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. 

Magnum Force

Soul Reaver

Magnum Force
Directed by Ted Post
USA 1973
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoiler.

For the second Dirty Harry movie, Ted Post took over direction although, it’s been said more than once that things on set were bad between him and Eastwood and, allegedly, Eastwood ended up directing a fair amount of the picture himself. I’m assuming there may be some truth to that and Eastwood certainly had proven himself a good director already, with his masterpiece Play Misty For Me (reviewed here). 

Magnum Force takes an idea for one of the rejected scripts for the original Dirty Harry (which I reviewed here) about a rogue team of killer cops, meting out their own lethal brand of justice, when the bad guys get away or are allowed to walk due to  the stupidity of the legal system. This was inspired by the Brazilian death squads that were in the news at the time. 

There was a good reason why Eastwood particularly wanted to bring this story idea to the screen. The huge positive reaction to the first movie was more than tempered by an outcry that his central character was some kind of vigilante, taking the law into his own hands. While this isn’t actually true if you pay attention on that first movie, that was how the film was being perceived and criticised by some and so Eastwood liked the idea of Harry Callahan using the system he hates so much to align himself against a group of conspirators within the same department he works for. And the guy who co-wrote the screenplay was... John Milius (future director of Conan The Barbarian, reviewed here).

Now anyone who’s seen Milius talk in an interview will know the director is not shy about his love of heavy artillery and war and this certainly comes to the fore in the film, with a lot of talk about the various guns the police are using and the way Harry matches up the shells from the bodies at the crime scene with one he manages to ‘stage vanish’ during a shooting competition. 

And it’s especially prevalent in the opening credits, where Lalo Schifrin’s excellent score (probably his best of the four of the five films he provided for the series) plays out against a hand holding a Magnum pistol in profile against a vivid red background... which looks especially good on Blu Ray. Then as the credits end, there’s Clint Eastwood’s voice performing a heavily truncated voice over of his famous “do you feel lucky” speech as the gun is turned towards the audience and fired at them, presumably a nod by Milius to a similar moment in the 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery, which scared audiences so much at the time. 

We then move onto the story and we have the relatively recently deceased David Soul playing one of the four cops who are going around executing criminals. It’s said... and this is almost certainly true... that he was spotted to play Hutch in Starsky And Hutch (which debuted on TV in 1975) because of this film. We also have Hal Holbrook (who many readers may best remember as the priest in John Carpenter’s The Fog, reviewed here) as an obstacle of a superior officer who is also embroiled in what’s going on... you’ll probably figure out his part in all this before it gets revealed on screen.

No mention is made of Harry Callahan’s end scene in Dirty Harry, where he throws away his badge and walks away from policing. I guess he must have changed his mind. Mention is made of his partner in that film retiring but this is the first film where his partner gets killed... quite possibly because of him, or at least, because of what he finds out. 

It’s not a particularly action packed film but it is nicely put together and the pace never really feels slow. As a kid I always liked this one the least (until The Dead Pool came out) but these days I actually quite like it. Again, it benefits hugely from being able to watch it in its original aspect ratio, as opposed to the pan and scan versions we would have seen on TV in the late 1970s. It’s also very much a seventies film in that little details of shots which are aesthetically pleasing are dwelled on, even though they don’t contribute to the unfolding of the story in any major way. So, for instance, there’s a wonderful shot of one of the killer’s police boots splashing through a wet puddle, followed by a shot highlighting the wet footprints of those boots on some steps. It’s a pleasure to watch things like this which are just catching little elements of life, rather than having to have everything leading into something else in the story, to be honest. 

Harry’s catchphrase in this movie is “A man has to know his limitations” but I can’t remember if this made it into any of the other movies. Certainly, although Schifrin’s score is excellent and using a more frenetic melodic palette, the orchestration is the same and, although there’s not a lot of it in the movie, Harry’s theme does make the occasional appearance in at least one scene (I think it’s only one scene actually but, it’s certainly there).

