Series Link 01.27.09: Dirty Harry

Posted by Arnold Furious on 01.27.2009

Did he fire six shots, or only five? Find out inside!

Series Link #12: Dirty Harry

Did he fire six shots, or only five? Find out inside!

SERIES LINK

Or Furious on Franchises…wish I'd thought of that 6 months ago.

Frequently when reviewing movies I notice I'm missing sequels here and there from classic series. In line with one of my key film watching beliefs I'll be making a point of tidying up some of my sequel history. The belief in question being that as long as I enjoyed the original I'll watch any sequel made of it. I don't know where this belief came from but it's one that seems to work out for me quite frequently and there are many film series where I have enjoyed multiple sequels based on my love and respect for the initial instalment (Alien, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Rocky etc).

Series Link #1 – The Pink Panther
Series Link #2 – The Road To…
Series Link #3 – Planet of the Apes
Series Link #4 – St. Trinian's
Series Link #5 – Jaws
Series Link #6 – A Nightmare on Elm Street
Series Link #7 – Norman Wisdom
Series Link #8 – The Exorcist
Series Link #9 – Critters
Series Link #10 – Superman
Series Link #11 - Ghoulies

Plus don't forget to check out my blog here where I throw quickfire reviews up whenever possible. Like Furious on Film. Only much quicker and less frequently. The last update includes a review of The Wrestler.

For this twelfth edition of Series Link I'm taking a look at one of my favourite characters and probably one of the great MANLY characters in cinematic history. Clint Eastwood is typically defined by two badass characters working on the fringes of the law. In the Old West he played "The Man With No Name". Or Joe, Monco and Blondie if you've actually seen the films. In the 70's Clint looked to reinvent himself starring in such diverse films as Play Misty for Me and The Beguiled. However the one role that confirmed Clint as a major player was the one I'm looking at today…Harry Callahan. The abrasive cop who shoots first and asks questions later became a bit of a joke later in Clint's career but in 1971 this shit was cutting edge.

Series Link #12:

Dirty Harry

How Many Films?

Five.

Starring?

Clint Eastwood (5 times), John Vernon, Andrew Robinson, Hal Holbrook, Mitch Ryan, Tyne Daly, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson.

Directed by?

Don Siegel, Ted Post, James Fargo, Clint Eastwood, Buddy Van Horn.

Series Span

17 years. 1971-1988.

Dirty Harry (1971)



The original Dirty Harry movie wasn't really intended to create a character that would appear in a string of films. If anything the main focus was the Zodiac killer who had terrorised San Francisco in the late 1960's. Never caught Zodiac stopped killing in 1970. Hollywood wanted to catch onto the popularity of the serial killer and made Dirty Harry. The thing that set the film apart from your average forgotten Movie of the Week about some guy's 15 minutes of fame was Clint Eastwood. His snarling, reckless detective became a cult hero overnight. Not to mention a poster boy for the right wing. Rather famously the original casting was to have Frank Sinatra in the lead. Imagine Ol' Blue Eyes blowing Scorpio away? "Do you feel lucky? Well do ya…PUNK?" Because Eastwood so commanded the role it's hard to imagine anyone else playing it. Which is probably why the Hollywood remake machine has been reluctant to touch Harry. Also without Eastwood's personality it would come off as right wing propaganda. A line it treads quite finely as it is. "Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it". Although Harry is just a shade more macho than he is bigoted. He doesn't care about anyone including himself. There's a scene in Dirty Harry where they're going to cut his trousers off to get to a gunshot wound and he insists they remove them without doing any further damage. "$29.50, let it hurt.". What a man!

Dirty Harry's position as a social icon in the 70's is pretty much unassailable. Much like John Wayne, a right wing icon himself, there will always be liberal bashing of the character and how un-PC it all is. Well the alternative is having action movies be all like that Jodie Foster thing where she's a radio presenter talking about how lovely New York is and then her ethnic partner gets killed in Central Park leaving her to get vengeance at a later date. It's like they wanted to make another Death Wish film but the idea of a white male shooting gang members in modern society just isn't acceptable. Sometimes movies like Dirty Harry are a good thing. Because Clint Eastwood is the best actor to play the role. Because that's what San Francisco was really like in the 70's. "When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher's knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross!"

