White Hunter Black Heart Reviews

Director, Clint Eastwood crafts not just one of his finest film but one of his best performances. It`s an enduring, compelling and superb entertainment filled with adventure, wit and intelligence. It`s sharp, thrilling, funny and truly absorbing from start to finish. A masterful piece of work that delivers gorgeous locations and wonderful character development. A fascinating and magnificent movie. I loved it. Eastwood is magnificent, he gives lots of energy, heart, passion and humor to his performance. Jeff Fahey is outstanding, this is his best film performance ever.

Good drama like the making of The African Queen, but it's not real.

I'm not so sure about this one. Clint is at the top of his game and delivers a bunch of classic lines but the rest of the movie is a bit iffy. I was slightly engaged and never really thought about turning it off, that's probably a good thing. Pretty decent.

he world famous movie director John Huston has gone to Africa to make his next movie. He is an obstinate, contrary director who'd rather hunt elephants than takes care of his crew or movie. He has become obsessed with one particular elephant and cares for nothing else.

More a stroking of someone's ego than anything else. It's amazing how Eastwood went from this mess to Unforgiven just a few years later.

A highly under sored Movie, in which should have had better reviews-this show is highly under rated. Based on a true story, Eastwood portrays the better of his film making. In this film he really shines in a new side of him...Don't mis judge this movie by its cover.

I would say this movie, based on a fiction novel by Peter Viertel about John Huston's hunt for an elephant before he goes on to film The African Queen is quite good. Granted, I've never read Viertel's book, but I am familar with John Huston and many of his films, including The African Queen. Clint Eastwood plays a fictionalized version of Huston but gets everything about the director down pat. This includes his vocalizations, his mannerisms, the way he walks hunched over and holds his hands with fingers extented and is always seen with a drink in one hand in a cigar in the other. He's a bit crazy, but the movie makes the great point that all great filmmakers are and that they can't budge to bend towards the studio's need for a happy ending. Clint Eastwood is great behind and in front of the camera, as usual. Jeff Fahey is very good in the supporting role as the writer who is brought along to Africa to finish the script while Eastwood goes on his obsessive hunt for an elephant. An obsession that turns into selfish morbidity and punishment, not only for himself but also the crew who's production he puts way behind. It also comes with a terrible cost. The film is a fine morality play about a man who gleefully seemed resigned to the fate that he was a bastard and doomed to burn in Hell. Eastwood completely losses himself in the role and it's the Eastwood we know, despite the common element of the overly macho persona. The film might have a limited audience. Most people may say what the Hell is this, but true Eastwood fans shouldn't miss it. A fine prelude to his masterpieces which were just around the corner for him in the 1990's.

Grade: B-

The movie itself is rather dull, at least the story is. It's more of a character piece. And Eastwood delivers one of his best performances.

If you like hunting elephants then this is definitely the film for you.

Eastwood gives a great pefomance in a real tight drama on how obsession can steal ones soul.

White Hunter Black Heart is powerful, intelligent, and subtly moving, a fascinating meditation on masculinity and the insecurities of artists.

Some of the dodgiest English accents this side of Keanu. The morality tale is laid on thick but the connection with the making of The African Queen was intriguing but the fictionalization of the people involved does lessen the impact of watching a bio-pic. Fahey & Eastwood seem to be having a lot of fun with their characters and were charming to watch playing against type in what you assume was a passion project for Eastwood.

It's sometimes boring, it's sometimes funny, it's sometimes good but it's never quite satisfying.

Over the top performance by Eastwood leads to enjoyable film.

Very different style of movie for Eastwood, makes me want to watch the African Queen...

It's like The Aviator, only it's shorter and the main character isn't as eccentric.

An epic motion picture,Clint Eastwood directed and starred in. The film is a thinly disguised account of writer Peter Viertel's experiences working with John Huston (the Wilson character) while he made the film "The African Queen", which was shot on location in Africa at a time when location shoots outside of the United States were very rare. Quite an adventure.

I have to agree with the lukewarm recommendations given by the RT community. This film feels as if it were made sixty years ago, which was probably its intent; but that approach did not work for me in 2008, nor can I imagine that I would have felt much differently about it in 1990, when the film was released. Eastwood never sounded quite right as he attempted to simulate John Huston's stilted speech; and other members of the cast, whom Eastwood directed, also spoke in a style that went out a long time ago. I appreciated the effort but never felt that it was convincing. I believe that Eastwood should have gone with thoroughly modern realism (my choice) or perhaps for even more stylized dialog, but not the kind of uncomfortably in-between compromise in this film, which has the amazing effect of making one of our greatest actors sound like an amateur.

Without giving away too much of the ending, I'd like to say that there were two climaxes in the movie. One wraps up the central story line, which is the obsession that "John Wilson" (the John Huston character) had with adventure in the form of elephant hunting; and the other makes a final comment on bigotry and exploitation. Early in the movie, Wilson/Huston shows his utter contempt for anti-Semitism; and throughout the rest of the movie, he stands almost alone, except for his Jewish writer, Pete, against the blatant racism and exploitation exhibited by the white interlopers against the Africans.

I assume that the screenwriter did not carelessly run the two themes simultaneously without purpose. He may have been deliberately showing the contradiction between Wilson's sensitivity to minorities and his eagerness to kill an elephant; but this is not an obvious connection to make for three reasons: (1) many, if not most, people, rightly or wrongly draw a distinction between animals and people; hunters are not routinely bigots, nor insensitive to their families and friends; (2) "Wilson" was not a nice person anyway; he may have been humanistic in his sticking up for minorities; but he didn't give a damn about how he made his friends and business associates feel; and (3) the acting was of such a nature as to hide any inner conflicts the characters may have been having. Then suddenly at the end of the film Wilson shows that he understands and is troubled by the contradiction. I guess that's real life in a way because many people go through most of life clueless before they recognize the obvious; but the film barely held my interest in the characters until it finally revealed that it had a point at the end.

The almost simultaneous denouements of the anti-bigotry theme and of Wilson's adventure/obsession corroborated each other in fact, but were discordant dramatically, one being simple and overt while the other was more complicated and worked on a level of Wilson's consciousness that we had no idea about until that very moment. The fact that Wilson's dual realizations converge is clever in retrospect; had the movie prepared us better for it, it could have been powerful. I think that modern-day realistic acting could have, should have, and would have supported the otherwise modern (i.e. conflicted in an off-hand, dry, sort of way) sensibility of the film.

VERY INTERSTING FILM, ALWAYS HELD MY INTEREST. EXCEPTIONAL CLINT EASTWOOD PERFORMANCE, BITH IN DIRECTING AND ACTING.NICE ON LOCATION FILMING.