30 Years Ago, Sixtysomethings Ruled Summer Thrillers with In the Line of Fire and Rising Sun

For the past decade-plus, there’s been an unretirement home ready for any formerly A-list stars who still want to play leading roles in movies without resorting to streaming-level Geezer Teasers: Simply pull a Liam Neeson, and get old-man old-school revenge on some anonymous group of gangsters or terrorists. But as impressive as it is that Neeson has been able to carve out a career in action movies and thrillers in his 60s and now his 70s, this was not always such a niche pursuit. 30 years ago, Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery were both 63, and spent a collective six weeks in the box office top three, respectively starring in In the Line of Fire and Rising Sun.

It was a summer of Adult Male Thrillers in general; apart from Jurassic Park, even the surprise-hit movies starring kids, like Free Willy and Rookie of the Year, trailed the likes of traditional male movie stars where surnames needed not apply: Tom (either one), Sly, Harrison. (Arnold was the rare exception, bombing out, kid in tow, with Last Action Hero.) But Eastwood and Connery were notable both for their near-retirement age and the fact that their ages weren’t really mentioned much as impediment to their stardom.

The movies themselves aren’t always so demure. In the Line of Fire reps neither the first nor the last time a gun-toting Clint Eastwood character has his suitability for action questioned onscreen, but it is arguably his last stand within the sort of normal older-guy-with-a-gun age range before “aging” becomes a chief preoccupation of almost all of his starring roles. These would decrease in frequency in the years following In the Line of Fire, which currently stands as the last Eastwood-starring thriller not directed by the actor himself. (In the three decades since, he has acted for another filmmaker just once, in Trouble with the Curve, directed by his longtime producer with the rhythm of someone who has learned a lot about filmmaking from Clint Eastwood.) In Fire, Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent who was on John F. Kennedy’s detail on that fateful day in Dallas, 1963. When the current commander-in-chief receives what Frank views as a credible threat on his life, the semi-disgraced agent asks to return to the presidential detail, hoping for redemption.

The two major vectors of action in the film are extremely familiar. Frank squares off against a taunting would-be assassin (John Malkovich) who senses a kinship between himself and the man who failed to save JFK; Frank also playfully flirts with (which is to say harasses and insults) a younger, female agent played by Rene Russo, who was able to make a career of being vaguely harassed and sometimes directly insulted by nearly every leading man in 1990s Hollywood, because of her unfortunate tendency to have chemistry with all of them. Seriously: Has anyone else credibly romanced Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Pierce Brosnan, Mel Gibson, John Travolta, and Dustin Hoffman? All within the course of about eight years? No, of course not! Why the hell would anyone want to do that, even at their peak popularity? And yet Russo not only did it, she was damn good at it. She was just getting started on this legendary ’90s run in 1993, but retroactively her presence offers a kind of reassurance that Eastwood really was still in old-but-not-that-old territory. It also gives the movie a wistful quality beneath the floorboard creaks. I first saw In the Line of Fire with my dad, as one does, and the line he remembered wasn’t Eastwood’s attempt at a nouveaux Dirty Harry moment (“That’s not gonna happen,” his rebuke that the studio considered so foolproof that it got its own trailer-footage retake) but his playful self-parody of elderly wisdom echoed at the end of the film: “I know things about pigeons, Lily,” he tells his improbable new love.

Still, despite the catchphrase that failed to launch (and the non-catchphrase that stuck with my dad), the thing everyone remembers about In the Line of Fire is Eastwood and Malkovich winding each other up. Wolfgang Petersen, the director Eastwood’s star would outlive, stages the chases and near-misses with taut professionalism that manages to foreground Eastwood’s toughness and his sixtysomething fragility both at once, but it’s ultimately a good, old-fashioned act-off that makes the movie: Eastwood, coiled but insecure, trying to keep his cool in the face of Malkovich’s smart-guy-gone-afield ex-CIA baddie. He’s a great foil for Eastwood precisely because he can’t have his mania chalked up to either the inexperience or cockiness of youth. Malkovich’s mystery assassin feels failed by his government, and sees Frank’s failure as kindred; Frank may be ultimately vindicated (and the movie’s JFK anniversary stuff may be on the crassly opportunistic side) but he’s not an avenging angel of geriatric righteousness. If anything, he’s ahead of the curve on all of the Boomers who followed after him and failed their own idealistic promises.

