Joanna Cassidy takes a role that could have been dismissed as "the girl" and fills it out as a fascinating, textured adult. He convinced me that he thought he could be one. Hackman never really convinced me that he could be an anchorman, but he did a better thing. Nolte is great to watch as the seedy photographer with the beer gut. The actors in "Under Fire" never step wrong.
Richard Gere's sleek sexual athlete in a similar recent movie based on a Greene novel, " Beyond the Limit").
This is tricky ground, and the wrong performances could have made it ridiculous (cf. It could almost have been written by Graham Greene it exists in that half-world between exhaustion and exhilaration, between love and cynicism, between covering the war and getting yourself killed. There are, in fact, a lot of ethical stands not taken in this movie. He's always in the thick of the dirty work, however, and if his conscience doesn't bother him, Nolte excuses himself for not taking an ethical stand. One of the key supporting characters in the movie is a mysterious American named Oates (played by Ed Harris). But "Under Fire" shows us a war in which morality is hard to define and harder to practice. He commits the journalistic sin of taking sides, and it leads him, eventually, to a much greater sin: faking a photograph to help the guerrilla forces. He doesn't get the interview, but he begins to develop a sympathy for the rebel cause. During a lull in the action, Hackman heads back for New York and Nolte determines to get an interview with the elusive leader of the guerrillas. The story is simply told, since "Under Fire" depends more upon moments and atmosphere than on a manufactured plot. Hackman cares, but not enough to affect his friendship with both of them.
These things happen under deadline pressure. During the course of the story, Cassidy will fall out of love with Hackman and into love with Nolte. Gene Hackman is Grazier, a TV reporter with dreams of becoming an anchorman. This is not the first small war they've covered, and indeed we've already seen them packing up and leaving Africa. We meet three journalists who are there to get the story. And the movie names names: It's set in Nicaragua, in 1979, during the fall of the Somoza regime, period. Instead, we see Hollywood stars who create characters so convincing we forget they're stars. It's about American journalists covering guerrilla warfare in Central America, and so right away we expect to see Hollywood stars transplanted to the phony jungles of one of those movie nations with made up names. This is the kind of movie that almost always feels phony, but "Under Fire" feels real.
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