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Firefox

Clint steals Russian plane! Plane plugs into Clint’s brain! Plane looks extremely unconvincing in flight. But note how many British actors are roped in to play Soviets – Warren ‘Dim’ Clarke, Ronald ‘baby-eating bishop of Bath and Wells’ Lacey, Nigel ‘Appleby’ Hawthorne, Clive ‘revamped Tomorrow People’ Merrison and Hugh ‘Edge of Darkness’ Fraser all don the sub-Khrushchev growl.

14 Comments

14 Comments

  1. Applemask

    July 25, 2009 at 10:56 pm

    Obligatory web browser joke.

  2. Richard Davies

    December 1, 2010 at 9:33 pm

    Same for Grandstand table top LCD game.

  3. Sidney Balmoral James

    December 13, 2021 at 7:44 pm

    This seems to be a very regular fixture on telly these days, although not perhaps yet attaining the lunatic number of re-showings the Mummy films seem to get (or the Scorpion king) – actually, that’s a thought, what film has been shown most on terrestrial television? Would love to know. Anyway, Firefox is one out of the very mixed bag directed by Mr. Eastwood, and as if to atone for the shockingly bad Eiger Sanction, this one is just about as dour and depressing as you can get. I suspect a lot of people went to see this expecting badass plane scenes, and found themselves having to sit through over an hour of dimly lit espionage, with familiar faces from British telly pretending to be dissidents or KGB. Perhaps the film in which Clint’s expression changes the least.

    • THX 1139

      December 13, 2021 at 10:54 pm

      I’d say probably Ice Station Zebra is the film most shown on TV, it must be playing somewhere in the world right this instant. Its producer Howard Hughes used to phone up his TV station and demand it be shown as much as possible for his own entertainment, so there’s a few hundred broadcasts right there, albeit in the USA.

      • Richardpd

        December 14, 2021 at 11:07 am

        The Great Escape used to have a reputation for being shown on TV loads of times, along with Get Carter & The Italian job.

        For some reason BBC1 seemed to show Star Man anytime they had a couple of hours free on a Saturday night in the 1990s.

        Madagascar & Mamma Mia! seem to currently be favourites for bank holidays on the ITV channels.

        I think Howard Hughes eventually bought a print of Ice Station Zebra so he could watch it projected in is hotel suite hideaways any time he wanted.

  4. Richardpd

    December 13, 2021 at 10:40 pm

    A runner up for the oddest cast ensemble involving Nigel ‘Don’t Wait Up’ Havers, the winner is probably Bridge Of Time with Susan ‘Partridge Family’ ‘LA Law’ Dey & Josette ‘Dayna’ Simon! Like Firefox, I’ve never seen it but noticed it in a TV listings magazine a few years ago & snipped it out because of the oddball casting.

  5. Droogie

    December 14, 2021 at 1:09 am

    I vividly remember the Mad Magazine parody of Poltergeist. The last panel showed the scene in the swimming pool with the undead corpses creating havoc. But this being Mad Magazine , the corpses are caricatures of actors in flop movies of 1982 that Poltergeist arse-kicked in the cinemas. Clint in Firefox and Woody Allen in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy feature , but amazingly Kurt Russell in The Thing and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner do too. Gobsmacking how both of those flop movies are now classics and have aged way better than Poltergeist has .

    • THX 1139

      December 14, 2021 at 10:39 am

      Woah, disagree on Poltergeist ageing badly, that’s a great popcorn movie.

    • Richardpd

      December 14, 2021 at 10:56 am

      The original Blade Runner release suffered from being too downbeat for what was a feel good season, as well as being a studio butchered edit where Harrsion Ford had to reluctantly narrate for it to make any sense at all.

      Since then Ridley Scott has re-edited & tweaked it many times, with at least 5 different cuts which were at one time all available in a box set for the very dedicated. I’ve just stuck with the standard Blu-Ray which seems to be complete enough to make sense.

      If TVC is short of things to do, a feature on films (& maybe other things) that flopped when they came out but are now regarded as classics would be welcome.

  6. Glenn Aylett

    October 26, 2023 at 3:38 pm

    It’s OK, very of its time, and Clint plays a combination of a secret agent and a fighter pilot quite well. However, post Soviet Union( well until Putin became the bad guy), films like this suddenly became very dated as the Cold War was over and Boris Yeltsin was too drunk to be a threat to anyone.

  7. Sidney Balmoral James

    October 26, 2023 at 9:27 pm

    In an attempt to make it appear as if Clint is in Moscow, rather than Glasgow or Helsinki or wherever the filmed it, he walks in front of a very obvious bit of back projection of Red Square. The failure of Blade Runner I can well understand, a stunning-looking, but terribly boring film, and Ford is like a plank in it. This is not to say he’s not a great film star, he’s just in that category with Clint, Clark Gable, Sean Connery, Alain Delon, Tom Cruise etc. who are stars, and can hold your attention in a film, but are not by any stretch of the imagination very good actors. Some actors of course veer wildly from film to film from great acting to ham, to not acting at all (Robert De Niro, Albert Finney, Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, Charlton Heston, Richard Harris – God, how the last two would hate to be linked together like that!).

  8. George White

    October 26, 2023 at 11:30 pm

    It was shot in Vienna, but most of the interiors despite the Creamtastic Brit cast were done in LA, including all the stuff set in London and the RAF base, hence David Huffman getting away with saying ‘High Wye-comb’

  9. Glenn Aylett

    October 27, 2023 at 10:25 am

    I wouldn’t imagine the Soviets would take too kindly to this film being made east of Vienna, so as in many other films, Vienna stood in for Moscow. Firefox was a good film, if very far fetched and dated.
    Another war film that always seems to crop up on ITV4 or Film 4 depending on who has the rights is Von Ryan’s Express, which is like a fantasy version of The Great Escape, and proved once again Frank Sinatra was as good an actor as a singer. One Creamy fact is the woman who played the treacherous Italian who gets shot in the back by Sinatra was Raffaella Carra, best known over here for the 1977 disco hit, Do It Again, but a major star of Italian music and television for decades.

  10. Adrian

    October 27, 2023 at 10:29 am

    Seemed a lost of trouble to go to to get his hands on a freeware web browser..

    This film is crying out for a modern day remake with decent special effects and a top rate director.

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