Spoiler alert: these reviews reveal plot twists.
Story: When San Francisco police detective Harry Callahan investigates a murder that leads to a quiet, coastal town, he uncovers a killer avenging a savage crime from 10 years earlier…
Harry Callahan: After the release of The Enforcer in 1976, Clint Eastwood had announced that there would be no more Dirty Harry movies. But that didn’t mean the character vanished entirely. In the early 1980s, Warner Bros were keen to cash in on Harry’s popularity so licensed a series of 12 novels, all credited to the pseudonym Dane Hartman but in reality written by several authors. Using lurid, pulpy titles such as Death on the Docks, Blood of the Strangers and Massacre at Russian River, the books helped keep the franchise breathing until Eastwood was persuaded to make a fourth cinematic outing. His volte-face was reportedly made in exchange for the studio green-lighting other projects he wanted to do…
In 1983’s Sudden Impact, Harry may be sarcastically called ‘the one constant in an ever-changing universe’, but actually the granite-faced conviction seen in the earlier films has been chipped away. It had been seven years since The Enforcer and the cop is now a notch less arrogant, a touch kinder and a tad more thoughtful.
This was perhaps a necessary switch, given the subject matter and theme of the movie – how badly men can treat women. But age and weariness are also factors. Harry is now in his early 60s, quite a few years older than the mandatory retirement age for real-life police officers, and as the story starts he’s suffering something of a crisis of faith. He even considers quitting the force. When a colleague asks if the current state of society is getting to him, Harry’s answer is bitterly ironic: ‘No, this stuff isn’t getting to me. The shootings, the knifings, the beatings. Old ladies being bashed in the head for their social-security cheques. Teachers being thrown out of a fourth-floor window because they don’t give As. That doesn’t bother me a bit…’ After Harry deliberately provokes a local mobster, out of spite as much as anything, the SFPD brass need to get him away from the heat. So they send him upstate to look into the background of a guy who was murdered after an apparent lovers’ tryst…
Clint Eastwood: In the seven years between appearances as Harry Callahan, Eastwood had directed four movies – cop film The Gauntlet (1977), drama Bronco Billy (1980), action thriller Firefox, and Depression-era tale Honkytonk Man (both 1982), all of which he starred in – and also worked as an actor on the comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978), its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), and the prison-break thriller Escape from Alcatraz (1979; a reunion with Dirty Harry director Don Siegel). He was by now part of the Hollywood establishment: a gold-standard movie star *and* a tried-and-tested filmmaker; someone who could control his own destiny.
Slightly surprisingly, then, Sudden Impact is the only Dirty Harry film directed by Eastwood himself. He’d wanted his dual career path from an early stage. While starring in TV show Rawhide he asked to helm some episodes, but was turned down, so it was only once he achieved movie fame in the late 60s that he was able to leverage directing gigs. His first feature was the thriller Play Misty for Me (released in 1971, the same year he first played Harry Callahan) and – at the time of writing – the 93-year-old Eastwood is currently making his 40th. His films are often distinguished by their economy and a no-frills focus on story. Eastwood has never been a director keen on visual pyrotechnics, elaborate camera moves or hyper editing; his style is to-the-point and clean. Some people have praised this efficiency, applauding Eastwood for not overthinking the format. Others, including a few colleagues, have complained that he’s too eager to settle for ‘good enough’ and that his work sometimes lacks finesse.
