Harry Callahan Kills Many in Sudden Impact
Inspector Callahan feels hemmed in by the law he represents. Sudden Impact (1983), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood in the fourth film featuring "Dirty Harry," makes it easy for the audience to understand who's good and who's bad, except that trigger-squeezing mayhem caused by a grim cop lacking the patience to negotiate isn't necessarily beneficial to peace, in my opinion. Granted, he puts down "punks," wiping out in one early scene at least five young Black men holding up a diner, before walking away without receiving more than a scolding, and orders to take a few days off.
Meanwhile, the more interesting subplot--a story crossing paths with Harry later on to become the main plot--deals with Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), an artist commissioned to refurbish an old merry-go-round in a small city near San Francisco. Nearby in this amusement park is the site of a crime committed ten years before against Jennifer and her younger sister Beth. They were raped by five men, with a woman (Audrie J. Neenan) egging them on. Beth has been catatonic for years; Jennifer tracks down their victimizers, .38 caliber revolver in hand. The plot, similar to Coffy, starring Pam Grier--a revenge story about an older sister going after the heroin traffickers who put her little sister in a fatal coma--deviates in that Jennifer Spencer, unlike Pamela Coffin, has a guardian angel in the form of Harry Callahan and his big gun.
Jennifer's killing method is to shoot her rapists in their penises before shooting them in their heads. Her artwork, apart from her nice designs for the merry-go-round horses, is heavy on red. One self-portrait resembles Edvard Munch's The Scream.
Callahan gets to know her as he works the first case involving the "cock-shot" man, is sent to fictional San Paulo where he runs into more "red tape," this time from a police chief evidently hiding something. The chief's own son participated in the rapes, felt so guilty about it that he rammed his car into a wall with resulting paralysis and brain damage. Jennifer can't bring herself to shoot his penis and head, but she's interrupted in any case by the last creep and his two brothers-in-law, all three of whom end up with large Dirty Harry bullets ripping up their bodies.
I'm jumping around in the film's chronology, but whenever Harry shows up in a scene, something violent or irritating to Harry is bound to happen, whether it's fatal for someone or whether he's just thwarted by normal bureaucratic methods.
This is the film containing the famous line Ronald Reagan used in some speech: "Go ahead, make my day." In Harry's case, he'd experience an emotional highlight if he could shoot someone to death. He's basically a nutcase with a powerful handgun; or, depending on one's politics, a symbol of law as it should be practiced. I didn't count, but I think he kills at least fifteen people in this movie, though we never see him filling out paperwork, testifying in court, or getting questioned by other cops on the details of shootings he's involved in. He never has to temporarily turn in his gun. He does get yelled at by the Police Commissioner, but they end up just giving him a vacation--which he doesn't want to take. Even when he's on vacation he kills three people.
He gets close to Jennifer Spencer, fucks her, and in the end saves her life, also framing her last surviving rapist for all the murders she committed. The neat wrap-up at the end begs the question: is Harry's solution of pinning the murders on one of the rapists going to hold up? I guess we must assume it does, because the film is essentially a cartoon.
What stands out most is Sondra Locke's performance. Eastwood directs her scenes with a sense of film noir suspense atmosphere, with music charged with a 1940s melodrama-type energy. Sondra Locke, blonde and pale like Veronica Lake, seems like a classic femme fatale getting back at the men who wronged her. The film's philosophical thrust suggests we should agree with Eastwood that Jennifer's vigilantism is just and maybe it is, as long as it's confined to a movie.
Lady Snowblood, reviewed earlier in this blog, also depicts a woman seeking vengeance for the past crimes of others--in her case, it's her mother she's avenging. The Japanese film works much better than Sudden Impact because the viewer is an intimate witness to the avenger's development as a fighter, as someone who's trained to carry out killings. Jennifer Spencer somehow acquires the personality of a cold-blooded killer but we don't see how that happens. As good as Sondra Locke is in this film (she's the best performer in it), her character remains too much on the surface. That she needs a man--Harry Callahan--to complete her mission of eliminating her victimizers falls flat. We've seen this kind of solution before. Harry arrives with his big gun and blasts the shit out of her final three antagonists.
Another problem: why would Harry Callahan want to spend any time with a woman who has shot three men in their penises? By the time he has sex with her, he's formed at least some idea that she's worth consideration as the murder suspect he seeks. He's seen her intense self-portrait showing expressionistic torment.
This lack of delving more deeply into Callahan's motivations regarding this enigmatic woman amounts to one of the movie's failures. Jennifer Spencer is the most interesting character, but it's also a Dirty Harry story, so I guess it was decided to not go too far in the direction of deep psychological exploration; just pave that abyss over with a revenge tale anybody can understand. Make the men in the audience uncomfortable with the bullets to the penis. Somehow that's worse than the numerous gunshots slammed into Harry Callahan's targets, from petty criminals to vicious rapists and murderers.
The worst thing of all in this fictional universe of five films, apparently, is the inhibiting "red tape" of "bureaucrats." The legalese, the "punks" getting off on technicalities. Cops should be free to do whatever the fuck they want to keep the city safe. Callahan exemplifies this idea, agreed to by then President Reagan.
That should tell us how fucking crazy a notion it is.
