I doubt even the most avid Clint Eastwood fan would claim Firefox was one of his better movies.

I remember buying this US one-sheet at a film memorabilia fair in Nottingham before the movie had been released in the UK.  From the poster it looks promising, with a great image and tag-line….but that’s about as good as Firefox gets. I remember being bitterly disappointed when I subsequently went to see the movie.

Its a curious mixed bag of dodgy politics, silly dialogue and mediocre special effects. Clint is the pilot suffering a bad case of the Vietnam flashbacks who is called upon to head to a thoroughly nasty and one-dimensional Soviet Russia undercover in order to steal the titular super war-plane.

The kicker is that the Firefox is equipped with a thought-guided missile system, so Clint has to (in one of the more stupid lines of dialogue in a largely stupid movie) “remember to think in Russian”. This seems to take a whole lot longer than the old-fashioned method of just pushing a button to fire, but there you go.

The movie came out post Star Wars, and the climactic dog-fight apes the low level attack on the Death Star, except the special effects don’t deliver. Having fast-moving planes superimposed upon snowy canyons in daytime just isn’t even remotely convincing, and especially not now we have got used to hyper-realistic CGI.

Nonetheless, I did have this poster on my wall for a number of years.  It is now available to buy here.