PINK CADILLAC
With Clint Eastwood, Bernadette Peters, and Geoffrey Lewis.
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In his latest film, Pink Cadillac, Eastwood plays Sacramento-based Tommy Nowak, a bounty hunter who specializes in scouring the dusty back roads of inland California and Nevada, tracking down bail jumpers for the bondsmen who posted bail. His latest target is Lou Ann McGuinn (Bernadette Peters), the wife of a low-class grifter whose incompetence has gotten her arrested for possession of his counterfeit loot. Afraid that she will lose custody of her baby, Lou Ann hits the road in her husband’s pink Cadillac with what she thinks is the rest of the counterfeit cache stuffed under the convertible top. Unfortunately for her, the money is the real McCoy, and it belongs to a dangerous bunch of ex-cons, members of the white-supremacist Birthright, who immediately set out after her. Nowak not only has to fetch back Lou Ann, he also has to take on the wilderness-dwelling killers in the process.
Like The Dead Pool, Pink Cadillac is directed not by Eastwood but by Buddy Van Horn, a longtime collaborator who started out as a stunt specialist and second unit director. Van Horn’s efforts–which include Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can–always contain more broad humor than Eastwood’s own work, and here Van Horn also displays a characteristic weakness directing supporting players. Otherwise, given Eastwood’s supervisory control, the films do not depart much from the director-producer’s vision.
Of course even with humor this vision would be too dank and despairing to bear if it didn’t offer some ray of hope. As expected, the fitful romance between Nowak and Lou Ann is the spark of light in the overwhelming gloom. Largely because the two stars are so polished and knowing, the notion that two people can carve out a little island of integrity in a sold-out world comes across as likely and even logical. The final scene of the two planning television commercials for their new skip-tracing business is warm and inviting.
