The Dead Pool

Harry’s Game

The Dead Pool
Directed by Buddy Van Horn
USA 1988
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers. 

I first saw the movie The Dead Pool on its original cinema release in the UK in 1989, slightly behind the US theatrical release. I really liked the Dirty Harry films by this point but... I really hated this one... at the time. I thought the robot car bomb chase was stupid (while now, when we’re living in an age of killer drones... well, it just seems quaint) and I thought the background of the horror movie production setting was too theatrical and colourful... which admittedly it is but, I’m way more forgiving now, it would seem.

Revisiting the movie, well I actually really enjoyed it this time around and, although it’s still my least favourite of Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan movies, I think it’s not actually letting the spirit of the other movies down... it’s just how it seemed to me at the time of its release.

Following on from the most boring opening title credits of any of the movies in the franchise, we get a story where Callahan is actually being lionised by the press for what is seen as a heroic deed. Running with it, the San Fransisco Police Department, who are unused to having Callahan being received in a positive light, want Harry to cooperate with the press, this time in the form of lovely lady journalist Samantha Walker, played here by the great Patricia Clarkson. She has good chemistry with Eastwood in this and, I think this may be the first time I saw her in anything. 

However, she picked a bad time to be associating with Harry Callahan because various killers of a jailed mob boss are after his blood and, on top of that, the latest case revolving around a horror film production, with a truly unlikeable incarnation of Liam Neeson as the young, luvvie director, involves a dead pool with Harry’s name on it.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a dead pool, lots of places have them (or at least had them back in the day). You would basically bet on which celebrity would be the first to die and, after a number of years, if your one came up next, you would win the pool of cash for the bet. In this one, a killer close to the production of the film is mowing his way through the list in order to frame the director and it’s Callahan’s job to find him. 

Once again we have a fast paced story with a number of action scenes and also some great police procedural stuff thrown into the mix... and Harry ‘gets the gal’ too, by the end of the movie (I was betting that both her and Harry’s new partner, played by Evan C. Kim, wouldn’t make it to the closing credits alive). It’s also got a less bold but still nicely put together score by the franchise’s regular composer Lalo Schifrin, with a few nice call backs to a couple of his themes from the first movie (reviewed here). 

Oh, and one James Carrey... that’s Jim Carrey to you and I... plays one of the early victims, a rock star whose death is made to look like a drug overdose by the killer, who completely fails at that cover up too. Another thing worth noticing is that the movie critic who is stabbed to death by the killer is made up to look like legendary film critic Pauline Kael (who was quite critical of the first movie in the franchise). 

And that’s all I’ve got on The Dead Pool, I think. It looks nice enough but the cinematography and set dressing makes it feel more dated and mired in the 1980s, unlike the other four which seem to be somewhat timeless. I thought it was fine though and I’m certainly more into it than I was as a 21 year old, that’s for sure. It’s as shame this was the final one but at least Callahan walks off at the end with Patricia Clarkson, so it’s nice to think that was a long and happy partnership for the characters in their fictional life beyond the screen. Not as much of a dud as I’d originally thought and Mr. Eastwood does a fine job with it.

Sudden Impact

Dirty Law

Sudden Impact
Directed by Clint Eastwood
USA 1983
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. Big ones. Take a look at them... make my day!

The Enforcer (reviewed here) was supposed to be the last Dirty Harry movie but, a string of less than stellar box office performances and certain other factors brought about this sequel, Sudden Impact, seven years later. I think it was a good choice and it made the most money, I believe, out of the five movies in this sequence. Although he’d been offered the direction of at least one of the previous Dirty Harry movies and had directed numerous other films, even directing one of the scenes in the first in this series, Eastwood finally agreed to pick up the reigns on this one and he does not disappoint. It was also the last of six movies that he and his then girlfriend Sondra Locke made together. 

This one’s a little different than the others too and, many might say the character oversteps his moral parameters and elevates himself above the law... which, of course, he does but, it’s also a crowd pleaser because of that, I think. It tells the story of Jennifer Spencer, played by Locke, who was gang raped along with her sister ten years prior to the main action of this film. There are flashbacks to that sequence, which made her sister non-responsive and with her mind lost in hospital since... but I have to say the constant flashbacks to highlight characters who took part in this crime does seem a little heavy handed, especially by today’s standards, I think.