Eastwood has stuck around Hollywood so long that it sometimes feels as if a majority of his career has been spent saying goodbye, or at least ruminating on his advanced age (before, more often than not, proving any naysayers wrong). Sean Connery stayed active in film for another decade past Rising Sun, toplining several more hits, but he never really took a regretful-old-man role. Rising Sun, his summer ’93 entry, makes relatively little of his advanced age, sometimes to the point of confusion: Is his John Connor fully retired from the Los Angeles Police, as would be pretty likely by age 63, or has he simply pulled back from the force to indulge his habit of condescending to the Japanese?

Connor is called into a high-profile murder case in the midst of a major corporate deal, introducing Lieutenant Web Smith (Wesley Snipes) into the exotic, mysterious and menacing practices known as… Japanese business dealings! So yeah, Rising Sun, adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, is an embarrassment in terms of cross-cultural education, and pretty limp as a whodunit, too. If the film was received at the time as a disappointing movie-star team-up, a disappointing Crichton project in the wake of that summer’s Jurassic Park and, in a distant third, a disappointing act of hostile racism, it feels more directly galling with the passage of 30 years. That’s often the case with racism on screen, of course, but Rising Sun has the added grotesquerie of seeing then-living legend Sean Connery appearing in absolute junk.

As is often the case with Connery’s later-period vehicles, there’s less chatter about Connor’s age than there would be for an Eastwood character – less of a sense that part of the actor’s whole deal is defying conventional wisdom about his advancing age. Connery defies it just by existing; no one in the movie seems especially surprised or confused that Connor has been dragged out of retirement despite what appears to be described as questions about his ultimate loyalties. (His affiliation with Scotland is not raised.) It’s at once a flex of Connery’s considerable muscle as a star (has any James Bond convincingly toplined so many big movies so long after his run came to an end? For that matter, has any James Bond been called back to duty, the way Connery was for the decade-earlier Never Say Never Again?) and kind of a chickenshit move by Rising Sun, which relies on Connery’s patina of wisdom to sell its potboiler nonsense. By sheer force of presence – that inimitable voice (“don’t loosh your temper”), neatly trimmed beard, eyebrows perpetually microseconds away from an arch – Connery makes the movie watchable, much to the understandable and visible exasperation of his co-star. Connery’s character isn’t right about everything in Rising Sun, but the movie is carried along by its canny exploitation of respect for our movie-star elders. Audiences dutifully showed up.

Of course, something sleeker and more dialed in to 1990s craftsmanship was just around the corner, and it starred… Harrison Ford. The Fugitive became a smash just a few weeks after Eastwood and Connery had their day in the sun, by placing Ford, at the comparably sprightly age of 50, in a fast-paced cat-and-mouse thriller. It was so instantly beloved that USA Today went to the trouble of pitting the film directly against In the Line of Fire in an entertainment op-ed of sorts, rebuking the clichés of the latter and embracing the forward-thinking and surprise-packed former. Now Harrison Ford is 80, saying farewell-for-real-this-time to Indiana Jones, and the distance between In the Line of Fire and The Fugitive doesn’t look so vast; they’re both Dad Movie classics in the end. Mainstream thrillers about guys in their 60s and 70s are either about proving that they can still beat the holy hell out of younger people – the moment in Rising Sun when Connery does a lightning-quick choke-inducing move on a security guy would be an extended show of brute force in a Taken knockoff – or, in the case of Tom Cruise, about the prominently ex-youthful simply willing themselves into their younger bodies, a sleeker and sometimes sweatier version of the seniority that Eastwood and Connery enjoyed. (Cruise runs faster and harder in Dead Reckoning than in his 1993 thriller The Firm.) Either way, we still get as many older guys kicking ass as ever, without as much of the human frailty that makes In the Line of Fire so memorable even, or especially, in its matter-of-fact creakiness.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.