Dirty Harry Collection

Retro

TAKE 1: One Man’s Opinion

…because film is largely subjective

by Frederick William Springer III

 

 

Dirty Harry Collection

Release Date:  16 February 2010                                                             Runtime:  -        

Review Date:  4 February 2013                                                                Series Rating:  4 (of 6)

     After I had my first Rocky experience, I then immersed myself in the world of Harry Callahan for the first time.

     To me, the first Dirty Harry is the best.  I liked the day-in-the-life-of-a-cop feel following Harry (Clint Eastwood) around.  And the bad guy, the Scorpio Killer played by Andrew Robinson was different, sufficiently deranged.  Magnum Force was slower paced (a little too slow for my taste) and the ultimate villain was predictable, but still a decent flick.  The play between Harry and his new partner Kate (Tyne Daly) was a fun addition to The Enforcer, my 2^nd favorite in the series.  Sudden Impact follows, an interesting storyline.  And the series wraps up with The Dead Pool, wherein I was surprised to see Jim Carey and Liam Neeson (pleasantly surprised in the case of the latter).

     The only gripe I had with the series was it never seemed to keep track of who Harry’s boss was.  In one installment it would be one person (Lt. Bressler), that person absent in the next film but suddenly back in another but then gone for the rest.  Then, to make things more confusing, one actor played a superior Captain in two films but had a different name each time.  Adding another level of confusion, in the fourth film, that particular Captain has the same name as the Lieutenant that was killed in the second film.

     Likewise, Albert Popwell had different roles in the first 4 films.  The first two were very brief bit-parts that I admit, even watching them back to back, I hadn’t made the connection, not even when I saw him in the 3^rd film.  However, in the 3^rd and 4^th films he has substantially larger roles so when he first appears in Sudden Impact I thought he was reprising his role from The Enforcer only to quickly learn that he was a new character—a cop, rather than on the other side of the law as he was previously.

     Also, I think it was in the 3^rd film, Harry started to use a new catchword—“marvelous” ad nauseam when he hadn’t used it at all (to my recollection) in the previous 2.  Likewise, in the next installment another catchword was introduced, though, thankfully not as oft repeated.

     Those aside, which were relatively minor factors in the scheme of things, I enjoyed my introduction to Dirty Harry.

     My ratings are as follows:

Dirty Harry (5)

Magnum Force (3.5)

The Enforcer (4)

Sudden Impact (3.5)

The Dead Pool (4)

Taking the average leaves us with a 4 for the series.