THE ENFORCER: I Had Them Dead Bang

The Enforcer (1976) – Directed by James Fargo – Starring Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman, Tyne Daly, DeVeren Bookwalter, John Mitchum, John Crawford, and Albert Popwell.

After the first two really good cop movies, THE ENFORCER presents the Dirty Harry franchise with its first stinker.

THE ENFORCER is the kind of movie that just sort of exists as a tired, would-be-forgotten film if it wasn’t for the connection to the Dirty Harry series. I own THE ENFORCER because it’s part of the Dirty Harry four-pack. There is, of course, five movies in the Dirty Harry franchise, but they don’t include THE DEAD POOL in this collection. I don’t know why that is – maybe it’s a studio thing or a rights thing – but if they’re going to forget that one of the Dirty Harry movies existed, I’ll nominate THE ENFORCER over DEAD POOL all day long.

DIRTY HARRY had Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) feeling he needed to step outside the system to bring justice for victims of crime. MAGNUM FORCE took Callahan and made him a defender (of sorts) of the system. But here in THE ENFORCER, Callahan is just a cop on a case with a rookie partner and a boss all up in his business. It’s a tired film that feels more like an episode of a TV series than a movie. It’s 30 minutes shorter than MAGNUM FORCE and really does feel like a bit of a money grab. There’s no passion here, no philosophical conflict. There’s good guys and bad guys and we might as well be back in the days when studios were producing 462 cheap Westerns a year.

The plot focuses on a group of criminals pretending to be a politically motivated, when all they really want is money. Their names are It Doesn’t Matter, I Don’t Care, Black Guy, Woman Who Dies, Woman Who Lives, and Other People.

By having them not care about the political issues they espouse to the cops and media, THE ENFORCER renders them solely as bad guys and robs the film of its potential conflicted policy. What if they really did believe that by stealing government weapons of destruction (which are being held at a facility less secure than I kept my Playboys when I was in high school) they could enact positive change in the world? That would create some tension in the film and make a subtle shift away from the philosophical questions being asked of cops and put it on the public. We don’t get that, unfortunately, because THE ENFORCER doesn’t want to think.

In the previous two films, Harry’s actions were largely justified for the audience, but this time around, he’s a petulant child thrashing about, causing damage, and acting like a spoiled brat.

He solves a hostage situation by driving his car through the front window of a shop on a city street. There are several gunmen and even more hostages inside, and the gunmen want a car so they can split. Harry gives them a car – his own, by crashing into the building and then getting out and shooting all the bad guys. It’s preposterous, and comes off as the act of a man who doesn’t give a sh*t anymore about anything. Having a nearly burned out Harry Callahan could have worked, too, but there’s nothing here to raise his spirits, to give back to him a sense of passion for his job. We start to see that though his bonding with his new partner, Officer Moore (Tyne Daly), but then she gets killed, too, so the end of the film sees a Callahan even more depressed than at the start.

After getting forced out of Homicide and into Personnel for that stunt, Harry shows up late for the new inspector interviews.

He pouts and grumbles about the Mayor’s decision to force women into the ranks of inspectors, but it’s him who’s causing the most potential future harm to his fellow cops by not being present for every interview. He can strut and stomp all he wants in this scene about how dumb it is for the Mayor to force women cops to move up the ranks when other cops with more experience will get denied, and there’s real meaning, real philosophy, to his way of thinking, but it all comes across as, “I don’t want women in my Boy’s Club.” Harry can barely be bothered to say, “This isn’t about women,” because deep down, that’s what it’s about for him far more than the experience issue.

As bland as ENFORCER is, it’s worth watching just for the performance of Tyne Daly, who’s wonderful throughout. Eager to prove herself, she continually proves herself to Callahan through the film, first with her brains and then later by shooting a bad guy (bad woman, really) who had the drop on Harry as he roughed up a priest who was defending the criminals. The film even gives Daly’s Officer Moore the glory of rescuing the Mayor from the Alcatraz prison where he was being held after his kidnapping, but just as she’s leaving the building, she yells for Harry to get out of the way of another gunman. Harry moves, she gets shot. Harry proves to us that he’s accepted Moore into the Boy’s Club by putting her life ahead of the Mayor’s; he tells her he’s going to get her out of there while the final bad guy is running away with his hostage, but she tells him no, and then she dies a death that would make Bugs Bunny proud.

THE ENFORCER is just a lazy, uninterested film. Watching it is like going out with a formerly impossibly hot woman who thinks all she had to do is show up and the bar and have guys buy her drinks all night. She’s putting in no effort and, truth be told, she doesn’t even want to be there. She’s just doing it because she doesn’t know what else to do. If you were to watch her all night, you’d see a flash or two of the old spark, but not enough to walk over there and buy her a drink.

DIRTY HARRY: Don’t Let Your College Degree Get You Killed

Dirty Harry (1971) – Directed by Don Siegel – Starring Clint Eastwood, Andy Robinson, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, John Mitchum, and John Vernon.

“I know what you’re thinking: “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well do ya, punk?” – Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan

DIRTY HARRY takes the gunslinger and recasts him as the individualistic cop for the contemporary era. No longer just out for himself, the gunslinger now works for the good of everyone inside the system, yet it’s his dissatisfaction with that system that allows him to keep his gunslinger street cred.