Vic Neptune
Inspector Callahan feels hemmed in by the law he represents. Sudden Impact (1983), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood in the fourth film featuring "Dirty Harry," makes it easy for the audience to understand who's good and who's bad, except that trigger-squeezing mayhem caused by a grim cop lacking the patience to negotiate isn't necessarily beneficial to peace, in my opinion. Granted, he puts down "punks," wiping out in one early scene at least five young Black men holding up a diner, before walking away without receiving more than a scolding, and orders to take a few days off.
Meanwhile, the more interesting subplot--a story crossing paths with Harry later on to become the main plot--deals with Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), an artist commissioned to refurbish an old merry-go-round in a small city near San Francisco. Nearby in this amusement park is the site of a crime committed ten years before against Jennifer and her younger sister Beth. They were raped by five men, with a woman (Audrie J. Neenan) egging them on. Beth has been catatonic for years; Jennifer tracks down their victimizers, .38 caliber revolver in hand. The plot, similar to Coffy, starring Pam Grier--a revenge story about an older sister going after the heroin traffickers who put her little sister in a fatal coma--deviates in that Jennifer Spencer, unlike Pamela Coffin, has a guardian angel in the form of Harry Callahan and his big gun.
Jennifer's killing method is to shoot her rapists in their penises before shooting them in their heads. Her artwork, apart from her nice designs for the merry-go-round horses, is heavy on red. One self-portrait resembles Edvard Munch's The Scream.
Callahan gets to know her as he works the first case involving the "cock-shot" man, is sent to fictional San Paulo where he runs into more "red tape," this time from a police chief evidently hiding something. The chief's own son participated in the rapes, felt so guilty about it that he rammed his car into a wall with resulting paralysis and brain damage. Jennifer can't bring herself to shoot his penis and head, but she's interrupted in any case by the last creep and his two brothers-in-law, all three of whom end up with large Dirty Harry bullets ripping up their bodies.
I'm jumping around in the film's chronology, but whenever Harry shows up in a scene, something violent or irritating to Harry is bound to happen, whether it's fatal for someone or whether he's just thwarted by normal bureaucratic methods.
This is the film containing the famous line Ronald Reagan used in some speech: "Go ahead, make my day." In Harry's case, he'd experience an emotional highlight if he could shoot someone to death. He's basically a nutcase with a powerful handgun; or, depending on one's politics, a symbol of law as it should be practiced. I didn't count, but I think he kills at least fifteen people in this movie, though we never see him filling out paperwork, testifying in court, or getting questioned by other cops on the details of shootings he's involved in. He never has to temporarily turn in his gun. He does get yelled at by the Police Commissioner, but they end up just giving him a vacation--which he doesn't want to take. Even when he's on vacation he kills three people.
He gets close to Jennifer Spencer, fucks her, and in the end saves her life, also framing her last surviving rapist for all the murders she committed. The neat wrap-up at the end begs the question: is Harry's solution of pinning the murders on one of the rapists going to hold up? I guess we must assume it does, because the film is essentially a cartoon.
What stands out most is Sondra Locke's performance. Eastwood directs her scenes with a sense of film noir suspense atmosphere, with music charged with a 1940s melodrama-type energy. Sondra Locke, blonde and pale like Veronica Lake, seems like a classic femme fatale getting back at the men who wronged her. The film's philosophical thrust suggests we should agree with Eastwood that Jennifer's vigilantism is just and maybe it is, as long as it's confined to a movie.
Lady Snowblood, reviewed earlier in this blog, also depicts a woman seeking vengeance for the past crimes of others--in her case, it's her mother she's avenging. The Japanese film works much better than Sudden Impact because the viewer is an intimate witness to the avenger's development as a fighter, as someone who's trained to carry out killings. Jennifer Spencer somehow acquires the personality of a cold-blooded killer but we don't see how that happens. As good as Sondra Locke is in this film (she's the best performer in it), her character remains too much on the surface. That she needs a man--Harry Callahan--to complete her mission of eliminating her victimizers falls flat. We've seen this kind of solution before. Harry arrives with his big gun and blasts the shit out of her final three antagonists.
Another problem: why would Harry Callahan want to spend any time with a woman who has shot three men in their penises? By the time he has sex with her, he's formed at least some idea that she's worth consideration as the murder suspect he seeks. He's seen her intense self-portrait showing expressionistic torment.
This lack of delving more deeply into Callahan's motivations regarding this enigmatic woman amounts to one of the movie's failures. Jennifer Spencer is the most interesting character, but it's also a Dirty Harry story, so I guess it was decided to not go too far in the direction of deep psychological exploration; just pave that abyss over with a revenge tale anybody can understand. Make the men in the audience uncomfortable with the bullets to the penis. Somehow that's worse than the numerous gunshots slammed into Harry Callahan's targets, from petty criminals to vicious rapists and murderers.
The worst thing of all in this fictional universe of five films, apparently, is the inhibiting "red tape" of "bureaucrats." The legalese, the "punks" getting off on technicalities. Cops should be free to do whatever the fuck they want to keep the city safe. Callahan exemplifies this idea, agreed to by then President Reagan.
That should tell us how fucking crazy a notion it is.
Vic Neptune
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