Villains:
* Of all the Dirty Harrys, Sudden Impact gives the most attention to its ‘villain’. We get to know Jennifer Spencer far more deeply than Scorpio or any of the other previous antagonists; we understand her and sympathise with her on a much more primal level… Jennifer is an artist exhibiting her intense, challenging paintings at a San Francisco gallery in an exhibition called Dark Visions. ‘A howl of anguish,’ says the gallery owner appreciatively, and we soon learn where that anguish came from. Ten years earlier, Jennifer and her sister Elizabeth were subjected to an horrific ordeal. They were gang-raped under a boardwalk in the seaside town of San Paulo, an attack we see in a brutal, unforgiving flashback. Now, having randomly encountered one of the rapists in the street, Jennifer is on a mission to execute all the perpetrators. After killing the first guy in a car in San Francisco, symbolically shooting him in the groin (‘Some stiff’s got himself a .38-calibre vasectomy,’ jokes a cop at the crime scene), Jennifer moves back to San Paulo. Under the cover of doing some historical research, she hunts down the others one by one – even continuing her quest after she learns that SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan is on the scene. In fact, she and Harry form a romantic bond after a meet-cute when his pet dog knocks her off her bike.
Jennifer is an embodiment of the eye-for-an-eye mode of justice, and actually has some lines of dialogue that could have been cut-and-paste from Harry’s 1970s speeches on the topic. Harry looks on with both bewilderment and some admiration as she talks about how the system has failed her: ‘Read me my rights? And where was all this concern for my rights when I was being beaten and mauled? And where were my sister’s rights when she was being brutalised?’ For the first time in the series, Harry has found a genuine equal; another character whose opinions on crime, law and order marry up with his. The difference, of course, is that Jennifer is a victim – so therefore her rage and revenge have extra emotional resonance.
Cast as Jennifer was Sondra Locke, Clint Eastwood’s partner and oft-collaborator. Their relationship had begun in the mid 1970s, when they co-starred in Western movie The Outlaw Josey Wales, but was often tempestuous and broke down after about 14 years in a flurry of bad blood and lawsuits. Eastwood had had affairs, fathered secret children and, she claimed, generally treated her badly. During that time, they also worked together on six films: Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way But Loose, Bronco Billy, Any Which Way You Can and Sudden Impact. But after the split, Locke’s film career dried up. She sued Eastwood, accusing him of arranging a sham deal with Warner Bros which would tie Locke to an exclusive contract but not actually give her any work. Eastwood settled out of court.
* The movie’s true villains, of course, are the rapists who inflict such a savage attack on Jennifer and Elizabeth. This loathsome group includes George Wilburn (Michael Maurer), whom Jennifer kills in San Francisco; Ray Parkins (Audrie J Neenan), the coarse and sadistic female member of the gang; Mick (Paul Drake), the leader and most violent of the bunch; and Alby (Matthew Child), who was so traumatised by the night, and felt such guilt, that he later crashed his car into a wall and has ever since been catatonic.
Other notable characters:
* As the film begins, Harry attends the court case of a clearly guilty thug called Hawkins (Kevyn Major Howard). However, in a speech that echoes the DA from the 1971 Dirty Harry, the judge is forced to throw out the case because Harry acquired the key evidence illegally. Outside the court room, Harry makes his feelings known. Grabbing the punk by the cheap lapel, he snarls some prime cop-movie dialogue: ‘To me, you’re nothing but dog shit, you understand? A lot of things can happen to dog shit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind or it can be stepped on and squashed. So, take my advice: be careful where the dog shits you!’
* Threlkis is a Mafia don who’s attending his granddaughter’s wedding at a swanky hotel when Harry breezes in, specially to rile the old man. In front of Threlkis’s family, Harry discusses the murder of a prostitute and drops (untrue) hints that she’d told the cops who was after her. Shaken by the provocation, Threlkis has heart attack, keels over… and, after Harry walks away dispassionately, dies. The character is played by Michael V Gazzo, who in 1974 had given a fine, Oscar-nominated performance in The Godfather Part II as a Mafia underling who rats out his colleagues.
* Harry is thereafter hassled by two sets of heavies – goons who work for Threlkis and friends of Hawkins. These two desultory subplots may be half-hearted, but they support the series theme of how justice isn’t always foolproof. They also inject some heat into the film before the main case takes Harry’s attention.
