught in tropical regions. When it comes to sex, you hardly see a kiss; yet the visceral 1 implications of the barracks scenes are potent. Eastwood puts his trainees through the usual routine — going back earlier than “Carry on Sergeant” — of obstacle courses, swinging on ropes, falling in puddles, and crawling under barbed wire.

Of course, this hairy bunch of American ethnics turns out to be the exemplary force in the recent action in Grenada by the United States.

Thank heaven, this film does not go into politics. It is, in fact, only a minor excursion into Gung-Ho American mentality, which could be applied to virtually anywhere on this globe during this century. I like Clint Eastwood

movies. There would have been no other reason for me to see this pseudo-war film, which is not all that much different to John Wayne going up the sands of Iwo Jima with his green beret on. At least, Eastwood does not show his Right-wing inclinations as flagrantly as that. The fact that his platoon is eventually sent off to Grenada to “liberate” some Americans there only takes up the last 25 minutes of the film.

We — and the troops —

are only told that Grenada is somewhere in the Caribbean, a former Spice Island. We only learn that there are any Cubans there after they have been shot, and leave smoking cigars behind. Possibly, one of the highlights of “Heartbreak Ridge” Is its foul language, which sounds worse than a cock at the crack of dawn. With a voice coming through half-shot vocal cords, Highway can blissfully tell us that he eats concertina wire, but does something else with naplam. I am surprised that the censors passed this film with an R. 13 rating, yet its expletives are rarely of the sexual kind, only of the untrained-toilet type. ■ Eastwood has purposefully. used this language to, almost poetically, overstate the case for military movies. “Ari Officer and a Gentleriian” may have been better, but this is the

ultimate of this genre: Thank you, Mr Eastwood; for that. ’ There are that Eastwood has joined Charlton Heston in some Right-wing movement; particularly aimed against the likes of Ed Asner, who stands for the other side of the “Liberty” coin. “Heartbreak Ridge,” however, is essentially apolitical. It has none of the Reagan-era wipe-offs of one of Stallone’s “Rambo” movies. The fie-; tional Rambo may be ex.-, emplified by Oliver North in Washington at the moment; Eastwood is better understood as the mayor of a small, conservative community somewhere in California.; This film is by no means his best In fact, it is highly forgettable. Yet I think, it should diligently be filed away in the Eastwood archives between “Bronco Billy” and “Paint Your Wagon.”