Oh this is really good…classic, good tension, directing. Cops kinda incompetent but, yeah I’m digging this, they caught him and…OHFUCKOFF. Come onnnnn…there were a billion crimes they could link him to even before the dead girl. If anything, he beat Harry and revealed himself to Harry. That alone can keep him locked up for a year.
Fuckoffffff…its bad because they could have had their cake and eaten to with some tweaks to the crimes they could link him to. And then he gets beaten to frame Harry??? Come onnnnn…
Andrew Robinson, who played Scorpio, was soooooo over the top. He squealed and giggled while Eastwood huffed and snorted, making the film unintentionally hilarious.
Robinson would go on to portray Elim Garak in ST:DS9.
It has been a while, but last time I watched it I thought it had not aged particularly well. Fun as a exaggerated period piece, but not really great cinema today.
In Dirty Harry…it really wasn’t even about 'Ohhhh their bleeding heart rights!!"
Harry was trying to save the kidnapped girl. And all that crap about ‘a search warrant’…Harry didn’t need a search warrant to enter that room. He was chasing a perp.
And yeah…David Soul and the other cops in Magnum Force were the true fascists.
Btw…I had no idea the funniest line in The Naked Gun came from Dirty Harry (referencing shooting a rapist with a butcher knife)*
Mayor : Drebin, I don’t want anymore trouble like you had last year on the South Side. Understand? That’s my policy.
Frank : Yes. Well, when I see 5 weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That’s my policy.
Mayor : That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of “Julius Caesar”, you moron! You killed 5 actors! Good ones.
Kills a woman
Shoots Harry’s partner
Shoots a kid in the face
Kills a cop
Assaults Harry
Kills a 14 year old girl
They let him go. (Heh. ****ing California DA’s)
Robs and assaults a liquor store owner
Kidnaps a bus driver and a bunch of kids
Mannnnnn…San Fran has trouble digging up $200,000 to pay off Scorpio? All those victims after they let Scorpio walk are going to bankrupt San Fran in payouts.
There’s the scene early in the movie where Harry stumbles across a bank robbery, shoots at the robbers, and then does the whole “did he fire six shots, or only five” speech to the last guy. The guy gives up, and then Harry points his gun at him and pulls the trigger, showing that his gun was actually empty.
That kind of primes the audience for the final chase and shootout at the quarry. Harry chases and shoots at Scorpio as he’s fleeing through the quarry, and finally wounds him. He does the “did he fire six shots or only five” thing again, Scorpio reaches for his gun, and Harry kills him.
I counted the shots in the second shootout, and Harry does, indeed, fire five times before the speech. But the first shootout doesn’t work. I counted the shots there, too, and I think Harry only fires four times before his gun is empty.
I’m curious if anyone has seen this film un-edited. It’s possible that some shots (in both senses of the word) were taken out of the first scene, either for time or for content. Or, maybe the filmmakers didn’t bother with that bit of continuity. This was made in the days before home video, when repeated rewatching (and nitpicking) of movies wasn’t as common. It’s possible they thought nobody would be counting Harry’s shots in the first shootout, so they didn’t bother getting them right.
Does anyone know the answer?
The robber that Harry gets the drop on in the first shootout was played by Albert Popwell. He went on to appear in four of the Dirty Harry films, missing only The Dead Pool.
And The Dead Pool, by the way, inspired the name of Deadpool in Marvel Comics.
Trivia anecdote…
Magnum Force was the first R rated movie I ever saw. I was too young to get in but my mom dropped me off at the multi-plex theater and I paid for one movie and walked into the other.
I’m saying that the attitudes about police in the early 1970s would have caused a different appraisal, much as we interpret Huckleberry Finn with a time frame in mine. I can see a connection between attitudes to police with regard to French Connection, possibly the dystopian Clockwork Orange, set at some time in the future. I’m not sure about the other films you cite.
When they showed the film on TV, you only see Harry fire 4 shots in the bank robbery scene. I remember noticing this, and thinking he should have blown the last robber (“I gotsta know”) away. But when the movie came out on DVD, you can see the un-edited version of the scene, and Harry does shoot 6 times. As I recall, one of the shots doesn’t really hit anything, and I think you only hear the other shot.
I always thought this was a huge goof on the part of the editing for TV people: they just looked for “superfluous” scenes to cut out not realizing how the lack of those 2 shots totally changes ending of that scene.
