Sâo Jorge cinema, like Condes cinema just along the road, is another gigantic city centre dream shrine on Avenida da Liberdade.
The avenue’s plane trees and palms are swaying and rustling in the blue afternoon gust.
By the Sâo Jorge cinema entrance steps, plenty pre-Backdraft smoke is swirling up from a roast chestnut vendor.
In Screen 1, where Backdraft is showing, the seats almost all have their numbers missing.
This is causing great confusion between audience members and ushers.
On the plus side, though, the screen is splendidly huge.
The idea of Ron Howard as director doesn’t excite me too much, but on the other hand it’s an irresistible cast: Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell, Rebecca De Mornay, Jennifer Jason Leigh, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and Scott Glenn.
Kurt Russell is great as the heroic loser. He has lost his wife, his chance of promotion, and his hope. He is blanking it all out through the adrenalin rush of his dangerous job.
Life has left him as high and dry as the old boat he now lives in.
William Baldwin as his young brother tries to follow in these surly footsteps. But unable to compete with his older brother’s bravery and experience, he opts out of active firefighting and joins De Niro as an assistant fire investigator.
De Niro is superb as the dedicated investigator, aloof from the often tedious male bonding camaraderie of Russell’s ‘17’ unit. He has to constantly rebuff political interference into his arson investigations.
De Niro’s authority is immediately established in the first scene he appears in.
At the burnt-out remains of a building, the firefighters have done their job and are drifting away.
The camera draws back to show De Niro sizing up the situation from the street.
He lights a cigarette before picking up his bag and entering the charred house.
No fuss, no heroics, no sweeping music, just a seasoned professional doing his job.
It’s a rowdy audience in Sâo Jorge cinema tonight for ‘Backdraft’.
Several people laugh out loud at the frazzled body sticking through the windscreen in one scene.
Later on, many spectators applaud Kurt Russell when in drunken jealousy he punches his ex-wife’s new boyfriend.
As an incarcerated arsonist, Donald Sutherland is marvellously insane, unnerving the rookie Baldwin with his cold callous observations on the delights of burning the whole world straight to hell.
De Niro, though, is unfazed by Sutherland’s gleaming malice and ensures that the parole board keep him locked up for another year.
In what is essentially a movie about male heroics, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rebecca De Mornay play less prominent roles, though Jennifer Jason Leigh’s is a crucial one.
She helps blow the whistle on her city hall boss and his financial cutbacks that have led directly to the deaths of firefighters due to lack of backup when dealing with major fires.
Some of the fire scenes are amazing and very exciting, especially the final scene where a massive fire in a chemical warehouse is complicated even further by the confrontation between Scott Glenn and Kurt Russell. They look like they are going to set about each other with axes until the fire takes over, with exploding oil drums and crashing flaming girders all around them.
Then, in the most dramatic stunt of the whole film, one of them sprints across a high platform through the flames.
After each step, that piece of the platform gives way and collapses into the heart of the blaze. It’s a tremendous scene.
Despite a few dodgy moments in the middle of the film when clichés of gushing water hydrants and slow-motion posing abound, ‘Backdraft’ is an entertaining couple of hours.
After the film finishes, I nip up Calçada da Glória for a couple of Bairro Alto beers.
I then head home to Costa da Caparica where there is a fantastic Atlantic sunset.
A lone motor-cyclist races across the beach, silhouetted against the fiery evening sky.
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