Under Fire

Riding to another Central American firefight come three journalists: reporter Hackman, tired of Third World wars; Nolte, Hackman's colleague and obsessive lensman; Cassidy, a radio reporter shifting her affections from Hackman to Nolte. Spottiswoode constructs a true portrait of these people, with no part of their lives, personal, moral, or political, which is not deeply informed by journalism; everything they do is subsumed in the great quest for the major scoop. Cassidy gives us a generous, no-nonsense Hawksian woman; Nolte is superb, American cinema's nearest thing to a tiger and a true heir to Robert Mitchum. As an immediate picture of what it feels like to be under fire, the black fear of being shot for nothing in a rubble-strewn street, the movie is way ahead of earlier examples like Missing; indeed, it takes an honourable place alongside classic war-torn romance pictures like Casablanca and To Have and Have Not; and there are ways in which it exceeds them. A thrilling film, with a head, a heart, and muscle. CPea.