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 Black Heart Eastwood's own iconography. Jim Hoberman of "The Village Voice" hailed it as "Eastwood’s best work before "Unforgiven"...[an] underrated hall-of-mirrors movie about movie-inspired megalomania." Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum consider it a masterpiece, with the latter pointing out the Brechtian nature of Eastwood's performance, as he never disappears into the role he is playing; instead, Eastwood is always recognizably his unique star persona while showing us what he imagines Huston (i.e. Wilson) to have been. The result is "a running commentary on his two subjects, Huston and himself—the ruminations and questions of a free man." "White Hunter Black Heart"'s gross theatrical