Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

City Heat Blu-ray Movie Review

The Heat Isn't On

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 3, 2016

"If you could just release the announcement for City Heat and not have to look at the film, it'd be the most successful picture I'd ever been in." —Burt Reynolds

As the sole onscreen pairing of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, who were two of the world's biggest movie stars at the time, City Heat should have been much better than it is. The film had a troubled history, with original director Blake Edwards being fired during pre-production (at Eastwood's behest, according to Reynolds) and eventually removing his name from the screenplay, which Edwards later said was one of the best he'd ever written. Edwards substituted "Sam O. Brown" as his writer's nom de plume for City Heat, with the initials "SOB" serving as an inside reference to his 1981 satire lampooning the film industry. (S.O.B. isn't yet on Blu-ray, but we live in hope.) Edwards was replaced by actor-turned-director Richard Benjamin, with whom Eastwood was more comfortable and who the studio probably hoped would bring the same madcap energy to City Heat that he had displayed in his debut feature, My Favorite Year (also, sadly, missing on Blu-ray).

The cachet of its two stars was enough to save City Heat from financial failure, but it was savaged by critics and faded quickly at the box office. Time has not been kind to this self-conscious mix of buddy cop comedy and gangster drama, which wobbles uncertainly between parody and period evocation. Modern CGI fests are routinely criticized for bombarding the senses with excess commotion to compensate for dramatic inertia, but City Heat confirms that it was possible to accomplish the same thing without a single computer in sight.

City Heat is set in 1933 Kansas City, with its jazz clubs, speakeasies and gangster rivalries. Its heroes are the perpetually bickering team of Police Lt. Speer (Eastwood) and his former partner, Mike Murphy (Reynolds), who is now a private detective. The pair gets caught up in a battle for underworld supremacy between the city's two top gangsters, Leon Coll (Tony LoBianco, The French Connection) and Primo Pitt (Rip Torn, The Larry Sanders Show), each of whom wants to get his hands on a set of ledgers stolen by Coll's bookkeeper (Twin Peaks' Jack Nance, whose role is barely a cameo). Murphy's private investigating colleague, Dehl Swift (Richard Roundtree, Shaft), has acquired the ledgers and is trying to sell them back to Coll, but Primo Pitt wants them too, because he can use them to eliminate his competition.

If all of this sounds a little vague, that's because the plot is just an excuse to have Speer and Murphy (mostly Murphy) routinely attacked by thugs whose behavior vacillates between comic and lethal. Some of them work for Coll, and some of them work for Pitt, but don't bother trying to keep them straight, because they're all (mostly) incompetent. City Heat is the kind of film where a gangster shoots hundreds of rounds from a submachine gun, while his targets stand in plain sight but are missed by every slug, and you're not sure whether it's a gag or just inept staging. Fists fly, rooms get trashed, buildings get shot up, and occasionally (but just often enough to deflate the comedy) someone gets killed. Meanwhile, Eastwood's Speer glowers, Murphy wisecracks, and the former partners keep one-upping each other with insults. Rinse and repeat, until all the bad guys have been neutralized.

Each of the detectives has a girlfriend, who provides some respite from the ruckus, usually by begging her man to be careful (or get serious). Speer fancies Murphy's secretary, Addy (Jane Alexander), who he thinks is too good to be fetching his former partner's coffee. Dehl Swift is devoted to a pretty singer named Ginny Lee (Fame's Irene Cara), who is the star attraction at the club owned by Fat Freddy (John Hancock). And Murphy is entangled with a society girl, Caroline Howley, who is played by Madeline Kahn in a style that recalls her turn as Gene Wilder's demanding fiancée in Young Frankenstein. (Believe it or not, the role was originally written for Julie Andrews.) Kahn's Caroline provides City Heat with some of its best moments, especially after she's kidnapped as leverage against Murphy and ends up cleaning out her captors at the poker table.

City Heat references two cinematic landmarks from the period in which it is set. One is a Marx Brothers comedy, Horse Feathers, which plays in the background during a clandestine meeting in a movie theater. The other is The Public Enemy, the gangster classic that made James Cagney a star, which is prominently advertised on a downtown billboard. City Heat vacillates wildly between the incompatible styles represented by these polar opposites, one a chilling portrait of the underworld, the other an antic romp where nothing is taken seriously. Benjamin's film remains stuck somewhere in between, running in both directions at once and busily going nowhere.

City Heat Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

City Heat was shot by Nick McLean, who was also the DP on Burt Reynolds other 1984 release, The Cannonball Run II, and reunited with the star the following year on Stick. (Before moving over to TV, McLean also shot The Goonies and Spaceballs.) McLean's lighting on City Heat diffuses a period sheen over nearly every shot, accentuating the elaborate production design and constantly reminding the viewer that this story is set in the past. As an additional reminder, the opening Warner Bros. logo displays in black and white, but that's as close to film noir as City Heat manages.

For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, Warner's MPI facility has created a new 2K scan from an interpositive, and the results set a standard for just how good an Eighties film can look. The grain is finely rendered, the detail is superb, densities are excellent, and colors are richly saturated throughout. The blacks of nighttime and tuxedos are deep and solid, and the shadows that routinely frame the stoically fearsome Lt. Speer are rendered with precision. Warner has mastered City Heat with a healthy average bitrate of 31.99 Mbps and a solid encode.

City Heat Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

City Heat was released in Dolby Stereo, but the soundtrack was remixed in 5.1 for DVD, and it's the 5.1 mix that appears on Blu-ray, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. Although the surround presence is largely confined to ambient effects like rainfall and to Lennie Niehaus's jazz- and ragtime-inflected score, the remix and lossless encoding do wonders for the film's pyrotechnics, which punch through with power and authority. Gunshots, of which there are hundreds, blast out of the speakers, with Speer's weapons usually the loudest. Several big explosions rock the scene, and while the bass extension isn't room-rattling, it makes itself felt. Irene Cara's musical performances go down smoothly, in sharp contrast to the cacophony of breakage that erupts during the periodic fights and shootouts. The dialogue is always clear.

City Heat Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The sole extra is the film's trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:07), which has a snappier pace than the film, thanks to the magic of editing. The DVD releases of City Heat in 2003 and 2010 were similarly bare. The trailer's voiceover reflects the PR campaign's reliance on the film's two stars: "Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in City Heat. Need we say more?" As with most of its recent catalog releases, Warner has remastered the trailer in 1080p.

City Heat Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's a shame that City Heat didn't turn out better, given the personal toll it took on Burt Reynolds. After his jaw was broken early in filming from a stunt gone wrong, Reynolds was restricted to a liquid diet, which left him visibly gaunt and depleted, sparking AIDS rumors, and also led to a pain killer addiction that stalled his career. Watching the film today, you have to admire the star's dogged professionalism, as he struggles, despite being injured, to inject lighthearted humor into an enterprise that (as he later admitted) he already knew was doomed. For all Reynolds' effort, City Heat never catches fire, but at least it looks good—never more so than on this Blu-ray.