The final showdown between Harry and the motorcycle cops is lengthy but doesn't really feel particularly climactic. The bikers seem to go down too easily (these days they’d get up for another few rounds of fighting) and David Soul’s villain especially, left to last (well, almost last... but again, that gets into spoiler territory), literally just drives his bike off a ship into some water and, well, the fall supposedly kills him. That’s probably true to life but, yeah, you wouldn’t get away with that in Hollywoodland these days, that’s for sure.

The film is pretty good though. Certainly bleak but also with a certain charm and Eastwood in particular is very good as the lead here. And Schifrin’s score really picks up the pace and follows through, creating tension in shots which might not work if it wasn’t for his persistent half jazz, half suspense stylings. Magnum Force further cements Eastwood’s international superstar status and it’s revisiting films like this that reminds me why he has that reputation. I’m looking forward now to revisiting the third one in the series next, as that one was always my favourite (even without Schifrin on scoring duties). 

'Salem's Lot

Barlow Sugar

'Salem's Lot
1979 USA
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

There’s an image which has stuck in my memory over the years but it rarely haunts my dreams the way it did as a child. A big double window made of various panes, looking out into the night through this window and the fog rolls in. Out of the fog, a small boy floats towards the window, his eyes black rimmed and glowing. He starts to tap/scratch on the window... he needs entrance and, of course, everybody knows a vampire has to be invited in.

This scene is something I saw in either 1979 or 1981, if you believe the UK TV release date from the IMDB (which I don’t as it happens, pretty sure it aired both in 1979 and 1981 over here). It’s one of many images which made a distinct impression in my mind when I was just 11 years old (or 13 depending on whether you believe etc), as I watched, over two consecutive nights I think it was, the two episode mini series ‘Salem’s Lot. I already liked (and had bad dreams from) various horror movies as a growing lad (most notably with the series of Quatermass remakes by Hammer) and I was doubly curious because it also had David Soul in it, who had just finished his very successful four year run as one half of what the BBC television announcer would weekly proclaim as, “those rough, tough but likable cops” Starsky and Hutch. Soul played Ken Hutchinson, the weedy one, but it was still kind of interesting to see how he would be acting in something else.

What can I say? Not only is he pretty brilliant in this (and I don’t even want to think about the TV mini-series remake of Casablanca he was in where he played Bogart’s role, thanks very much) but ‘Salem’s Lot is actually a quite brave and interesting piece of US horror television, following in the footsteps, perhaps, of the two extremely successful TV movies The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler and the one season TV show they spawned, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. 

It’s been a long while. 34 years (or 32, depending on, yeah you know that bit already) and I have to say, it’s really stood the test of time. I do think that this is the stand-out career highlight for director Tobe Hooper, director of the original version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, allegedly, pseudo-director of... erm... Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. There are things that people of a younger generation might find hard going about this one these days... it had a pace all it’s own and most kiddies these days might not be able to sit still for that... but for people of my generation who were terrified and in love with the show, as I was, well it really isn’t all that dated compared to the original broadcast years ago.

The first episode starts off with a scene which takes place two years after the main narrative of the show and we meet David Soul as Ben and Lance Kerwin as Mark, still running from the events you are about to watch. A little bit of business with a vial of Holy Water which glows blue and then we’re into the jigsaw-like typography of the main credits, as composer Harry Sukman’s unbelievable score quotes the Dies Irae for a little bit before propelling us at high speed through a main title piece which is so startling and memorable that I’m surprised it hasn’t been released as a soundtrack before now. It was, in fact, released as a limited edition, 2 disc CD soundtrack a mere two weeks ago and I expect it will sell out soon (mine arrived a couple of days ago and it's been well played already) but the score is astounding in its moody atmosphere and that title music, I suspect, may have even been inspiration for Danny Elfman’s opening titles for Beeteljuice (and may also have been “inspired” itself by Bernard Herrmann’s Skeleton Duel music from The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad). That’s just my own flight of fancy speculation, of course... but I do believe it. 

