Chariddy Shop Cinema #5 : The Enforcer (1976)

Chariddy Shop Cinema #5 : The Enforcer (1976) The only one of the five Dirty Harry movies that I failed to see at the cinema, hence the one that kind of leaves me a tad non-plussed. The original took the crowd pleasing, Nixon’s silent majority pandering view that, with all these lawyers, pen-pushers and do-gooders favouring the perpetrators of crime rather than victims, we needed an anti-hero who could descend to the crims level whilst just barely remaining behind the line of acceptability. He might be as vicious, violent and contemptuous of the rules as his opposite numbers, but he could get the job done with justice prevailing (albeit at a price.) That didn’t stop some critics crying ‘Fascist’! and with Dirty Harry being a box-office success, it was time to forget the ambivalent ending of that first feature and have Harry superseded by a new generation of cops (played by soon to be famous young actors) who also decided to forget the rules (such as they are) and take things a step further by executing criminals without trial in Magnum Force. Harry’s unimpressed. “Pretty soon you’ll be executing your neighbour because his dog pisses on your lawn.” That put things into perspective. So where to go with the third film? Women! Women’s lib! The ‘Frisco mayor is vote-catching via introducing the politically-correct method of quotas. Neanderthal Harry’s ended up on the Personnel Review Board as a result of destroying a restaurant, the villains within and sending innocent bystanders to hospital or the psychiatrist’s couch at great cost to the city. Even perky Tyne Daly fails to raise his enthusiasm. Once a group of nutty psychopaths, masquerading as the People’s Revolutionary Strike Force but actually only really interested in blackmailing San Francisco for millions of dollars, manage to steal a host of weapons and murder Harry’s partner DiGeorgio, he’s whisked back to homicide but has a new sidekick in newly-promoted Ms Daly. The counter-culture lefty loons have kidnapped Mr Mayor and bunked off to Alcatraz for a showdown with Callahan, our lone hope against this kind of ersatz terrorism. Although the film feels a bit second hand (and it takes you a while to dial in to that 1970s sensibility) once you’re there it’s a passable 98 minutes. Clint ambles through it all, but manages to show a softer side in his scenes with Tyne, who also manages to keep her character afloat, not quite the bumbling idiot she might be taken for. There’s a couple of odd swipes at religion, Harry gets on well with the blacks, even if his boss sees them as troublemakers. It’s a stacked deck, but worth a hand or two.