* Harry’s bosses at the SFPD include Captain Briggs (Bradford Dillman), Lt Connelly (Michael Currie) and an unnamed commissioner (Bill Reddick). Slightly oddly, Dillman had played the not-dissimilar Captain McKay in The Enforcer – but now has the same character name as the captain in Magnum Force. The writers surely didn’t get mixed up and give a returning character the wrong name?!
* Jennifer’s sister, Elizabeth (Lisa Britt), has been catatonic in hospital ever since the attack 10 years earlier. When Jennifer visits her, the doctors say there’s nothing physically wrong but Elizabeth is stuck in a vegetative state due to her trauma. As is the way with fictional representations of this condition, the actress plays her scene with a trace of sadness across her face – implying that Elizabeth understands her situation all too well.
* Chief Lester Jannings runs the police in San Paulo, and clashes with outsider Harry on more than one occasion. Jannings warns him, threatens him, tells him to get out of town – even resorting to that age-old US-cop-story cliche of pointing out that Harry doesn’t have any jurisdiction (because he’s not in San Francisco any more). We eventually learn why Jannings is so highly strung. He knows all about the attack on Jennifer and Elizabeth, and his son was there at the time: the now-disabled Alby… Pat Hingle, who plays Jannings, was a pal of Eastwood’s, having co-starred with him in Hang ‘Em High (1968) and The Gauntlet (1977). Later in the 80s, he began an eight-year stint as another police boss: Commissioner Gordon in the Batman movies.
* Officer Bennett (Mark Keyloun) is San Paulo’s junior cop who provides Harry with some assistance and clues. He feels he owes the older man: upon his arrival in town, Harry had saved Bennett’s life from a gun-totting robber. San Paulo is a small place, all the better for the coincidences the film needs to keep its plot moving. For the filming, the real city of Santa Cruz stood in for the fictional San Paulo. The vampire flick The Lost Boys shot there a few years later: the same wooden roller-coaster features in both films.
Albert Popwell: The character actor’s first scene is a fake-out, trading on his previous roles in this series (robber, pimp, revolutionary) to make you think he’s going to be a bad guy. As Harry practises his aim at a make-do firing range in the woods, a mystery man appears in the distance. He draws a gun as he approaches Harry stealthily, but then Harry swivels round, huge handgun at the ready… We then realise that Horace (Popwell) is a cop. He’s Harry’s partner, in fact, and was sneaking up on him as a joke. The two share a chat that at times feels like a fetishised advert for guns, and Horace also calls his friend Jamf, which he eventually confirms stands for Jive-ass Motherfucker. Later, after Harry has gone to San Paulo, Horace sends him a pet dog as a companion – a bulldog which Harry names Meathead. (The dog switches gender from scene to scene.) Horace himself later arrives in town for visit, but before he can find Harry he encounters Mick the rapist, who kills Horace as a warning.
Music: Composer Lalo Schifrin is back, having missed The Enforcer, and his score is very much a bifurcated affair. Tension and mood are handled exceedingly well, creating a knife’s-edge suspense to many scenes focused on Jennifer and her campaign. When called upon to be more upbeat, however, we are unmistakably in the 1980s. Synth drums, Seinfeld bass slaps and even some hip-hop vinyl scratches have not dated well.
Key moments: Every Dirty Harry film has an early sequence, unrelated to the main plot, which serves to demonstrate the hero’s steely ability to deal with criminals. In the original movie, Callahan stumbles across a bank robbery; in Magnum Force, he happens to be at the airport when a plane is seized by terrorists; in The Enforcer, he drives a car through the window of a liquor store that’s being robbed. Here, we get a scene that includes the most memorable dialogue of the whole series.