The scene quoted above is the most cowboy scene in the entire film, establishing Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) as a modern ‘slinger. He’s sitting in a diner while a bank is being robbed across the street. Still chewing his hot dog, he heads outside, diagonally crosses the intersection, and starts blowing bad guys away. Importantly, Callahan has someone else call for back-up and then when the back-up arrives, Callahan walks away, leaving the uniformed cops with the clean-up.

Like many people in the general public, I knew of Dirty Harry Callahan more than I knew about DIRTY HARRY. I’ve probably seen bits and pieces of every movie in the series, but Dirty Harry is such an iconic character that I feel like I knew him more than I actually did. The fifth movie in the series, THE DEAD POOL, is the only movie I can remember watching, because it’s the only movie released during my own contemporary viewing habits. Of all the movie genres out there, the cop/crime movie comes pretty far down my list of favorites. As a rule, I prefer crime movies from the criminals point of view more than from the cop’s point of view.

That last comment is not prelude to me telling you I was disappointed in DIRTY HARRY because that would be far from the truth. This is a rock solid movie, albeit one that doesn’t quite match its reputation. DIRTY HARRY is like Bullitt and Death Wish in that regard – we hear about “Do you feel lucky?” and the famous car chase and the gun-crazy vigilante/killer and a cultural truth gets built up about these movies, a truth that is largely revealed false when you actually watch the films. Dirty Harry is not some kind of untouchable, lone wolf super cop, Bullitt is not a balls-out action romp, and Death Wish isn’t about the Punisher.

All of these movies take their time and are as much character studies as crime films. It can make watching them both incredibly rewarding and disconcerting, depending on how you want reality to match up with expectations.

In San Francisco, a serial killer calling himself Scorpio (Andy Robinson) uses a sniper rifle to kill a woman in a rooftop pool. Inspetor Callahan is assigned the case and he arrives on the scene chewing gum and exuding an easy confidence. The best part of Eastwood’s performance is how he slowly turns up the pressure on Callahan, with that easy confidence and cocksure attitude slowly giving way to anger and confusion as the film unfolds, and then returns at the end to confidence when he takes Scorpio out after the law has failed to keep the serial killer locked away.

At the core of DIRTY HARRY is the issue of a person’s rights – the rights of the accused versus the rights of the victims. HARRY takes a somewhat easy way out in this regard as there is no question – in his mind, in our mind, in anyone’s mind – that Scorpio is the killer. The result is that we’re clearly set up to see this film completely from the point of view of a frustrated cop who feels let down by the system, and not from a falsely accused individual.

What’s striking is that despite Harry being the bad-ass cop and a bit of a department rogue (why they call him “Dirty” Harry is a running talking point through the film), everyone is on his side. His Lieutenant and the Chief of Police are on his side. When he goes to the see the Mayor (John Vernon) at the start of the investigation, the Mayor is on his side. When he chastises Callahan about an incident from the previous year, Callahan replies, “When an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard; that’s my policy.”

“Intent?” the Mayor asks. “How did you establish that?”

“When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.”

Callahan leaves, but once he’s out of the room, the Mayor admits, “I think he’s got a point.”

Even when the District Attorney has to let Scorpio walk out of jail because Callahan violated the perp’s right, he’s on Callahan’s side, too, telling him that he doesn’t want Scorpio back out on the street any more than Callahan does, but since the cop violated Scorpio’s rights by not reading his miranda rights and “torturing” him (stepping on his injured leg to get information about the location of a kidnapped girl), the DA has to let him out. He’s even brought in a judge to verify his conclusions.

Callahan is disgusted by this, arguing, “What about the girl’s rights? Who’ll speak for her?”

“I will,” the DA tells him, “so long as you let me do my job.”

Creating in the immediate post-1960s era and in the middle of the Vietnam War, DIRTY HARRY is clearly struggling with what the country was struggling with – the sense that “the system” wasn’t working anymore and that the “old normal” was being replaced by a “new normal” that no one had quite figured out, yet. DIRTY HARRY is framed by images of the San Francisco Police Department. The opening images are of a wall of remembrance for San Francisco cops that have lost their lives in the line of duty, and the last scene of the film sees Callahan killing Scorpio and then tossing his badge into the same body of water. It’s a highly symbolic act, equating the system with the criminal as Callahan, in essence, kills both of them.

Make no mistake, Callahan tossing away his badge is an indictment against the country itself. Americans have long embraced and celebrated the idea of the individualistic spirit, and Callahan killing Scorpio on his own time, without the support (or knowledge) of his superiors, and then tossing away his badge is the gunslinger tossing away the idea of his willing capitulation to the system. This isn’t a total rejection of government or nation, but of the operation of government; Callahan isn’t like the conspiratorial nutters today who think Obama is out to take their guns away, as evidence by the fact that everyone in the movie in a position of power above him is on his side. No, this is a rejection of the way the system has (in Callahan’s eyes) put the rights of the criminal over the rights of the victimized.

In Callahan’s eyes, when the system lets the victimized down, it’s okay for the gunslinger to shed his official status as an officer of the system and act on his own.

As the Mayor might say, “I think he’s got a point.”