MOVIE REVIEW : Eastwood’s Shiny New ‘Cadillac’--a Vehicle of a Different Color

“You shouldn’t mess with a man’s vehicle,” someone remarks during the course of “Pink Cadillac” (citywide). He’s referring to the splendiferously tail-finned, precious-pink 1959 Caddy of the title, but it might also be a veiled reference to the movie itself. It’s the latest in a long line of Clint Eastwood Saturday night action specials, full of salty violence and cool humor.

In this one, Eastwood plays Tommy Nowak, a wry, T-shirted skip tracer (he tracks down bail-jumpers) with a penchant for fey impersonations and a weakness for ditzo blondes in tight pants. It’s Eastwood’s vehicle: his hand on the wheel, his lips peeled for the quips, his pedal to the metal. The movie was conceived for no other reason than to give him something to drive. But, as long as he’s at top speed, with Bernadette Peters, snuggling up, bombarding his ear with pert, wise-acre badinage, it’s a fairly amusing cruise.

The movie zips along amiably between Sacramento and Reno, out through the Sierras and the Nevada highways, racing through a mythical terrain Eastwood seems to have defined for himself since the mid-’70s. It’s open, clear, uncluttered, threaded with highways, gas stops and edge-of-the-town taverns, populated with nymphs, squares, salty old geezers, bartenders, eccentrics, maniacs and oddballs.

Eastwood’s Nowak, as with his old Sergio Leone characters, is a kind of bounty hunter: a skip tracer working for a madly mugging Sacramento bail bondsman. But Nowak isn’t a lonely outsider. John Eskow’s script is really a love-on-the run thriller. In this case, Nowak falls for his prisoner: lamb-on-the-lam Lou Ann McGuinn (Peters), wrongfully arrested because of the idiotic counterfeiting activities of her dodo husband, Roy (Timothy Carhart), who is mixed up with a band of half-witted white supremacists and ex-convicts called the Birthright. The pink Cadillac, which passes from hand to hand during the ensuing melee, is Roy’s; its trunk is crammed with money from the Birthright’s war chest.

It’s a sign of the movie’s tone that although these are trademark villains for an Eastwood movie--surly fanatics and backwoods imbeciles on a macho trip--they’re eventually played less for menace than clownishness. They’re a pack of bigoted nincompoops, and though they commit arson and kidnaping and snort amphetamines off hunting knives, they’re less like the street scum of “Sudden Impact” than the looney-tune bikers in “Every Which Way But Loose.”

“Pink Cadillac” has a strong visual design and lots of juicy, self-confident acting. But it doesn’t transcend its star vehicle trappings or chemistry. The construction of the story is so soft, you get the impression that if the driver and navigator were replaced, the movie might turn rattletrap and fall apart.

That wouldn’t seem as disappointing if it didn’t come right after Eastwood’s last directorial effort, “Bird,” the intricately jazzy ode to bop great Charlie Parker, which vaulted Eastwood, surprisingly for some, to the front row of current American directors. “Bird” deserved all its praise. It was a passionate piece of tight-lipped romanticism, beautifully acted and articulated.

“Pink Cadillac,” conversely, wasn’t directed by Eastwood, though it’s clearly his movie. It was handled by key Malpaso associate Buddy Van Horn, who did “Any Which Way You Can” and “The Dead Pool” and usually directs Eastwood’s action sequences. Van Horn is an amiable director--an ace at action, obviously--but he doesn’t seem able to transform material that is inherently this thin and unimaginative.

When he has scenes with Eastwood, Peters, William Hickey (as a shy, shambling trailer park manager), John Dennis Johnston as a maniac or Geoffrey Lewis doing a little sitcom aria as a brain-burned ‘60s-era ID forger, Van Horn lays back and doesn’t seem to interfere. But he is too amiable and laissez faire in the dialogue scenes. He doesn’t seem to have dropped down a dramatic through-line. You may find the shifts of Lou Ann’s husband, from bozo to villain to stumblebum to sidekick, bewilderingly unconnected. Or fail to understand why Tommy and Lou Ann are so lazily laconic and jokey just after they’ve run a gauntlet of killers with automatic rifles.

In a way, Eskow’s “Pink Cadillac” script has the same construction as all those buddies-in-love-on-the-road movies of last year, “Rain Man,” “Twins” “Things Change” and “Midnight Run.” But Eastwood tries to mix up road action movie with screwball romance.

He is also consciously creating a new kind of character for himself. Nowak is a “master of disguise,” who successfully impersonates a starchy chauffeur, a rodeo clown, a sleazy “hey-bro”’ promoter with pencil-thin pimp mustache and, finally a redneck nerd. And Eastwood doesn’t play these roles for pyrotechnic brilliance, as Robin Williams might have; he gives them a sly, draggy, antic quality.

He acts as though he were having a great time subverting his own image, like Bogart as the swishy bibliophile in “The Big Sleep.” Eastwood’s interaction with Bernadette Peters also has a different swing than usual. Peters’ Lou Ann is a goad and a tease, a scrumptious little honeybunch out to wilt his whiskers; she’s such a snazzy actress, she brings it off. Eastwood’s bemused reactions to her high jinks are the spice of the whole movie. He seems to be saying: Mess with my vehicle all you want.