Clint Eastwood in the 1990s Clint Eastwood in the 1990s Clint Eastwood directed the film "White Hunter Black Heart", an adaptation of Peter Viertel's "roman à clef" about John Huston and the making of the classic film "The African Queen". The film received some critical attention but only had a limited release and earned just $8.4 million. In 1993, Eastwood played Frank Horrigan, a guilt-ridden Secret Service agent in the CIA thriller "In the Line of Fire", co-starring John Malkovich and Rene Russo and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Eastwood's character, Horrigan, is haunted by his failure to react in time to save John F. Kennedy's
White hunter Great White Hunter". The title character is an American tourist looking to find his own courage by facing danger on safari. In the story, Hemingway accurately refers to the professional hunter leading the safari, a character named Wilson, as a "white hunter". (Wilson is said to have been based on Hemingway's own guides, Philip Percival and Bror von Blixen-Finecke). The addition of "great" in the movie release title may have helped to lodge the ironic use of the phrase in the popular culture. Clint Eastwood's film, "White Hunter, Black Heart" (1990) presents clear examples of this type, both in the