Dropping into a diner to buy his regular coffee, Harry is distracted by his newspaper so doesn’t notice that the waitress is trying to silently convey a message to him by putting a huge amount of sugar in his cup. Walking outside and taking a sip, Harry realises immediately that something is up, so sneaks around the back of the building to creep in unseen. The diner is being robbed by a gang who, as well as the cash on site, have realised that they can relieve all the customers of their wallets. (This is the same plan Pumpkin and Honey Bunny think up in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction.) But then Harry appears. At first he’s as calm and commanding as ever, then he starts shooting – risking the patrons’ lives to subdue the gang. When there’s just one criminal left, it’s a standoff – will the creep go for his own gun? ‘Go ahead,’ snarls Harry. ‘Make my day.’ As terse, effective, character-illustrating dialogue goes, this example is one of the greats.
The line was probably written by John Milius, who had also worked on the scripts for the first two Dirty Harry films and was hired to polish Sudden Impact before production, though other writers have claimed credit too. The phrase quickly entered the pop-culture lexicon, being quoted by President Ronald Reagan in a speech about taxes in 1985, by Michael Keaton’s title character in the 1988 horror-comedy film Beetlejuice, and by Marty McFly in 1990’s Back to the Future Part III. Eastwood himself reprised the line during a bizarre and rambling speech given at the 2012 Republican National Convention when he improvised a satirical dialogue with President Barack Obama (who was represented on stage by an empty chair).
Review: There’s a cool cinematographic style, edging towards film noir, running through Sudden Impact. An early scene is filmed at dusk and features a slowly creeping camera as well as evocative close-ups of Jennifer’s eyes as she pretends to seduce one of the rapists so she can murder him. This combination of sex and violence is very Hitchcockian, as is the Bernard Herrmann-type score, and surely it wasn’t a coincidence that the scene takes place within sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, a key location from Hitch’s San Fran-set masterpiece Vertigo.
Elsewhere, the influence of another master director can be detected. Whereas all the Dirty Harry sequels copy the earthy, unsentimental mood set by original director Don Siegel, Sudden Impact also contains something of the operatic and the expressionistic – a tone Eastwood learnt while working with Italian supremo Sergio Leone in the 1960s. Vital scenes, such as those from the killer’s point of view, are staged with a theatrical panache, which really pull us into the drama and the suspense. The film uses big fat close-ups of Jennifer’s eyes as we go in to flashbacks to the night she and her sister were brutalised – *so* Spaghetti Western – while an echo of Leone’s playfulness comes in the form of comedy: a cop eats a limp hot dog while talking about a guy who’s had his dick shot off. And then the finale features a blisteringly arch shot of Eastwood, backlit so he’s a silhouette, with his phallically symbolic .44 Magnum automag by his side: the very image of an avenging angel.
Away from the more flamboyant moments, the film impresses even further. Action and drama are balanced really well, and there’s even room for some humour. Dialogue scenes are constructed unfussily and efficiently, the storytelling has clarity and texture, and the emotional power of the central plot really socks home. There are also, to be fair, one or two line flubs from Eastwood himself. (Was he rushing his own close-ups?) But thanks to Eastwood, screenwriter Joseph Stinson, cinematographer Bruce Surtees and the cast, the film is just tremendously staged and structured.
All this craft elevates a movie that is part police-procedural, part revenge-o-matic, but the biggest reason for the success is Jennifer Spencer. Sudden Impact is not a film built on intrigue. We the audience always know more than nominal lead character Harry, because really the protagonist is Jennifer – she’s who we identify with, follow, maybe even cheer on when we shouldn’t. Sondra Locke, maligned by some critics, actually gives a terrific, watchable performance that’s full of suppressed fury. It’s not just her hair colour that makes Jennifer feel like a Hitchcock blonde – there’s also her enigmatic coolness, which is clearly masking a turbulent interior. That interior is dramatised exceedingly well, through both Locke’s performance and Eastwood’s direction. The movie actually began life as an unrelated thriller intended as a Sondra Locke vehicle, before being retooled as a Harry Callahan sequel. In some ways, that emphasis was never lost.
Nine bigger and bigger waves of corruption, apathy and red tape out of 10
Next: The Dead Pool
Ian Farrington 