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 fair fight. The film was entered into the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. The film received positive reviews with review tallying website Rotten Tomatoes reporting that 29 out of the 33 reviews they tallied were positive for a score of 88%. The consensus reads: ""White Hunter Black Heart" is powerful, intelligent, and subtly moving, a fascinating meditation on masculinity and the insecurities of artists." The film has grown significantly in critical stature, especially in light of the films Eastwood made immediately afterwards. Many of these, like "White Hunter, Black Heart", turned out to be self-reflexive and self-conscious works criticizing and deconstructing