"Dirty," looking very clean (Updated)

Today sees the release of of Warner Home Video’s most ambi­tious Blu-Ray pack­age since the great Blade Runner set of last hol­i­day sea­son: The Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition, a most lav­ishly fes­tooned pack­age stuffed with some bemus­ing gee­gaws (e.g., a fairly cheesy mini-replica of Inspector Callahan’s badge and I.D. card). The movies, of course, are para­mount. Were I to be ungen­er­ous, I’d say that only the first pic­ture, Don Siegel’s 1971 Dirty Harry, and the fourth, the 1983 Eastwood-directed Sudden Impact, were deserving of Blu-Ray treat­ment, but in this game, as the say­ing goes, deserve’s got noth­ing to do with it. 

Dirty Harry remains a stag­ger­ingly com­pel­ling film. Siegel’s dir­ec­tion is taut, dis­cip­lined, ruth­lessly effect­ive. Far from fas­cist, the film plays now—especially in the light of Eastwood’s latest film, Changeling, which I saw at Cannes and you’ll see in a few months—as one of the earli­est of Eastwood’s anti-authoritarian work. 

I’ve been try­ing to use my new cam­era to get Blu-Ray images off my plasma screen, and the above shot, of Harry’s post-dedication open­ing, is one of my more cred­it­able efforts. The vivid­ness of the Blu-Ray pic­ture is pretty startling. 

I remem­ber how bit­terly dis­ap­poin­ted my pals and I were with Dirty Harry’s fol­lowup, ’73’s Magnum Force, where Siegel was replaced by Ted Post, which is rather like hav­ing Chuck Mangione sit in for Clifford Brown. It takes screen­writer John Milius all of five minutes into his com­ment­ary on the disc to admit to the pic­ture’s “chees­iness.” Well, yes. The Enforcer’s the dir­ect­ori­al debut of stal­wart Eastwood second unit man James Fargo, who would find his water level col­lab­or­at­ing with Chuck Norris. Sudden Impact is a weird one, with Harry con­front­ing night­mares some­what bey­ond his ken; it’s a kind of dip­tych with the dis­turb­ing Tightrope, which Eastwood starred in the next year, and cer­tain scenes have more of a hor­ror movie feel than any­thing. The Dead Pool is a routinely enter­tain­ing Buddy Van Horn num­ber, fea­tur­ing early film appear­ances by Liam Neeson, Patricia Clarkson, and as every­body knows, Jim Carrey, lip-synching “Welcome to the Jungle.”

There are a hel­luva lot of extras, some more use­ful than oth­ers (I really have no interest in Michael Madsen’s mus­ings on film crit­ics, and I’m sure you don’t either, but here they are, in a fea­tur­ette on Magnum about the polit­ics of the Harry films), but most pretty sol­id. Say what you will about Schickel, his com­ment­ar­ies on Harry and Impact are almost as inform­at­ive as they are worshipful. 

Blogging’s gonna be light the next couple of days, as I cut open the middle fin­ger of my right hand open­ing a can of food last night, and hadda go off to the ER and get six stitches. This makes input­ting a drag, and addi­tion­ally, I’m feel­ing pretty lame and stu­pid for hav­ing cut open the fin­ger in the first place, so I’m going to lux­uri­ate in some self-loathing for a bit. (Kidding. Mostly.) I doubt I’ll be gone too long.…

UPDATE: My dear friend Mr. Joseph Failla writes in with a cogent and affec­tion­ate defense of Magnum Force, below the fold. 

Joe Failla writes:

As one of your pals who was ini­tially bit­terly dis­ap­poin­ted with the inferi­or Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, I’ve learned to appre­ci­ate some of its most base ele­ments over the years. Ted (Hang Em High*) Post is no Don Siegel and you would nev­er con­fuse either film with the oth­er even on a foggy night, but I once saw both films on a double bill (in reverse order!) and found myself immensely entertained.

No two films fea­tur­ing the same char­ac­ter (played by the same act­or) could be more them­at­ic­ally dif­fer­ent than these. In Force, Eastwood’s Callahan does a com­plete turn­around by defend­ing the very sys­tem he showed so much con­tempt for in the ori­gin­al. As one mem­ber of the secret death squad notes to Harry, “You of all people should under­stand.” But let’s face it, Dirty Harry was meant to be a one shot deal. When he tosses his badge away in that film’s con­clu­sion, Harry was a man with no future. In the sequel, he’s reborn with a con­science and for the only time in the series does he have a private life. We see his apart­ment (a pic­ture of his hit and run vic­tim wife is on dis­play), he has a fling with a pretty neigh­bor, and he attempts to help an old friend he believes to be crack­ing under pres­sure. Giving Harry a past and a future seems to be incon­gru­ous with his actions and almost spec­tral, icon­ic avenger status in the original/

Stylistically it’s an 180 degree turn also—at over 2 hours it feels bloated and, com­pared to the original,seems to move at a snail’s pace (not what you want in an action pic). But where it suc­ceeds is in sheer nerve, par­tic­u­larly in how it details the many gory killings in close up (when was the last time you saw all the dead bod­ies twitch after dying in a non hor­ror film?), and in a num­ber of incred­ibly sleazy set ups (such as machine gun­ning and bomb­ing a pool party, a pimp pour­ing Drano down his girl’s throat, a sex scene inter­rup­ted with gun play cli­max­ing with a naked blonde fall­ing from a high rise and a gang­ster impailed on a crane in the front seat on his Cadillac). We also get the nor­mally like­able Hal Holbrook, David Soul and Robert Urich as devi­ous vil­lians, a “humor­ous” hijack­ing sequence (“Excuse me sir, but can you fly?”), and of course Harry’s wry mus­ings at much of the carnage (“Shows a cer­tain sense of style.” and the fam­ous “A man’s got to know his lim­it­a­tions.”). Quite an offer­ing of may­hem, con­sid­er­ing Warners opened Force on Christmas Day in 1973.

While Force is not up to the ori­gin­al’s extraordin­ary drama and excite­ment, it ranks well as one of the bet­ter sequels. The Enforcer and The Dead Pool are pretty routine follow-ups that actu­ally spoof the char­ac­ter rather than expand on him. Only Sudden Impact man­ages to strike a real chord again with its par­tic­u­lar view of mor­al out­rage. But by hav­ing Harry take out a diner full of gun­men, and in the end get Sondra Locke off the hook even though he knows she’s a killer, the film’s mes­sage is diluted in play­ing things both ways. Besides, Force is one of Michael Cimino’s earli­est writ­ing cred­its and made his dir­ect­ori­al debut Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (also with Eastwood, and still one of the most pecu­li­ar of action films) possible…and the rest is history.

* We should indeed remem­ber that Ted Post also helmed Hang ‘Em High, Eastwood’s first stateside pro­ject after the Dollars Trilogy. His dir­ec­tion there is so imit­at­ive of the Leone films, I hold more of a grudge against this than Magnum Force any day.