So, it’s ten years later and Jennifer is slowly seeking out each of the perpetrators and killing them with a gunshot to the genitals (her signature move) followed by a gunshot to the head. She travels to the coastal town to catch up with the perps one by one in their home territory but it’s also where Harry, played by Eastwood, ends up, primarily to get him out of San Francisco and partially to investigate the first of these crimes, as it’s the home town of the first of an ever increasing number of victims. This brings him into friendship and romantic entanglement with Jennifer and, the usual load of trouble with authority figures.

And it’s all good fun. 

There’s a nice line where Eastwood crashes a party to intimidate a suspect (he manages to accidentally intimidate him into a fatal heart attack) and he foreshadows the potential for harm to two bodyguards by asking the lady on the door to phone for an ambulance due to the two guys suffering multiple abrasions and lacerations. Of course, this is a nod back to A Fistful Of Dollars, by way of Kurosawa’s original template of that movie, Yojimbo, where the leads asks for a number of coffins to be prepared. A lot of the film takes place at night, which seems to give all the characters a more sinister tone and Jennifer is certainly no exception. The play of shadow and light in certain shots really hammers home the darkness, such as a shot where we are watching a front view of Locke working on a painting but the artificially created light throws the shadow of her arm painting into a small section of the screen behind her. There’s almost a German expressionist element to the shot. 

The film opens strongly, after we see Jennifer despatching her first victim, with Eastwood briefly attending a court case before going to a diner and being warned a hold up is in progress by the waitress, who has been serving his coffee for the last ten years, dumping a load of sugar into his cup. It’s in this scene where he first uses his latest  and most culturally influential catchphrase “Go ahead... make my day.” 

All well and good but let’s talk about the waitress in this scene. One of Clint’s early roles was a very brief, almost but not quite an extra level part in Tarantula (reviewed here). The film starred Mara Corday as the leading lady and she and Clint Eastwood had been good friends ever since. It’s she who plays the waitress here and she also turns up in a few other of his films over the years.  

Lalo Schifrin provides one of his best scores for the series, taking on contemporary percussion style orchestration into his usual fusion of jazz and suspense and... it’s really something. There are also a few nods to his original Dirty Harry score thrown into the mix. 

But lets finish up with the real elephant in the room here. The audience probably had a problematic unease building up when they first saw this movie... I know I did. The problem being that, while she’s clearly been disturbed and affected by her experiences, Locke’s character is absolutely who the audience is siding with. Up until now, Harry has always been about justice rather than the law but, it always came down to a line he wouldn’t cross. Justice must prevail but, only within the limitations of the law. Not here though. He finally crosses the line and does the right thing in spite of the law... breaking it and muddying the waters with a specific piece of evidence so Jennifer can go free at the end. I’m still not sure how I feel about it all these years later, in all honesty. It’s a moment which severely compromises the Harry Callahan character but, at the same time, nobody wants to see Jennifer brought to justice for her own crimes either. Everyone she takes out is pretty horrible and her vigilante character is serving up revenge that seems to bring a real sense of justice to the piece. 

So yeah, Sudden Impact brings a taint on Clint Eastwood’s character but it makes it a very interesting entry in the series (although not my favourite... that will always be The Enforcer). After this... well nobody really expected Eastwood to do anymore of these things but, just five years later, what is now the last of the series was released at the cinema. In all honesty, I remember hating that one when I went to see it but, let’s see if it’s improved any over time. I’ll be revisiting that one next.

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). 

Dirty Harry

Punk, rocked!

Dirty Harry
USA 1971 Directed by Don Siegel
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Dirty Harry and the homicidal maniac. Harry’s the one with the badge.
Poster Tagline.

You don't assign him to murder cases - you just turn him loose.
Alternate Poster Tagline.

Well okay then. I’ve not seen Dirty Harry in about 40 years so it was due time for a revisit, I think. I’m a little more impressed with it now than I was when I first saw it in the late 1970s/early 80s on television but, I liked it enough to see all the sequels at the time (catching the last two of the five on their first run cinema releases). This one’s directed by classic Hollywood director Don Siegel (who I will always remember best for the original 1950s version of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers... reviewed here) and stars Clint Eastwood as the titular Inspector Harry Callahan... who these days, in real life, probably wouldn’t be on a police force for very long (although, since writing this and seeing what’s going on with ICE in the US of late... maybe he would).

