Stream On: Clint Eastwood’s ‘True Crime,’ first in an occasional series
Can reporter Steve Everett save an innocent man from the gas chamber for the sake of his own career?
Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor and film director (who’s still at work). After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, Eastwood rose to international fame in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I’m a fan, although I like Eastwood’s directing a tad more than his acting.
/Streaming /Amazon /😎56%😌49% /Trailer /1999 /R
But Eastwood can bring considerable charm to his acting: In his 1999 mystery thriller True Crime, that he also directed and produced, he plays Steve Everett, a washed-up journalist and recovering alcoholic, who has to cover the execution of convicted murderer Frank Beechum (Isaiah Washington).
Everett is also a married womanizer. In the opening scenes he is plying a young, pretty reporter on his paper, Michelle Ziegler, with drink, but she knows that “Ev” is married and demurs. On her tipsy drive home she’s killed in a crash, and Everett is handed one of her reporting jobs that has a clock on it: the subject of her story about a convenience-store murderer, Frank Beechum, is to die tonight by lethal injection, and she was to interview him one last time and cover his execution.
Everett is in all kinds of trouble at his paper, partly for sleeping with his editor’s wife—not to mention his publisher’s, and partly for drinking, although he’s currently on the wagon. When he finally interviews Beechum, his “nose,” “the only thing I got going for me,” tells him that Beechum is innocent.
Beechum, as played by Washington, seems like a nice guy. The warden and the guards on death row treat him with friendliness and respect (he’s been there six years). His story is that he was a gang-banger, but fell in love with a good woman (LisaGay Hamilton) who got him going to church. He got a job in a garage, and while seeking steak sauce in the convenience store, was told by a friend behind the counter, Amy Wilson, that she couldn’t pay him for a job he did on her car, but could soon.
Later, a witness found him standing over her dead body “with a gun in his hand.”
Beechum’s character is played against Everett’s: the reporter is a cynical, womanizing ex-drunk who tells Beechum that he “doesn’t even care about right or wrong,” but his “nose” (maybe really his conscience) compels him to try to repair Beechum’s case before he is executed; at this point in about eight hours.
This is another of my favorite movies: there are emotional three-hanky scenes, such as when Beechum’s wife and little girl visit him; comedy, especially Everett’s interactions with his editor (Denis Leary, Rescue Me) and his publisher (James Woods, Ray Donovan, The Onion Field); suspense; and even some action, when Everett finally gets drunk and takes a witness on a wild car ride as the clock winds down.
And the ending is gold. There are obviously two ways it can go down; Eastwood’s art is in the presentation of the way that it does. True Crime’s screenplay is adapted from a novel of the same name by Andrew Klavan, as were quite a few films, but it didn’t do well at the box office. I can’t say why; it’s nearly a perfect example of its type. Maybe streaming it can get a second wind—it can’t currently be streamed for less than $3.99.
Sources include Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.