Dirty Harry, the movie, is just a man movie. Straight up. Sometimes you just want to see Clint Eastwood with a big fucking gun shooting bad people and stopping them from getting away with it. Dirty Harry is pretty much the defining action film of the 20th Century. Everything that followed was basically just copying and borrowing from the action set pieces in Dirty Harry. Right down to the hero having the louder sounding gun. Make no mistake about it; this is one of the ‘must see' films. It may seem a little tame compared to modern CGI laden effects pictures but it's gritty and Eastwood just owns the screen.



Magnum Force (1973)



With the success of Dirty Harry ($26M off a $4M budget – 1971 money, that's about $100M profit nowadays) a sequel was almost inevitable. And it came along pretty quickly. Clint Eastwood, at that point becoming a promising young director, was offered the chance to direct but turned it down and the job went to Ted Post. Although subsequent interviews with Eastwood have suggested he and second unit director Buddy Van Horn directed most of the film anyway. Eastwood gets a bit of assistance in the acting stakes here too gaining heavyweight Hal Holbrook as the stiff Lieutenant Briggs as a counter balance to his renegade cop routine.

Magnum Force is never really as good as Dirty Harry. It seems as if some of Harry's edge has been taken away in an attempt to appease the left-wing critics of the first film. Harry's never been quite as nasty since Dirty Harry. Magnum Force is still a strong film though. This time Harry assigns himself to investigate a new serial killer in San Francisco…a killer with a badge! It seems some local police have gone renegade and started wiping out scumbags. This puts Harry in a bit of a quandary. Does he support those who've practically followed his suggestions and cleaned up the streets or does he go after the cops who are taking the law into their own hands? The fact Harry opposes the killer cops should tell you how much Harry's characters gets toned down from Dirty Harry to Magnum Force. After all the Harry Callahan of the first film would probably just kick back and let them get on with it.

That doesn't mean that Callahan is no fun in Magnum Force. Far from it. He has a wail of a time. Stopping hijackings, jumping roof's on a motorcycle, driving his car head on into a bike and in my favourite scene repeatedly judo chopping someone in the neck until they die. In fact the body count, number of people who die in the movie, leaps up from 7 in the first film (only three of which are killed by Harry himself) to a whopping THIRTY in this blood drenched sequel. More mayhem, more carnage! More money at the box office! As much as I enjoyed Magnum Force it really doesn't come close to Dirty Harry. I think the reason is probably because Dirty Harry was specifically written around the serial killer. The Zodiac/Scorpio serial killer drives the plot. In Magnum Force Harry drives the plot himself. The bad guys may have been played by better actors (Tim Matheson & David Soul are both in this) but they just can't compare to Andrew Robinson in Dirty Harry. He's just more…evil. And the film is that much edgier.

The Enforcer (1976)



With The Enforcer the film makers really tried to demonstrate how out of touch the character of Dirty Harry was. In the 1970's there was an increasing urge for multi-cultural and gender equality. Hence Clint gets landed with a new partner…Tyne Daly. I know what you're thinking 80's kids, Tyne Daly…as in Cagney & Lacey? Yep, before being Mary Beth Lacey little Tyne Daly paired up with Dirty Harry. Not before the Police Department has tried to cut Harry down to size by transferring him to personnel. "Personnel? That's for assholes!" Perhaps he'd have preferred it to getting saddled with Mary Beth! "She wants to play lumberjack, she's going to have to learn to handle her end of the log." Fans of the series will be happy to see Harry Callahan hasn't lost touch with his wit. If anything the one-liner count in the Enforcer is at the highest of the entire series. Perhaps that was a mistake as it lightens the mood even more than the addition of the ‘fish-out-of-water' character of Kate Moore. Although at times Callahan is so funny it's easily forgivable.

Lt. Dobbs: Are you finished with the questioning, Callahan?

Harry Callahan: Hypothetical situation, huh? All right, I'm standing on the street corner, and Mrs. Grey there comes up and propositions me. She says if I come home with her, for $5 she'll put on an exhibition with a Shetland pony...

Mrs. Grey: If this is your idea of humour, Inspector...

Lt. Dobbs: All right, what are you trying to do here, Callahan?

Harry Callahan: I'm just trying to find out if anybody in this room knows what the hell law is being broken, besides cruelty to animals.