With the background turmoil of a load of assassinations, the Miranda rights, the Vietnam war and a general feeling of overall descent in the USA... Dirty Harry came out just at the right time. The character was, perhaps, not necessarily an antidote to the political turmoil of the times but certainly someone who highlighted the increasing sense of futility the general public were feeling at the time. At least that’s what I think and I certainly suspect that would account for the high box office take on this one. 

Harry is a judge, jury and executioner who is much more concerned with cutting through the red tape and upholding justice, rather than doggedly following the law (which anyone who has done any time on jury service, would recognise are two entirely different things). Clint Eastwood does really well in this one and deserves the iconic status that this film cemented for him in American cinema (following the equally iconic portrayals of his spaghetti western characters for director Sergio Leone in the 1960s). Dirty Harry, like most detective and crime stories, transplants the lone hero figure associated with the mythic American western and continues to lionise this style of character at a time which was ripe to challenge authority in an urban setting. To say the film and lead character was influential is perhaps, an understatement. Not just in films either. The comic book character Judge Dredd, for example, would surely not exist in the form he first appeared in without the legacy of Dirty Harry... just as Johnny Alpha, aka Strontium Dog, would not have existed without the influence of those Leone westerns.

The film looks great, too. Starting off with a series of scroll downs on a memorial stone to represent the San Francisco police who have given their lives in the line of duty, the film quickly establishes the villain, the Scorpio killer (inspired by the real life Zodiac killer), played by Andrew Robinson (who Star Trek fans will be know for his regular role of Garrick in Deep Space Nine, of course). We get the sniper rifle panning around the urban jungle where he shoots a woman swimming in a roof top pool, Lalo Shifrin’s landmark score already doing some heavy lifting in establishing an off-kilter theme to represent the twisted mind of the killer. When Harry goes to investigate, through the opening credits, there are some really nice, unusual angles as we watch Clint Eastwood’s character climb a cooling tower to figure out where the shot came from. Seeing it in its intended wide screen aspect ratio, which I probably wouldn’t have when it was first screened on TV, the film’s beautiful shot design and fluid camera movement is really effective.

This continues throughout the course of the film as Clint’s gum chewing hero goes about his business. The director also pitches different textures against each other in aesthetically pleasing ways, such as when half of the screen is the front of a building with nothing going on, while the other half is Clint walking away from the character, up an alleyway in long shot. It’s good stuff. 

There are also some nice instances of visual shorthand in the movie, cleverly built to tell a piece of story with no dialogue or further clarification needed, such as when a shot of a cigarette falling into a pile outside a car door shows us instantly that the driver has been sitting in the car, with the motor running, for a substantial amount of time. There are a few regrettable moments where, for instance, various people are standing still in the street to watch the shooting of the film, which the director presumably hopes the audience won’t notice but, even so, it’s a tremendously good looking movie and, seeing it in its original aspect ratio really helps it. 

It’s become a cliche now but, this may well have been one of the first movies to feature a character running around from phone booth to phone booth in a city, reacting to the demands of the killer... although I suspect this was a phenomenon on TV before this. It’s well done though, with the majority of the sequence utilising no music until, in a nice piece of soundtrack spotting, Schifrin’s powerful score kicks in for the climax of that particular sequence. And even the ending of the film, where Harry repeats his famous “Did he fire five shots or six?” speech, has a final result which mirrors the corpse in the water at the aftermath of the first bullet shot fired at the start of the picture. 

At the end of the film, Harry mimics Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon (reviewed by me here) by throwing away his cop badge into the same river as the bad guy he’s just dispatched and turning his back on authority for good. One wonders, if the studio would have known the film would be so popular as to require a sequel which kinda ignores this final act, whether that sequence would have stayed in. Several actors including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra turned down the main lead on this one and, one also wonders if they would have, if they’d known how much the film would capture the zeitgeist of the times, declined the role as they did. Certainly, John Wayne obviously regretted it, compensating by making his own versions of the urban western with McQ and Brannigan. 

This film didn’t put Clint Eastwood on the map, he was there already but, it certainly cemented his reputation as a number one box office draw and, honestly, I’m really looking forward to revisiting the other four movies in this series, which I got for my birthday* in the Blu Ray box set Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry Collection so, yeah, more to come here. 

*over a year ago now, since time of writing.