Firefox (1982) – How Clint Won The Cold War!
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Director: Clint Eastwood
Genre: Spy cum techno Thriller
Time: 1 Hour 57 minutes
Platform: Amazon Prime (rent)
Cast: Clint Eastwood. Freddie Jones
It is 1980 and The Cold War is intensifying. Both sides are intensifying the race to create deadlier weapons. British Intelligence obtains information that the Soviet Union possesses a highly dangerous combat aircraft code named Firefox. The Mig 31 Firefox is not just stealthy, but also boasts a thought-controlled weapons system, surpassing the capabilities of the western allies. So the Americans give the word – destroy it. But the British Officer who is coordinating the project Kenneth Aubrey (Freddie Jones) has an even better idea – Steal it!
The Americans provide the pilot who can do it but there is a problem. Mitchell Gant (Clint Eastwood) is half Russian and can speak Russian but he is a Vietnam War veteran who is suffering from PTSD nightmares which involves a Vietnamese girl being burnt by napalm. Reluctantly he agrees to do the job. The CIA and SIS acknowledge that there is no other individual capable of doing it, given Gant’s background as a combat veteran. The British agree to smuggle him into Bilyarsk, the test facility, and they use their long dormant networks in Russia to do so. The KGB has also got news that something is afoot. The race is on between Mitchell Gant and the entire might of the KGB and its networks. (Guess who wins😊 )
Everyone thinks that Tom Clancy is the father of the techno thriller in which leading edge military technology operates perfectly in the battle between the Soviets and the Western Allies. Craig Thomas wrote Firefox in 1977–a good seven years before Clancy came out with his The Hunt for Red October in 1984. Without a doubt, Craig Thomas can be recognized as the pioneer of techno thrillers.
The book contains descriptions of the innards of a fighter cockpit that are amazingly real, indicating extensive research on the topic. It’s also a spy thriller as Gant keeps changing identities to get to Bilyarsk , with the help of the local British network composed of dissidents , who are against the Soviet System. They are constantly chased by the KGB. The author captures the oppressive police atmosphere inside the Soviet Union.
The code name Firefox is in keeping with the NATO code name classifications for Russian aircraft , civil or military. Fighters had code names starting with F, Bombers with B, Cargo and civil transport planes with C and Helicopters with H. The real life Mig 31 which entered Soviet Service in the mid 1980s, was code named Foxhound! Remarkably, the fictional Mig 31-Firefox (left below) bears a striking resemblance to the real life Mig 1.44 (right below), which was abandoned because of financial constraints and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book was a mega success and established Craig Thomas as the master of the techno thriller . He wrote one more book Firefox Down (which was totally meh). Mitchell Gant returned for two more books while Kenneth Aubrey continued in a series of battles against the KGB, helped by his young sidekick and Australian “legman” Patrick Hyde. Unusually, none of Thomas’s later books were made into films.
The film is faithful to the book, preserving the characters and story. The infiltration scenes starting from “Moscow” through the “Moscow Subway” and then the road journey to Bilyarsk test Centre form the best segment as the terrorized Gant wonders whether he will even reach that place alive. (Usually Finland or Austria substituted for Soviet Union for films set in the Soviet Union; in this case its Austria). After Gant steals the fighter, it becomes an extravagant display of special effects, some of which looks a bit cheesy now (it was 1982 after all). Freddie Jones shines in his brief appearance as Aubrey while Eastwood does what he does best – squint into the camera 😊 .
Despite Eastwood’s single expression, it is his directorial skill that shows up throughout the film as he maintains a tight pace devoid of any unnecessary side plots. Given that this was 1982 and the Cold War was going hot once again, the film was a hit and recovered its original cost !
Trivia: When the film was released in India, the censors chopped off entire sections of dialogues. In the interest of Indo-Soviet friendship, they chopped off whole sections of dialogues whenever Russia was mentioned. (Indian cosmonauts were set to go into space in just two years, but this is truly extreme).
So, the scene where Gant is induced to fly the Firefox, (within the first 10 minutes), plays out like this.
American Officer : Major Gant, you are going to fly the greatest warplane ever built in the world.
Gant: where is it?
American Officer : Russia! – this one word was cut !
More Trivia : Nigel Hawthorne, then becoming famous due to his Yes Minister/ Yes Prime Minister role as Humphrey , is in a tiny role, as one the dissident scientists inside the test facility Bilyarsk.
In sum, this is an enjoyable Cold War thriller, ably directed by Eastwood who also stars as the laconic, PTSD driven Mitchell Gant. The film is available on Amazon Prime (Rent)
Script – 4 out of 5
Story – 4 out of 5
Direction – 4 out of 5
Photography – 4 out of 5
Total – 4 out of 5
Hi Rammesh,
A nice look back at this unusual film, and had a good laugh at your first trivia point! As well as the photo of the fictional Firefox next to an actual Mig 1.44… that’s life imitating art…
Unusual film in the sense that we have Clint here, not with loud-n-clear Magnum .44, or his trusty steed, or even with an orangutan but a… combat pilot suit!
Some comments on the film, from ‘Clint, A Retrospective’, Richard Schickel, published in 2010..
“It’s hard to say what attracted Clint to Craig Thomas’s novel, except for the opportunity to work special effects, which he had not done before (RB: pre-1982), and which were now all the rage…. there’s nothing wrong with Clint’s work in the film.. but there’s nothing anarchical or eccentric in his playing. He’s back to the taciturn manner of his earlier films, but without the sense of fun – or at least irony – with which he sometimes invested those figures.”
“Despite its cost, the picture was mildly successful commercially, and his new fans among the more literate filmgoers mostly ignored it. Indeed, it seems to me they were in a sort of a transitional stage: not much interested in genre films, except as guilty pleasures, they were more attracted to Clint as a sort of topic for further sociological studies than they were to the idea that they might be witnessing the rise of a potential film artist. It would take them another decade (RB: early 1990s) to fully embrace that idea”
…
Lastly – perhaps unrelated/irrelevant, but when first seeing this on the big screen, I felt that Tom Cruise was paying homage to Clint Eastwood/Firefox? – the Darkstar sequence in Top Gun Maverick.. iconic actor.. steals a hypersonic aircraft…. pushes it to its Mach limit….
Hi Robin
Its high time I got that Schikel book on Clint 🙂
I completely agree that Eastwood probably made it for the fun of it. As I said in the post, the post “steal” part of the picture is one huge SFX extravaganza. IIRC John Dysktra, the man who did the first Star Wars (1977), was the man who did the effects. Funny as some of it looks cheesy – yet it is guilty pleasure to enjoy the absolute hokum of a story.
I guess the movie could be summarised in the following dialogue :
Soviet General Secretary : Am I speaking to the pilot who has stolen our plane?
Gant : Yes.
General Secretary : what are your
Gant : It could be improved !
Also agree that the Darkstar thing could be a tribute.
KVR