The plot this time around has Harry tracking down the People's Revolutionary Strike Force, a bunch of left-wing yahoo's who want to bomb San Francisco back to the stone-age. There's a degree of propaganda about the choice of villains here. It's clearly aimed at Dirty Harry's detractors; the liberal left. Portraying his enemies as terrorists it gives him a perfectly good reason to shoot the bastards. Hey, that sounds familiar doesn't it George W. Bush? I jest. Because it's kinda obvious and done largely for laughs you can pretty much let it go. Eastwood has a handle on the role and seems to be enjoying himself. Tyne Daly turns in a great performance and the film goes up several notches with a great showdown on Alcatraz Island where Harry & Kate Moore aim to free the Major from the clutches of the terrorist group. Only 13 people die during the course of the film, which is a bit of a step down from Magnum Force. There's a feeling by the third film the series is running out of steam slightly and it took seven years to make another one. Clint Eastwood had a lot of options available to him at the time and didn't need to carry on making them. But they were so hugely popular that a 4th film was inevitable.

Sudden Impact (1983)



For the fourth Dirty Harry movie Clint Eastwood finally took over behind the camera. Interestingly enough it came about as the result of a survey (instead of the usual nowadays…an online campaign from the fanboys). Movie fans were asked to name an actor and a character they were associated with. This was down to Warner Brothers trying to drum up support for their Bond movie Never Say Never Again by pimping Sean Connery over Roger Moore. But much to their surprise Eastwood came up strong in the showing as Dirty Harry. Seemingly oblivious to the potential of another Harry movie the studio (Warners) decided to go ahead and make one. Sudden Impact went on to take $67M at the US Box Office making it the most successful of all the Dirty Harry movies!

Eastwood was at the time in a relationship with fellow thespian Sondra Locke. He pretty much cast her in anything he thought he could get away with. She appeared in a bunch of Eastwood projects in the 70's and 80's. In this one she gets one of her juiciest roles; that of the killer. One that Callahan happens to fall in love with. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We kick things off in San Francisco with an increasingly irritated and aging Callahan pushing the rules around and shooting people. This is where one of his great one liners; "go ahead, make my day" comes from as he's in the process of blowing away four scumbags who are robbing a coffee shop. Or threatening father of the bride mobster Threlkis (Michael V. Gazzo) into a heart attack at his daughter's wedding. Eventually he pisses off his own police department so much he gets shipped out to San Paulo. This whole sequence contains the kind of lines that the Simpsons parody with their TV cop show McGonagall (in my mind at least one of their most accurate parodies that could have had as much screentime as McBain).

Sudden Impact sees Harry out in a small town rather than the big city but he still has to answer to an idiot superior. This time its local Chief Jennings (Batman's Pat Hingle). The problem with repeating the successful formula of earlier Harry movies is that so many other films had ripped the formula off that Sudden Impact, despite featuring one of the most innovative of renegade detectives, was in itself derivative because of all the copycats. You can almost hear Homer Simpson yelling "because he gets results, you stupid chief!" There's also the debate as to whether Sondra Locke is good enough to play the lead in Sudden Impact or whether she just got the role by nature of being Clint Eastwood's girlfriend. I'm kinda leaning towards the latter because she's a terrible, terrible actress with no screen presence whatsoever. Finally we have the age issue. The craggy faced, grey haired Clint is now 53 years old, which is a little long in the tooth for an action hero and it shows. All of this adds up to the worst film in the series (until the next one), almost a parody of the earlier films, which isn't really what you'd expect from Eastwood's directors chair! On the upside because it's so paper thin, to the point of caricature, that it's highly enjoyable as a guy movie. Lots of shooting and associated fun! There is even a scene where Clint punches out an irritating ginger lesbian. The ending is totally over the top but entirely superb. I'm torn with Sudden Impact because for every OTT fun scene with Eastwood yucking it up you have one with Sondra Locke being terrible. Good idea, bad casting.

