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.

Tarantula

Firefox VS Spider

Tarantula
USA 1955
Directed by Jack Arnold
Universal/101 Films 
Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

Warning: Small, eight legged spoilers coming your way. 

“I’d say you were the biggest liar since Baron Munchhausen”
quote from Tarantula

Well Tarantula is a film I wasn’t that impressed with when I first saw it, although I absolutely adore 1950s, atomic age B-movies and... revisiting it now on a very good Blu Ray transfer put out by 101 Films as part of a dual edition (yeah, some companies are still putting both the Blu Ray and DVD in the same set combinations)... I’d have to say I’m still not all that swayed over by it. Jack Arnold was an absolute master of these kinds of films with things like the first two Creature From The Black Lagoon films, The Incredible Shrinking Man and, even uncredited work on the classic This Island Earth. This one falls fairly flat though, especially when you compare it to, say, the absolute masterpiece that was THEM! (reviewed by me here). It does have a couple of things going for it though...

One is that some (but not quite all) of the special effects and make up effects in this one are handled pretty well, for the most part. The other thing is that the script does nothing to make light of the ridiculous plot (although the make up in one scene may well make you laugh) and the actors are all very good at projecting a certain amount of gravitas around the story. These actors include monster movie regular John Agar as the perpetually smiley, heroic Dr. Matt Hastings, Leo G. Carrol as the resident mad scientist Prof. Gerald Deemer and the sensuous Mara Corday as the professor’s new work experience student (as we’d express it these days) and love interest for Agar, Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (who would go on to play a few supporting roles for her friend Clint Eastwood in The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact, Pink Cadillac and The Rookie but, I’m getting ahead of myself... I’ll get to Clint in a little while). 

Also in the cast, as the sherif of the small town of Desert Rock and friend to Agar’s Hastings, is Nestor Paiva. Regular readers may remember Paiva as the boat captain in both Creature From The Black Lagoon (reviewed here) and Revenge Of The Creature (reviewed here)... and also for his role in The Falcon In Mexico (reviewed here). I almost didn’t recognise him at first because, although he was born in California, I always associate him with playing roles with a strong, sometimes Mexican accent and, also, his almost bald head here is prominently displayed, rather than covered with a hat. Hearing him speak perfect American English was a bit of a shock, to be honest. 

The film opens quite starkly and effectively. A camera pans around the bleak desert landscape until it fixes on a man wandering through and then collapsing. He dies but by then we can see he has deformed features. This is because, as we later find out, the serum Professor Deemer is working on to make animals grow to giant sizes in order to solve the world’s food shortage problems, causes an unnaturally quick manifestation of the rare disease acromegaly when injected into a human. Acromegaly, is of course, the famous rare condition contracted by famous character actor Rondo Hatton, which pushes the bones and muscles around the face to give everything a warped look (something which gave him good work in various villainous roles in his short, painful life... the Rondo Awards are named after him).  

Anyway, the professor buries another of his initially willing human victims, after being attacked by him and... the laboratory is partially burned down. What he doesn’t realise is that, while he was rendered unconscious in the fight, the dying human lab rat injected him with the formula as well... not to mention the fact that the professor’s already unnaturally huge tarantula has escaped and, of course, it roams the desert killing cattle, horses and humans until everybody can put two and two together... mostly as a not bad special effect superimposition of a real tarantula interacting with miniature sets and being projected against real life actors in some sequences. I think there’s probably some puppet work here too but, in regards to the big spider’s many on screen appearances, the puppetry is kept to a minimum.

So that’s the set up and, it’s not a terrible film to be sure (fourth biggest box office hit of the year) but, I have to say, the storyline and lack of any real twists and turns leaves me a little cold when compared to other movies like this. However, some of the make up effects, such as when Leo G. Carrol first shows signs of acromegaly, are put together extremely well. Alas, on the last time you see him, just before he is injected with venom by the tarantula so it can eat him, the make up is so over the top that he appears to have one eyeball that has melted all the way down the side of his face. If this sounds silly, it is.

What also sounds silly but, really isn’t, is the way the live footage of a real tarantula is scaled up and inserted into the shots. This kind of approach rarely looks good but, in Tarantula, Jack Arnold just about gets away with it... it looks quite acceptable and decent. I say almost because, on one tell tale shot where the big guy is one again clambering over a small mountain, some of its legs disappear behind the sky so, you can definitely see where the live action and the miniature were badly lined up, in that instance. 

And, big spoiler here, the Tarantula is finally put down in the final reel by a jet fighter pilot firing rockets or napalm or some such. The close up shots of the pilots eyes (pretty much the only thing visible of his face) combined with his voice, made me sit up straight. I looked it up and this is, indeed, the second uncredited screen role in a Jack Arnold film for a young Clint Eastwood, seen here piloting a jet long before his stint in Firefox. And, of course, this film’s leading lady would, as I said earlier, play a supporting part in four of Clint’s movies too. I wonder if this film is the first time they met... or even if they did meet as, I don’t think Clint shares a screen with anyone in this film... just sits in the cockpit, talking into his radio. 

And that’s me pretty much done with the quite entertaining but, really not great, Tarantula. The score is a mix of original and old rerecorded and tracked in pieces, from the sound of it... the opening Universal logo was the tip off for me on that front, which begins with the same opening bars as Creature From The Black Lagoon. It’s all quite effective though and very much of its time. Let’s face it, though, while Tarantula may not have the thrills and spills of certain other, more thoughtful atomic age monster movies, it’s still quite watchable and, if you have a hankering for spending time with this kind of thing (and who doesn’t?), then you’ll certainly want to be adding Tarantula to your list, if you’ve not seen it before.