Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector's Edition

Introduction

Clint Eastwood is a legendary figure in Hollywood for his work both in front of and behind the camera, seemingly gliding effortlessly between acting and directorial roles. As an actor, despite making many fine films, Eastwood is mainly famous for two roles. The first was as the anti-hero in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns as the character known (or rather not known) as The Man With No Name. This series of films made him famous, but he didn't become a true star until 1971 with the creation of a new character, earmarked originally for Frank Sinatra; San Francisco police lieutenant Harry Callahan, the cop with the big piece - the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world.


The Dirty Harry series is an incredibly popular series of films, capturing the spirit and politics of the times - although it got a little too superficial in the end. The films themselves have been released both as single editions and as a boxset collection previously, but the Studio's have decided it's time to foist a new box set on the general public.

Dirty Harry and Magnum Force are available as separate single releases, whilst The Enforcer, Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool are only available currently in this set.

Dirty Harry (1971)
See my review here: www.myreviewer.com/default.asp?t=1;a=103954


Magnum Force (1973)
See my review here: www.myreviewer.com/default.asp?t=1;a=104428

The Enforcer (1976)
Callahan has been sidetracked into the Department of Personnel and Records as punishment for yet another huge bill for damages caused in the line of duty, one of his punishments is to sit on a promotions board at a time when the wet but progressive Mayor decides to practice affirmative action and promote more women. Moved back into mainstream policing after the kidnapping of the Mayor, Callahan is initially unimpressed with new partner, the newly promoted, Inspector Kate Moore (Tyne Daly) but gradually gains respect for her. The Mayor's kidnappers are a bunch of hippy revolutionaries with guns, man. They also decided to base themselves up in the deserted prison of Alcatraz a couple of years before Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage find themselves fighting real military revolutionaries.


Sudden Impact (1983)
Dirty Harry returns in the first 80's comeback for Harry Callahan, this time of the trail of a woman reaping vigilante revenge for the rape of both herself and her sister. The woman, Jennifer Spencer(Sondra Locke), is a semi-successful artist with a line of popular but very dark paintings. All growed up but deeply affected by this incident from her teen years, Spencer wreaks revenge on the small town losers who forced themselves on the siblings, resulting in the younger sister being sectioned due to the trauma. Callahan is banished from San Francisco by his superiors who once more decide that he's costing the City purse too much in his pursuit of justice, and ends up on a seemingly minor and unimportant task of following leads in the sleepy backwater town of San Paulo. Big mistake as Callahan single handedly stops crime in Hicksville and then saves the day.


The Dead Pool (1988)
It's 1988 and Harry Callahan is tempted out of movie retirement for a slick albeit superficial story involving slick cockney-accented pony-tailed trashy film director Peter Swan (played by Irishman Liam Neeson) and the culturally popular Dead Pool game - possibly just a twinkling in a script writer's eye at the time, but seen everywhere now. Callahan's name is on the list after seriously hacking off a local crime lord he's trying to keep behind bars and Harry is not best pleased by the addition of partner number 5 in high-kicking Al Quan (Evan C.Kim). Callahan also has a love interest in TV journalist Samantha Walker (Patricia Clarkson) and a featured car chase that is just mind-boggling.

Visual

Pristine, a really good job has been done on remastering the pictures for this release. In fact, I'd probably go as far as to say that they're pristine.

Audio

Good 5.1 Surround tracks on all the films.

The music sounds great, especially Lalo Schifrin's scores for the first two films. Schifrin was replaced by Jerry Fielding for The Enforcer and whilst the score is good, it's nowhere near as good as previously. Schifrin would return for the final two films but got sidetracked from his jazz style by the synthesiser and drum machine style of the 80's and thus the scores for both suffer from dating far more than the older films.

It should also be noted that The Dead Pool features Guns 'N Roses 'Welcome To The Jungle' on a recurring basis, most notably during a rather cheap and tacky '80's promo video sequence filmed within the film.

Extras

For the extras on Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, see the review links above.

The Enforcer

The Business End: Violence In Cinema - a half hour programme on violence with the film industry

Harry Callahan/Dirty Harry: Something Special In Films - 6 minute original featurette that accompanied the films' release in 1976

Commentary by James Fargo


Sudden Impact

The Evolution of Clint Eastwood - 25 minute featurette on Eastwood's career both in front of and behind the camera

Commentary by Richard Schickel

The Dead Pool

The Craft of Dirty Harry - a general but interesting look behind the scenes, examining direction, editing, cinematography and scoring

Dirty Harry trailer gallery - this extra is common to all the films

Overall

Superb collection that has clearly had some attention lovingly poured onto it. Great picure and sound (albeit subjective dependent on your love of cheesy '80's scores…) and a whole raft of varied extras that focus either on Clint Eastwood or Dirty Harry make this a must have.

The only drawback to this collection really is that it becomes obvious that the series gets progressively weaker, despite the second film actually surpassing the original. The Enforcer starts the downward trend, although it's a bad film by any means, but it gets worse as we hit the decade of excess. Whilst Sudden Impact is a great dark story, it never feels like a Dirty Harry film, his appearance in the film kind of feels forced and could really have been any generic Eastwood film of that era (in fact for years, I actually thought The Gauntlet was a Dirty Harry film and it certainly would have fit in this series…). Added to this, it appeared that the producers felt the need to update the series in a typically brash but ill-thought out way; thus we have a very disappointing score from master composer Lalo Schifrin (although even he surpassed this with the dreadful score for The Dead Pool) and a rather unnecessary upgrade of the iconic .44 Magnum to the automag version - it feels wrong.


The Dead Pool is worse, it looks really superficial and Liam Neeson's mockney accent really doesn't help nor does his rather trashy (and typically 80's) film set where he's supposed to be filming his latest crap film called Satan's Hotel. Bizarrely, or maybe not, the two '80's films look much more dated than the previous ones, with maybe The Enforcer as the exception. I'm also in two minds about the car chase with the explosive-laden remote control car, it should be laughable but just seems to stay on the right side of credible (only just though…).

Regardless, Eastwood carries these films effortlessly and they deserve some recognition for the creation and continuation of one of film's most iconic characters, one with more than one catchphrase and a famous soliloquy to boot.

Recommended.