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. 

Kolchak - The Night Stalker

Stalk On
The Wild Side

Kolchak -
The Night Stalker
USA 1974/75
Universal/Kino Lorber
Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so after revisiting the two TV movies The Night Stalker (reviewed here), based on Jeff Rice’s The Kolchak Papers and The Night Strangler (reviewed here), it was time to take another look at the next chapter of the Kolchak legacy, the show which spun off from those two movies, Kolchak The Night Stalker. Despite the ratings smash of those first two TV movie sucker punches, the regular show only lasted 20 episodes (of around 50 minutes each) before being cancelled, for reasons I’ll get into later.

It was, however, a great show and it certainly had a much longer lasting legacy in TV history than you would expect for a show cancelled before it had even finished its first season. A number of horror themed TV shows of modern times may not have been around without this one and, as I may have mentioned before, The X Files started off with Chris Carter trying to make a new Kolchak series and then going down the Mulder and Scully route when the rights negotiations came to nothing (from what I remember). Similarly, once The X Files had gotten bigger, McGavin refused to reprise the role of Kolchak for the show but did agree to play a different character for a couple of episodes, not to mention turning up as Frank Black’s father in an episode of sister show Millennium for Carter.

Like they did The X Files, decades later, many people refer to Kolchak The Night Stalker as being a ‘monster of the week’ show in an almost derogatory manner and, yeah, okay it’s guilty as charged and is, in some ways, quite formulaic, with Kolchak stumbling onto some supernatural entity and pursuing it to get another unsaleable and unprintable story for his editor... but that doesn’t mean to say the show wasn’t any good. Quite the opposite in fact... which is why it was so influential decades later, with directors and creators who remembered watching it in their youth. Heck, future blockbuster writer and director Rob Zemeckis even sold his first script to the show... although I don’t think the episode in question, Chopper, about a vengeful, headless Hells Angel biker cutting people down with a sword, is one of the better entries in the series, to be honest.

The show kept the two main actors from the show, of course... so we have Darren McGavin as the incomparable Carl Kolchak, in his trademark seersucker jacket and straw hat, along with the wonderful Simon Oakland as his shouty, cynical and much put upon boss, Tony Vincenzo. McGavin was also unofficially co-producing the show on set, which led to friction with the two main producers on the series, one after the other. We also have, after a little while, a couple of other regulars on the show. These are Jack Grinnage as the effeminate, uptight Ron Updyke and Ruth McDevitt as Emily Cowes, or Miss Emily as she was known on the show.

Miss Emily and her character is something of an interesting wrinkle in the show in that she is a sign of the ever evolving nature of the scripts and she has an interesting development. Miss Emily is the elderly lady on the team at the INS (Independent News Service) where Kolchak now works and is the newspaper’s agony aunt, as well as crossword puzzle maker. Now, she is absent and on vacation for the early episodes but talked about as Miss Emily. And in the first episode, Ruth McDevitt plays one of the readers who sends in for advice to that character (leading to Carl going to interview her as she seems to have a clue to something he’s working on). Later, in episode five, the actress would be back as Miss Emily but, her character name is Edith Cowles. In the sixth episode she’s finally called Miss Emily properly, although for that episode she’s still called Edith Cowles on the end credits, for some reason.

Another, similar sign that the show may have had a rushed development was the fact that the title changed a little into the series. For the first four episodes, it’s only called The Night Stalker (like the original movie) before switching to Kolchak The Night Stalker in episode five. So, yeah, big changes were obviously being made while the show was shooting and in post... it certainly shows.

The episodes are all quite fun though and, for a ‘monster of the week’ show, there were actually quite a lot of different kinds of threats and mysteries for Kolchak to dig into without getting boring... although, I can see that future seasons of the show, if they’d gone ahead, may have gotten very similar, to be sure. So we have a werewolf episode, a zombie episode, a Jack The Ripper episode, a Rakshasa episode, an Alien episode and various other quirky things such as Aztec mummies, witches, sentient suits of armour, a Frankensteinien robot and even a youth killer. There’s also a vampire in a sideways sequel, in episode four, to the original The Night Stalker movie... with one of the vampire’s victims from that occasion returning to bring a new toothy threat near the vicinity of Las Vegas.

Likewise, there are a number of guest stars and a fair few ‘before they got famous’ parts scattered liberally throughout the series... such as Richard Kiel, Victor Jory, Phil Silvers (in an episode written by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster), Julie Adams, Erik Estrada and one time Wonder Woman Cathy Lee Crosby. Not too mention a fair few shout outs to various horror institutions such as, in an episode where one of the characters is watching The Mummy’s Ghost (reviewed here), there’s also a character called William Pratt (which was the real name of Boris Karloff, of course). Actually, that specific episode has the greatest scene of any Kolchak story in it, where Ron Updyke tells Kolchak and Vincenzo about an accident with a truck carrying some animals to a zoo. “It seems some dangerous animals did escape, including two large apes, a pair of adult African gibbons, as well as a Malayan tiger, a civet cat, and a pie-cost.”, he says. “What's a pie-cost?” asks Vincenzo, concerned. “89 cents.” says Ron. I’m not quite sure why certain people of my acquaintance can’t see that it’s one of the greatest jokes ever put on screen but, well... it just is totes hilar, as far as I’m concerned.

I loved the show and I even loved the somewhat pathetic man-crocodile creature in the last episode, The Sentry, which completely nicked its whole plot idea (and a very similar setting) to one of my all time favourite Star Trek episodes The Devil In The Dark... how the company never got sued for this one when it’s so patently obvious it’s ripped off from that one is anybody’s guess.

Something I didn’t know, which explains a lot, is that Darren McGavin didn’t really want to turn Kolchak into a weekly series, although you wouldn’t know it from the quality of his and Simon Oakland’s performances in the show, which is reason enough to watch in itself. He was happy doing just a third movie but the show went ahead in the end and he and Oakland came with it... talked into it by the producing role which he was then never credited for. This meant a lot of friction with the other producers and, this eventually is what brought about the demise of the show, it turns out. Not bad ratings but, McGavin finally telling Universal that he’d had enough and wanted out. And so it came to pass and, it’s a shame but, maybe not so much of a shame in that the plots might have gotten a bit over familiar if it had gone on for too long.

Kolchak The Night Stalker is still a great show though and it’s honestly never looked better than the relatively new Blu Ray set put out by Kino Lorber. Like the two TV movies they also put out, it looks so clear and sharp it could have been shot yesterday. And I think it’s a testament to the high respect in which the show is held that, amongst the few extras on the four discs of five episodes apiece, each and every episode has some ‘guest star’ providing a commentary track for that installment... which is nice. So, yeah, again this is a highly recommended show with some nice scoring, mostly by Gil Mellé and Jerry Fielding which, alas, has not seen the light of day as yet as a commercially available recording. But, although McGavin was done with the series, this wasn’t quite the end of Kolchak. I’m not going to watch the painfully received, short lived, ‘missed the point’ modern remake of the show from 2005 (which lasted only half as long as this one did before cancellation) but the character did live on in other media... which I’ll get too in my next two reviews.