Eastwood: True Crime (1999)

The second of Clint Eastwood’s great crime procedurals of the late 90s and early 00s sees him as Steve Everett, a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, who’s called in to cover the execution of Frank Beachum (Isaiah Washington), a Death Row inmate on Alcatraz. The entire film is set over one day in San Francisco, as Everett starts to suspect that Beachum might be innocent, and tries to rope together the evidence to prove his hunch. Among other things, that makes for a wonderful evocation of the quotidian fuzz, clutter and texture of the city, as Everett moves from one source of information to another, while trying to spend quality time with his daughter and estranged wife. As the day’s action and ambience gradually gathers around the North Block on Alcatraz, the film takes on the vertiginous, spiralling momentum of some of the most memorable San Francisco films, as Eastwood adopts the most mobile camera he’s ever used, centrifuging the city around himself at an almost dizzying speed. At the same time, that makes his identity feel more elastic, provisional and comic than in nearly any of his other films – at times his dialogue is positively screwy, the closest he could ever come to fast-talking, while his office, headed by the irascible Alan Mann (James Woods), feels straight out of a 90s media sitcom. That’s not to say that it makes light of capital punishment – if anything, Eastwood’s procedural tendencies create a much more chilling, dystopian vision of execution – or “the procedure” as it tends to be euphemised – than a more sentimental approach, evoking the exquisite courtesy afforded to an inmate on their last day on Death Row with a synth-scored, futuristic surrealism worthy of Carpenter or Cronenberg. It all makes for a film made to be shown in cities where entertainment technologies have become omniscient, but communication technologies haven’t quite caught up – although Everett can pretty much watch the progression of the execution wherever he goes, on a vast swathe of entertainment platforms, he can never quite communicate his findings as instantaneously as he’d like. And it’s in that frenetic disparity that the film’s San Francisco almost comes into focus, as a panorama of communicative possibilities that are always just out of reach.