Fast Flight

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

FIREFOX Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by Alex Lasher and Wendell Wellman

There are two movies in Firefox. The first is earthbound, the kind of well-made but not very venturesome adventure picture that almost four decades of cold war have made all too familiar. The second, however, is airborne, an extravagant flight into the realm of special visual effects. For the film's producer-director-star, Clint Eastwood, it represents an attempt to arrange a shrewd encounter of a new kind, with the young audience that likes things that go whoosh in the night.

Eastwood plays Mitchell Gant, a sometime hot pilot in Nam, still plagued by bad dreams and occasionally immobilized by horrific memories of the war. The British-American intelligence team that has picked up disturbing signals from the Soviet Union is less concerned with his mental state than his still keen airman's skills. They want him to sneak into Russia, filch the futuristic fighter plane that provides the film with its title as well as its best moments, and wing it out of there. Disguises, fake papers, sly street-corner meetings in Moscow, a chase on the subway, murder in the men's room--the stuff of uncounted spy movies is piled on, albeit with the unassuming efficiency that is the hallmark of Eastwood's directorial style. If he can't make it fresh, he can make it lively. The fact that his character has a tendency to be shocked into passive reveries about his wartime experiences whenever he hears a loud noise adds suspense and humanity to the film. By the time a spy ring of Jewish Russian dissidents are inserting him into the top-secret complex where Firefox has been developed, one is well and truly ensnared in the plot's web.

But all of that is merely prelude. Even his fiery escape in the plane, under the out-of-joint nose of the Communist Party's First Secretary, first-rate though the sequence is, does not prepare one for the marvels that follow. For Firefox is a magical airplane. It is blur-fast. It is invisible to radar. It has a shield that makes it almost impervious to enemy rockets. And a pilot can direct its weaponry with his brain waves; you think bad thoughts about the other guy, and blam! you blow him right out of the sky. It is probably true that possession of such a plane would control the cold war balance of power.

That's one for the geopoliticians to sort out. What with the First Secretary on the radio trying to talk him down, and the second Firefox prototype trying to shoot him down, Mitchell Gant has his hands full. He is engaged in a dogfight covering thousands of square miles, and it is a thing of wit and beauty and, above all, lightning reflexes. These planes move with the blasting power of a Star Wars spaceship, and it is fun to see the future zinging and skittering through our own airspace. Eastwood's laconic professionalism plays off amusingly against the high-tech complexity of his flying machine. And its cruelly trim design plays off handsomely against the bleak beauty of the arctic cloudscapes, icescapes and oceanscapes, where a refueling rendezvous with a submarine must be kept if a final, final escape is to be made. In these concluding passages, John Dykstra's special effects help to turn Firefox into a fantastic voyage through a kind of boyish dream world, suspenseful but, despite all the rocket fire, essentially innocent. Firefox the movie is, on balance, rather like Firefox the plane; it is at its best a clean, well-designed, fast-moving machine, at once practical, fanciful and capable of stunt flights that verge on the ecstatic . -- By Richard Schickel

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