The Dead Pool (1988)



With Dirty Harry becoming somewhat of a joke, Sudden Impact reviews had noted Eastwood's age, it was left to good old Buddy Van Horn to deliver on the final Dirty Harry movie. Van Horn was a stuntman and actor friend of Eastwood's who had appeared in many of Clint's movies. He'd also directed Eastwood in Any Which Way But Loose. You get the feeling he's a token director so Eastwood can focus on his antics in front of the camera (seeing as he only directed three times in his career and they were all Eastwood flicks). The Dead Pool has become a cult film for other reasons than the usual Dirty Harry reasons as well because of Jim Carrey. The rubber faced comedian was early into his acting career and still six years off Ace Ventura. In the Dead Pool he plays junkie rocker Johnny Squares. Miming to Guns n' Roses "Welcome to the Jungle" and getting smacked out of his head before becoming a corpse is his entire contribution but it's an early highlight. In retrospect the performance is ridiculous and predictable but at the time he was just a wacky bit part player and it came off nicely. You know you want to see it now…



So the plot of Dead Pool sees director of the movie Hotel Satan; Peter Swan (Liam Neeson) organising a secret contest involving the deaths of celebrities. When Harry (Clint Eastwood) realises he's on one of the lists he becomes interested. But he's also somewhat of a hero at the time thanks to good PR. He's ordered to be friendlier towards the media and that's reporter Samantha Walker (Patricia Clarkson) after Callahan destroys her camera. He also gains a new partner in "Chinese-American" Al Quan (Evan C. Kim). Early into the film Harry gets attacked for his part in jailing mobster Lou Janero (Anthony Charnota). So Janero's men go after him and turn his car into Swiss cheese. If he was Sonny Corleone, he'd be dead meat. But Harry Callahan has become somewhat of an unstoppable machine by this point so he just ignores the bullets and shoots everyone. This is the character's biggest problem by the Dead Pool. He'd just become too tough. He couldn't be harmed.

The premise for the Dead Pool is pretty silly and the dialogue is campy. "Maybe I'll start my own dead pool and put you on it" – Callahan. But despite this the Dead Pool is an entertaining movie. It helps a great deal that a competent actress was cast opposite Eastwood for it. After all the bad taste of Sondra Locke was still in the population's collective mouth. Patricia Clarkson delivers a far more complete performance showing capable range and a good grasp of TV reporting. She has the presence required and makes me wish someone else had been cast in Sondra Locke's role in the otherwise enjoyable Sudden Impact.

One of the most memorable scenes in the Dead Pool is when the killer chases after Harry Callahan's car with an RC car. It's rare that you get a new take on a classic sequence like the car chase. Dead Pool provides one. Whether you think it's clever or good depends on how much you buy into the ability of the killer being able to drive both his car and the RC car at the same time. I think it's a fun scene although it does contribute to the overall lack of seriousness in the film. It's certainly the silliest of the Dirty Harry movies. But it retains the essence of the series; San Francisco as the backdrop and Harry Callahan snapping at people. Although he does seem to have mellowed with age. Another fun part of Dead Pool is spotting the Guns n' Roses cameos. They're at the funeral of Jim Carrey's character and also at the docks where Slash fires a harpoon gun in a stunt gone wrong. End of the day Dirty Harry probably needed one last go around to stop people clamouring for it but the result is pretty average. Eastwood is relatively uninspired and there really isn't enough edge to it.

Ratings:

Dirty Harry *****
Magnum Force ***1/2
The Enforcer ***
Sudden Impact ***
The Dead Pool **1/2

Box Office:

Dirty Harry $28.1M
Magnum Force $44.6M
The Enforcer $46.2M
Sudden Impact $67.6M
The Dead Pool $37.9M

The 411 –

Dirty Harry is one of the most beloved ‘guy' characters in history. He came in at #17 on 411's Top 100 Movie & TV characters of all time list for example. He's iconic and it may even be the role that Eastwood is most remembered for. More so than the ‘Man With No Name'. I love Clint Eastwood. He's been in a huge number of great ‘guy' movies. Almost as many as John Wayne! And still Dirty Harry stands head and shoulders above the rest of his roles. The first film is an all time classic and the majority of the sequels are not only highly entertaining but also very decent in the quality stakes. The series started to falter as Eastwood aged but Sudden Impact was only dragged down by Sondra Locke and the Dead Pool was perhaps just one sequel too many…struggling to reach 85 minutes of run time. They probably did the right thing calling time on the franchise at five films. Harry Callahan remains one of the great movie characters of the 20th Century.