Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #256 Fire With Fire (1986)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I just finished a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
Because I have seen many, many motion pictures in my quarter century as a professional film writer, I arrogantly assume that if I have not heard of a movie, it’s probably because it’s either bad, forgettable or some combination of the two.
That’s more than a little ridiculous. There are so many movies out there that it’s impossible to know about even a fraction of them. Yet I go through life thinking that if a movie doesn’t suck it should, at the very least, be on my radar.
Consequently, when I saw that the next movie up on my patron-funded exploration of the films of Virginia Madsen was an obscurity I’d never heard of called Fire With Fire, my expectations for the 1986 star-crossed romance were low to the point of being non-existent.
I thought that if the movie was any good it would have more of a reputation and its title, premise and leading man (Craig Sheffer) didn’t do much for me either.
I started to get more excited when I saw the names of the always great character actors Jon Polito and Jean Smart in the opening credits and Warren Skaaren credited as one of the screenwriters.
Skaaren doesn’t have many credits but two of them are for working on the scripts for Beetlejuice and Batman so he has a formidable and impressive legacy all the same. They’re both really good movies. You should see them if you haven’t, particularly Beetlejuice.
Truthfully, if you’re reading this article on this website there is a roughly zero percent chance that you have not seen both films, probably more than once.
So my enjoyment of Fire With Fire has a lot to do with low expectations and even more to do with my ever-growing infatuation with star Virginia Madsen. I’ve always liked Madsen. I’ve always found her beautiful, charming and talented but the more I see of her, the more I dig her.
Madsen is perfectly cast as the most talented, smart and beautiful student at a Catholic girls school in Oregon. It’s easy to buy Madsen as the kind of impossibly gorgeous, irresistible dream girl that would inspire a bad boy to break all the rules and risk death and imprisonment for a chance to be with her.
If Fire With Fire were made today the male lead would undoubtedly be a Hemsworth-like beefcake with a Mister Universe physique. But 1986 was a much different time so it was still possible for Sheffer, a man who looks like he probably weighs about 140 pounds soaking wet, to get cast in the ripped hunk role.
Sheffer plays Joe Fisk, a troubled young juvenile delinquent whose rebellious nature lands him in a juvenile reform camp overseen by the malevolent Mr. Duchard, a sinister overseer played by Polito.
A mustache-less and less grizzled than usual Polito has an absolute blast channeling Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke as a drawling, country-fried, gun-toting authority figure who gets off on threatening his terrified charges in intensely homoerotic ways.
As befits a movie about horny, hormone-crazed teenage boys trying to survive without any exposure to the opposite sex, Fire With Fire is a supremely homoerotic film filled with pretty boys in soiled undershirts and filthy jeans.
One fateful day while running through the woods, Joe comes upon Madsen’s Lisa Taylor in a shallow body of water recreating the John Everett Millais’s Ophelia for an art project.
The ethereal young beauty is a goddamn vision. Joe is instantly smitten. Lisa is equally enamored. It’s love at first sight. The sheltered but headstrong Catholic schoolgirl will do anything to be reunited with the dreamy bad boy with the bedroom eyes.
So the plucky teenager proposes that her school do something nice for disadvantaged youths, particularly the one she wants to have sex with, namely, inviting the sweaty, horny, dirty boys at the prison labor camp to a dance.
A nun played by the great Jean Smart improbably agrees to the idea after her students vote for it over ideas that do not involve dancing with boys starved for female attention. Then again, if the bad boys and the good girls didn’t have an excuse to get together and exchange steamy looks there would be no movie.
Director Duncan Gibbins, who would go on to direct just one more movie before dying at forty-one after burning to death saving his cat from a fire (truly a hero’s death!), comes from a music video background, having directed the clips for artists like Wham!, George Michael, Glenn Frey, ABC and Eurythmics.
So it is perhaps not surprising that, just like Electric Dreams, Fire With Fire sometimes feels like a feature-length music video. As with Electric Dreams, that is not at all a bad thing, particularly during a standout dance set-piece that kicks off with “Computer Blue.”
That’s not only a Prince song but a Prince movie song. It’s not just a Prince movie song: it’s a song from the almighty Purple Rain soundtrack. The unexpected musical star-power continues with Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love”, Huey Lewis and The News’ “The Heart of Rock and Roll” and, to a lesser extent, Stephanie Mills’ “Bit By Bit (Theme From Fletch)”, which was also used in a movie.
Fire With Fire also features a title song that unfortunately is not named “Fire With Fire (Theme From Fire With Fire)”. The two lovers find every opportunity to be with one another but it’s not easy.
Gibbins’ handsomely shot, well-acted and unexpectedly sensitive teen romance is true to the intense, extreme, almost unbearable emotions of adolescence as well as the unrelenting horniness that characterizes teen life for girls as well as boys. Madsen and Sheffer have potent chemistry as a contemporary Romeo and Juliet who aren’t about to let the glowering, joyless dictates of a dreary adult world keep them from being together and, more importantly, fucking.
I didn’t expect much from Fire With Fire but it is a cut above typical teen fare. There are many other movies on Madsen’s extensive IMDB entry that I have never heard of or am at best only vaguely familiar with so hopefully I have plenty more pleasant surprises in store.
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