Clint Eastwood revisited Harry Callahan three more times, usually whenever his career was in the dumps. If Dirty Harry was a cultural phenomenon and Magnum Force a respectable follow-up, the rest are uninspired cash-ins. The main law Harry enforces in these sequels is the Law of Diminishing Returns. Given Dirty Harry‘s San Francisco setting, something like The …
Harry Callahan’s next adventure originated with John Milius, Hollywood’s favorite gun fanatic, surfer and “Zen anarchist.” Milius wrote B Movies for American International Pictures before breaking through with two Westerns, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and Jeremiah Johnson. His knack for macho action and pulpy, colorful dialogue fit Dirty Harry perfectly; Milius wrote his draft in 21 days, receiving …
Part I. 1971 was an incredibly violent year for movies. That year saw, among others, Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack, with its half-Indian hero karate-chopping rednecks; William Friedkin’s The French Connection, its dogged cops stymied by well-heeled drug runners; Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, banned for the copycat crimes it reportedly inspired; and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw …
As happened for so many other genres, the 1960s/1970s saw a tremendous creative expansion in crime and cop thrillers. The old Hollywood moguls had died off or retired, most of the major studios were bleeding red ink, attendance had gone off a cliff since the end of WW II, and a new breed of young, …
“When I was a child,” film reviewer Stephen Whitty wrote in “What Happened to Grown-Up Films?” for New Jersey’s state paper, The Star-Ledger, on the day of the Oscars, “most of the big hits in movie theaters were aimed at adults. Now that I’m an adult, most of the big hits in movie theaters are …
Since the earliest days of American cinema there has been a shadowy counterpart to the commercial mainstream: exploitation movies — pictures whose appeal lies in their sensational treatment and leering promotion of often lurid and prurient material. Pre-1960, when mainstream Hollywood worked within severe restrictions on content, exploitation movies offered audiences titillating glimpses of the …
There are two timely justifications for revisiting the career of Clint Eastwood at this particular moment. The most obvious is the premiere of Eastwood’s latest directorial effort, Hereafter, at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. The other is his appearance on the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014 which came …
Under-appreciated throughout much of his career, with his early work made up of catch-as-catch-can projects, his credits meandering from Westerns (The Beguiled, 1971; The Shootist, 1976) to science fiction (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956), war stories (Hell Is for Heroes, 1962), period pieces (The Verdict, 1946), crime stories (Dirty Harry, 1971; Charley Varrick, 1973), …