Dirty Harry

The Saloon
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http://imageshack.us THE ENFORCER (1976, James Fargo)

Unlike the first two Dirty Harry movies, that seemed to make a statement about the situation of law enforcement in a modern urban society, The Enforcer tells a rather straightforward story of cops versus killers. Some of the villains look a little like hippies, and maybe the makers tried to hint at some ultra-violent terrorist groups active in Europe (Brigate Rosse, Rote Armee Fraction), that had a left-wing, student background, but this all seems very innocuous today (and I don’t think it was taken too seriously back then). After all, it’s not even clear what these guys are up to. They rob guns and kidnap the Lord Mayor, but don’t seem to have any revolutionary philosophy. Harry has also become more or less a caricature of the iconoclastic San Francisco cop too. He’s still crossing boundaries when enforcing his personal view on justice (after all he is the enforcer), but it’s all presented in a whimsical style. With those hippie like terrorists and a macho cop who doubts whether a female partner can possibly up to the job, The Enforcer feels more dated than its predecessors, but that is not really a problem.

I liked the film a lot. It’s of course not nearly as good as the original, but it’s much tighter than the second entry. Director James Fargo must have heard the rules of thumbs which says that if you’re not going to do a film of any substance, be sure it is FFF : fast, furious and fiolent. Actually it’s so FF&F that some of its shortcomings are covered up. The story doesn’t make much sense and some scenes are nearly ridiculous (notably the final scene, with the leader of the terrorist climbing a tower, so Eastwood can blow him and a the upper part of the tower away). Harry is contrasted by no less than three characters, who all respond, in their own special way, to one of his special qualities. He is assigned a female partner, Tiny Daley, who has to deal with his macho bravura, and finally manages to touch the right chord (before she’s killed like all Harry’s partners). Bradford Dillman is his slimy boss, who has been working ten years in personnel (a devision Harry despises in particular), and Harry Guardino is his more immediate superior, functioning as a sort of catalyst between the iconoclastic detective and Dillman’s martinet. All three actors are perfectly cast, and it’s nice to see that Tiny Daley once was a beauty. Once, before she inflated to hippopotamic proportions. But a good cop thriller can’t do without a good villain, and stage actor and Shakespeare director DeVeren Bookwalter does an excellent job as the terrorist Bobby Maxwell. It was one of his very few movie appearences, and he apparently accepted it because he needed money for his Othello adaption (released half a decade later).

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[quote=“scherpschutter, post:61, topic:647”]http://imageshack.us THE ENFORCER (1976, James Fargo)

it’s nice to see that Tiny Daley once was a beauty. Once, before she inflated to hippopotamic proportions.[/quote]

HAHAHA

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Lalo Schifrin is probably my favorite non SW movie score composer, along with Basil Poledouris, Danny Elfman, and Jimmy Page and John Carpenter.

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Maybe The Enforcer was supposed to be the last Dirty Harry movie, since it took 7 years until Sudden Impact was released, and Impact was made probably mostly for commercial reasons, Clint needed a big hit again?

Anyway, The Enforcer is an ok 70s cop movie I guess (haven’t seen it in ages) and more true to the original Dirty Harry concept of Harry taking the law into his own hands, than the rather odd story of the second entry where Harry was in many ways quite the opposite to the original film.

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And of course lets not forget the actor Albert Popwell who starred in four of the five Dirty Harry films, and each time playing a different character:

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JAMF

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I liked the Enforcer (actually, scherp, I’ve read that the hippie radicals were a nod to the U.S. based Weather Underground and Symbionese Liberation Army), but the hippies were frankly kind of cheesy and stereotyped, not to mention poorly acted, as well as a bit dated by the mid-70s. Threre’s a bit of the genre cliches starting to reep in at this point, but I don’t think the series lost me until Sudden Impact, which I remember something about Eastwood saying it was more commercial.

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Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry are very good films, but all of Harry’s sequels are more or less disappointing.

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You never stop learning …
(Let’s see what mr. Google has to say about them)

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http://imageshack.us SUDDEN IMPACT (1983, Clint Eastwood)

The fourth Dirty Harry, the first directed by Eastwood himself, and also the one that brought us the famous line ‘Go ahead, make my day’. It is spoken twice in the movie, the first time during an amusing, if somewhat typical scene in which Harry singlehandedly (but with the help of his gun, of course) ends a robbery, shooting four heavily armed pieces of scum.

After having enraged his superiors one more time, Harry is put on a case of a series of mysterious murders, apparently sex-related, since all the victims are shot both through the head (where there brains should be) and their balls (where their brains usually are). The killer is – no surprise – a young woman (Sondra Locke), who’s exacting revenge for a gang rape in which she and her younger sister were victims. Sudden Impact seems more or less an answer to the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. In that movie Harry was confronted with a group of vigilante cops, who were executing the kind of villains who managed to circumvent the law, but he ended up confronting (and eliminating) them. In Sudden Impact the opposite position is taken, in a rather radical way.

Of all Dirty Harry films (and probably even all Eastwoods non-westerns) Sudden Impact is closest to a spaghetti western : it is a typical revenge movie, even respecting the flashback structure and the de-saturated, heavily filtered look of the flashbacks. The final reconciliation between ‘detective’ Eastwood and ‘criminal’ Locke (after all he has been trying to find her during the entire movie) is a bit similar to the conclusion of Death rides a horse, where Van Cleef turned out to be the last person who witnessed the slaughter of John Philip Law’s family.

The problem of Sudden Impact is that the two story-lines (Locke exacting revenge and Clint investigating the case)aren’t really intertwined. For about an hour or so you have the impression that Harry is a little lost in his own movie: for an investigator he’s not investigating much, the usual conflicts with his superiors have become way too predictable by now, and the comic relief of the farting and pissing dog is downright embarrasing. It’s only when it becomes clear that police chief Pat Hingle, reliable as ever, is hiding something, that Eastwood the director gets his film on track a little. The revenge story may be a bit too crude and rude to make a real statement about vigilantism, but is otherwise well-handled, and when the story-lines finally intertwine, we’re in for a compelling and spectacular final half hour. While not being particularly impressive, Locke turns in one of her better performances here.

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oh man I love the Dirty Harry series. The first and Magnum Force are my favorites.

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If you have any interest in that famous gun from the Dirty Harry films, this may interest you from the real Dirty Harry:

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The opening theme from SUDDEN IMPACT is my favorite piece of music in the entire series.

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Absolutely, first two are the best, IMO (Magnum Force being narrowly my favourite from that pair). The Enforcer is excellent as well, though, and Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool are both pretty damn good.

Best music? Either the Magnum Force main theme[/url] or Scorpio’s View[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tcqJNKjVXA: the bad guy’s theme from Dirty Harry.

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I have to admit I don’t have much time for THE DEAD POOL. I do bust a gut laughing each time I witness Jim Carrey lip-synching to “Welcome To The Jungle,” though.