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Tagline: Detective Harry Callahan. He doesn't break murder cases. He smashes them.

Pizza: Ameci

Preshow Entertainment: THE 11TH ANNUAL YOUNG COMEDIANS SHOW

BLITZKRIEG COP

Like Larry David's CURB (and probably real life) persona, Police Inspector Harry Callahan, according to Clint Eastwood himself, "does all the things people would like to do in real life, but can't." He also stated that DIRTY HARRY (1971) was ahead of its time by bucking the sociological shift of the time of putting the rights of the accused over the rights of the victim. Also ahead of its time, Random Movie Club, who screened DIRTY HARRY mere days before it was selected as part of 2012's National Film Registry.

All but one person on the planet knows the iconic scene from Harry. On the off-chance that you are the one person, let's catch you up. Harry is standing over a bank robber, pointing his gun at him after a shootout. He tells the robber:

"I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

Well, did he? Even we don't know, because A) We would have had to be smart enough, or at the very least know ahead of time, to count the gunshots. And B) Even if we did, we don't know, because of the movie trick they do; although we see him fire five times, we hear a sixth shot when the camera's not on Harry. So, was it Harry who shot it? Or was it from one of the other robbers' guns? I don't know about you, but I gots to know. This scene reveals the ugly truth about Inspector Harry Callahan - he is a psychopath. He's somewhere between DEATH WISH's Paul Kersey and LETHAL WEAPON's Martin Riggs. For not only does Harry have little regard for the law (which protects criminals), but he will actually turn his back on a man who may have a gun (as he does in this scenario). Who does that?? Answer? The same guy who makes the "Well, do ya, punk?" speech, a speech he repeats later to another criminal. That means this is Harry's m.o., which in turn means....psychopath. Case closed. When Harry's disregard for rules and laws bites him in the ass, he bites right back. Asked by the Mayor what he's been doing on this case, he replies - "Well, for the past three quarters of an hour I've been sitting on my ass in your outer office waiting on you."

Yet, as far as psychopaths go, Harry's a charmer who is fighting for good. I suppose the argument is - who better to track down a psychopath than another psychopath? And DIRTY HARRY has a great bad guy - Scorpio (Andrew Robinson). A true psychopath, not a hand-wringing movie cliche who sleeps on a bed of nails to show how psycho he is. How crazy is Scorpio? To get back at the SFPD (Harry in particular), Scorpio pays a man to beat him into mashed potatoes, a great scene that I probably just ruined for you. Oh well. You should have seen this movie by now anyway. And the movie treats Scorpio fairly. I like that we see him, and we don't just hear his footsteps or see a shadow flit by, or see the brim of some signature hat.

It makes sense that church bells are the first thing you hear in the movie, as HARRY is filled to the brimstone with religious allusions. From Scorpio's declaration of killing a priest, to the religious cross pattern on the football grid, to someone almost dying while leaning against a cross. These church bells lead into HARRY'S terrific opening scene involving Scorpio and his first victim. Then, CUT TO: Clint entering the next scene through a doorway, with his name in the title superimposed over him as he walks. It's advertising 101 - Show the problem, sell the solution.

Armed with his .44 magnum and a bouncy Lalo Shifrin score, Harry finds himself thwarting bank robberies, suicides and kidnappings. Harry gets all the dirty jobs. But what made Harry so dirty? Sure, seeing criminals use the legal system to their advantage can unravel a man, but worse, Harry's support system, in the form of his wife, has gone away. Heartbreak is enough to make any man go kablooey. Just ask Martin Riggs. So that's Harry Callahan, a man who never stops eating his hot dog while shooting at the bad guys. Who casually looks down at the blood on his pants to confirm that he's been shot. He's clearly balancing on the rails with just enough sanity to not ride off them. He's battling demons on both sides of his eyes. It's a damn good thing he doesn't have a partner. So of course, they give him a partner. As if they needed to irk him some more.

This movie was huge for Clint, but it wasn't just his portrayal that made it so popular. Director Don Siegel blazed a trail of amoral grit and man's internal darkness mixed with kinetic sequences. There are lots of dialogue-free moments, including the first couple of scenes. And those shots of Harry, so prominently pointing his gun while in the foreground! Anyway, this trail would soon be trod on by many filmmakers to come. Not saying Siegel was the first, but he was there at the right time. And maybe he was the first. Maybe if I didn't cut out of NYU's film class that day, I would know. Actually, Siegel makes a cameo here, walking in front of a car, not unlike Kevin McCarthy did in Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Harry even quips to him, "Get the hell out of the way, hammerhead!"). One day, when Siegel was sick, Clint took the directing reins for him. It's the scene with the suicide jumper. In fact, Clint credits Siegel with how he learned to direct. After Siegel died, Clint dedicated his movie UNFORGIVEN to him. Fittingly, Clint ended up winning Best Director for that.

I like how authentic and...forward DIRTY HARRY was, right down to its use of racist name-calling. If made later, in more PC times, it would have surely been homogenized. But besides its tone, there are a bunch of truly exciting sequences, especially the money-drop one, where Scorpio has Harry on the run, dashing from payphone to payphone on a time schedule (how would they do that today?). There are also terrific fight scenes with sound effects amped up louder than RAGING BULL (Breaking celery stalks? This sounded more like Redwoods.) and choreographed so we can actually tell who is hitting and who is getting hit. I also liked the wink of seeing PLAY MISTY FOR ME on the marquee of a theater as he walks by. MISTY came out in October, HARRY in December.

Then there's the similarities between the good bad guy (Harry) and the bad bad guy (Scorpio), as they both literally limp to the conclusion. They also both say the word "Jesus" under their breath, Harry when he sees the first taunting note from Scorpio, and Scorpio when he sees Harry is waiting for him, one step ahead.

Clint wasn't the first choice for Harry. Many were offered the role, including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum (who dismissed the script as "a piece of junk"), Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra (who took the role, then let it go with some bullshit reason of a wrist injury from eight years prior, which would make it hard to hold Harry's big gun). There were also a bunch of drafts from a bunch of writers, including Terrence Malick and John Milius.

So why is he called "Dirty Harry," anyway? "Every dirty job that comes along," he says. Or maybe he is just a dirty cop, not on the take, but out for justice, at whatever the cost. Whatever the reason, we at RMC felt pretty lucky to get DIRTY HARRY as this month's random movie, punk.

Preshow Entertainment: THE 11TH ANNUAL YOUNG COMEDIANS SHOW

We watched an HBO Young Comedians Show, originally from 1987. John Larroquette was the MC, and he was awful.
It's funny how you can tell the comedians who have it, and the ones who don't. It was obvious that the Pitbull of Comedy Bobby Slayton was going to be big (well, bigger), displaying his funny and his confidence out of the gate. Yet someone named Geoff Bolt was schticky, "forgetting" his kids' names and the word "camera"....lots of that pretending not to know things. And...he had a puppet. Margaret Smith, with her drawl, was low key and quite funny. Others on board, Allan Havey and Rick Ducommun.Interestingly, the music was provided by Grammy, Tony and Emmy winner Marc Shaiman (SMASH = Boo!, SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT = Yay!).

Posted by Rich on October 04, 2012 at 8:00 PM | Permalink