Dean Riesner Archives - Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

The new Siegel is characteristically clean, fascinatingly and unfussily detailed, beautifully paced—a model of movie craftsmanship and a pointed affront to those slovenly wrecking derbies and indiscriminate bloodbaths that have been passing for contemporary action thrillers the last year or so. Indeed, to anyone who has alternately yawned and fidgeted through shapeless and soulless dreck like Badge 373 and The Stone Killer, wondering what it was doing to general audiences and—through them as an economic factor—what it was doing to the future of the genre, the first quarter-hour of Charley Varrick is deeply exhilarating: not only a superior exercise in suspenseful narration but also an up-to-the-moment demonstration that they still can make ’em the way they used to.

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Review: The Enforcer

[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977]

James Fargo’s The Enforcer, with Clint Eastwood billed as “the Dirtiest Harry of them all,” also makes him the limpest, and represents the deterioration of the Dirty Harry Formula—if indeed there ever was such a thing.

Donald Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) told a many-layered story built around two men “above society”: Scorpio, a homicidal maniac whose madness figuratively puts him above society even as Siegel’s camera and mise-en-scène place him there visually, and Inspector Harry Callahan, who is set apart by his badge, the emblem that begins and ends the film. Contrary to the report of many who reviewed the Siegel film, Harry is no cold blooded, fascist executioner. He is sensitive, feels responsibility, takes unto himself the guilt for the inadequacies of the System and its failure to provide proper protection for the people. It is the clash of his individual morality (more that of guardian than vigilante) with the complex sociopolitical realities of the world around him that really informs Siegel’s film, and culminates in Harry’s throwing away his badge and walking into the distance behind the final credits to become one of “the little guys.” Guided by Siegel, one agrees with Harry’s impatience at a System musclebound by its own laws and procedures; yet one also understands the legitimate concern of people like the Chief of Police, the D.A. and the Mayor, and knows that Harry’s impetuousness, however effective in the Scorpio manhunt, would be grotesquely inappropriate in most police work.