Then we get in to the main story as writer Ben returns to his home town of ‘Salem’s Lot in Maine (where the writer of the original novel, Stephen King, sets most of his books and, indeed, lives), once known as Jerusalem’s Lot but shortened over the centuries. He comes to write the story of a house that terrified him as a child. A house where... bad things happen and, by a strange coincidence, where bad things are happening again. And this is where King pays tribute to (or just plain steals and splices in) the original Bram Stoker version of Dracula. With James Mason’s Mr. Straker acting as a Renfield substitute to “Mr. Barlow”, who is a vampire modelled after the Max Schreck performed creature in F. W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror (hmmm... Nosferatu... sure I’ve heard that name before somewhere). The local estate agent has secured Mr. Straker and Mr. Barlow a nice antiques shop and, of course, the house that Ben has returned to write about.

And things get predictable but comfortable from this point, as Ben and his friends try to find out what is going on while the vampire slowly starts pulling the town apart. It’s not, in any way, rushed... but it still feels pacey at some points. I believe it was also very influential (I can think of at least one moment in John Carpenter’s The Fog which was done here first, although it's more likely that the specific scene I'm thinking of was first seen by Carpenter in the movie version of The Trollenberg Terror aka The Crawling Eye) and it firmly supports the foundations of the vampire myth in the 20th century while still having a certain amount of fun with it.

It also has some really nice shock and scare moments which were very well documented and talked through over the course of the next few days after its original airing in various school playgrounds around the country. The moment, for example, when a young boy is driven back from the wind, walks towards camera and then a black silhouette pops up from the bottom of the screen in front of him which is guaranteed to make most viewers who are engrossed in this jump out of their skin. Especially when it’s accompanied by a particularly close relative of the 1950s, B-movie monster, musical stinger, courtesy of Mr. Sukman’s thrill ride of a score. A similarly startling but, at this point expected, sit-up-in-the-coffin-and-take-a-bite moment also sticks in the memory. It’s all really great stuff and filled with carefully timed moments such as this, coupled with great acting from the entire cast, but especially all those I’ve mentioned so far and with a big shout out to young Bonnie Bedelia (known more for her role as Bruce Willis’ wife in the first two Die Hard movies) and the always watchable legend who is, one of the greatest overlooked actors in the history of the cinema... Elisha Cook Jr.

There is one irritating thing, though. It’s a glaring continuity error with a set of packing instructions which are stuck to the front of the crate which holds the coffin and body of Mr. Barlow. They seem to appear and reappear at will. You can forget about matching shots in this sequence of the show... but it is fun to play “spot the packing instructions” I have to admit.

Now, something which I would like help with from the memory of the NUTS4R2 reader collective is this. The character Mark has a penchant for horror pop culture. Various model kits and posters/stills of the iconic Universal monsters fill his disproportionately large bedroom (how do characters get that kind of money in the jobs they are in). In the story he is seen fixing part of the old Auroura model kit of the Frankenstein monster. Now I remember a scene where, once it was fixed, he pressed a button on the model several times and its eyes lit up and it made a buzzing sound. It doesn’t, however, seem to appear on this version of the show. Did I remember this right or have I remembered a scene from another movie or TV show from around the same time and grafted it onto my memory of ‘Salem’s Lot as the decades take their toll on my tired brain. I’d be really grateful if somebody could leave a comment or get in touch through twitter and put my mind at rest on that one.

And so that’s about it for this write up. I loved this as a kid and I still do now. This and Christine were the first two Stephen King books I read in my early teens (I read Christine first). I remember when I read ‘Salem’s Lot that the book followed it a good deal but then branched away and did its own thing... that is to say, the TV show changed it around and the writer, director and producers made some decisions about how best things would play out on popular TV is my guess. But it’s a pretty entertaining horror show and very much talked about by people, especially children, at the time. Definitely one to grab hold of and have a look if you’ve not seen it before and are in love with the horror genre. I understand there has been both a sequel and a remake to this in the ensuing years, but I haven’t seen either of those yet. I plan on fixing that sometime soon but, in the meantime, I will say that I can’t imagine any remake or alternate adaptation of this which could be anywhere near as engaging and entertaining as the original... nor have such a kick-ass score as this one. Definitely watch this 1979 version if you’ve got the time.