The Enforcer

Tyne To Die

The Enforcer
Directed by James Fargo
USA 1976
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. 

The Enforcer... not to be confused with either the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name and, nor indeed, the many films which came after this with the exact same title... is the third of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan movies. It’s also easily my favourite one, mainly because his leading co-star in this is just so good and adds a whole other dynamic to the character. 

The film opens with a pre-credits sequence this time around, before going onto the clichéd San Francisco skyline kind of shots you usually get on films of this ilk. Here we see a bunch of ‘terrorists’ (but not really, they’re just in it for the money), who are the main villains of the piece, take out two gas board officials and steal their truck to use for a scene later in the movie. We then, post credits, go into a couple of incidents with Eastwood’s Harry Callahan during his daily patrol, one of which he gets demoted to personnel for, for a few days, before being drafted back into homicide. It’s in personnel that he learns that the mayor is trying to encourage women police officers and he meets and tries to rattle a young female officer who is trying to become an inspector.

When he gets brought back to homicide again, after his partner gets killed investigating a robbery in progress while Harry was cooling his heels in personnel, he finds that the same female officer is his new partner. And this is the movie’s trump card because it manages to deal with inherent sexism in the police force in a positive way... not that we’d had any reason to suspect that Callahan was in any way sexist from the previous movies... but it also gives Clint Eastwood the best co-star he’s ever had (with probably some of the best chemistry too)... 

None other than the, then relatively unknown, Tyne Daly... the great Tyne Daly... plays his new partner Inspector Kate Moore and, boy, does she make an impression in this movie. She does an absolutely fantastic job here as a newcomer to homicide trying to deal with stuff like an autopsy and Harry’s chilly reception but, not only that, she does a great job almost stealing the limelight from Eastwood and credibly working with the actor too, in relatively few scenes (it’s a fairly short movie in the series). We see them create a working relationship which blossoms into a partnership of mutual respect and friendship. So much so that, when she saves Harry’s life for the second time in the movie, during the climactic stalk, chase and shoot finale, she dies from taking a few bullets intended for Harry... and the audience really feels it. Along with Harry of course, who literally blows the body of her killer to bits in the next scene.

So yeah, that unique partnership of Eastwood and Daly, never repeated as far as I can remember, absolutely makes this movie the best of the Dirty Harry films in my book. Once again, Harry has a different catchphrase... this one a sarcastic ‘Marvellous’ every time Inspector Moore does or says something questionable. But, Moore is also given her own catchphrase in this, “Don’t concern yourself Inspector Callahan” which she paraphrases with her last words at the end of the picture.  Now in the previous picture in the series, Magnum Force (reviewed by me here), David Soul was spotted and given the role of Hutch in the hugely successful TV show Starsky And Hutch. Similarly, Tyne Daly does such a good job in this movie it finally led to her hugely successful TV show, as Mary Beth Lacey in Cagney And Lacey, five years later. I like to think of Inspector Moore as a younger, more loose spirited version of Daly’s future signature role. 

Once again, the film is nicely lensed and has some good, creative shot design. One nice touch, for example, is when Harry leaves the hospital room, where his former partner is dying, to go out into the lobby to talk to his boss. As that set of information is conveyed with a conversation between the two men, more information is beings simultaneously given via the big intensive care observation window between the two characters, as we watch Harry’s partner die in the background through the window. 

The music in this one is pretty great too. This is the only Dirty Harry film which doesn’t have a score by composer Lalo Schifrin. I don’t know why but the producers enlisted the help of veteran composer Jerry Fielding instead and, it has to be said, he does an excellent job of keeping the tone of the movies set up by Schifrin. It doesn’t veer too far, I reckon, to the kind of score Schifrin would have provided with the assignment and I’m sure Fielding was probably asked to keep to the same kind of sound scape with his music. It was really nice when, starting in 2004, Donna Schifrin founded record label Aleph primarily to release and showcase her husband’s scores... the Dirty Harry soundtracks finally became commercially available on CD and, even though Schifrin didn’t compose the third, they were nice enough to release Fielding’s score for The Enforcer. So I guess they must have liked it too and it’s a nice thing to do for the fans of this series of movies.

And that’s me done on this third entry in the franchise. The film ends grimly with Harry standing over the corpse of his new partner on Alcatraz island while a helicopter lands to pay the ransom to the kidnappers that Harry has just wiped out. The Enforcer was intended to be the final Dirty Harry film but, seven years later, after a string of box office flops for the actor, he was persuaded to play Harry again. So I’ll be revisiting that one again soon.