dirty heelers

Evening at the chateau.
Watching the Dirty Harry movie with Serafina.
It's got something.
Objectionable violence of course.
But something else.
It's what I call the Death Wish sensibility, a name taken from the Charles Bronson vigilante film of the early 1970's.
That whole notion of what happens to the villains if suddenly the nice guys fight back harder than anyone else has ever dared to before.
The same notion is used in Death Wish itself, along with Mad Max, and Die Hard, all of which spawned sequels.
None of the sequels being much good by the way except in the case of Mad Max, when the second film so surpassed the first that it became a work of art.
A visual poem in an action movie.
I'm telling you folks sometimes art doesn't show up where we set traps for it.
Not at the Oscar Ceremonies.
Not at Cannes.
But here.
In this empty violent rubbish.
In fact the only two film directors with any real claims to be artists or poets over the past fifty years are Sergio Leone who directed The Good The Bad And The Ugly, and George Miller who directed Mad Max.
Everything else in the cinema is just pretentious Irish Times drivel.
Don't let anyone tell you different.
So here we are.
Dirty Harry.
An extraordinary film in its way.
Like everything good in cinema, a film that works probably for about ten different reasons.
Cinema is such a collaborative medium.
What have you got in Dirty Harry.
Well Clint was on top of his game.
He was doing what only he could do.
He hadn't yet been debased by his decision to tell his girl friend to abort their unborn children.
The powerful understated charisma was still his.
Clint was at the height of his powers.
Playing the role he was born to play.
What else?
The film was being directed by Don Siegal.
Don Siegal was a Hollywood director who knew a tremendous amount about the American tradition of story telling through film.
His name was never on everyone's lips.
Yet there were few directors who could match him when it came to visual narratives.
And the music.
Lalo Schifrin wrote the music.
It's perfect.
The music works.
Lalo Schifrin is the guy who wrote the Mission Impossible theme.
His Dirty Harry theme is different but just as good.
And the writers.
Two people with the improbable name of Fink.
The Finks.
They wrote a story that hadn't a smidgin of originality in it, but which did everything that had been done before, in ways better than it had been done before.
And the casting.
Whoever cast Dirty Harry did a consummate job.
Everybody is where they're meant to be.
The main actors.
The support.
The bit players.
The extras goddammit.
It all works.
But the violence is objectionable.
Now me and Serena and Paddy Pup and the hamster are watching the most famous scene.
Clint is eating a sandwich at a city diner when he notices a bank robbery taking place across the street.
He walks outside, drawing his Magnum. (Gun, not ice cream or carafe of wine.)
As Clint steps into the street, there is the sound of firing from the bank, and John Fry Chief Executive Officer of the Johnston Press emerges with his henchmen.
Clint starts shooting.
Everything becomes a blur.
Finally only John Fry is left alive.
He is lying wounded on the street, clutching something under his arm that looks like phone tapping equipment.
All the henchman are dead.
Clint strolls towards him.
John Fry starts to reach for his own gun which has fallen near him on the pavement.
Clint utters a gentle forbidding: "Ah ah."
The street goes awful quiet.
"I know what you're thinking punk," says Clint. "Did he satirise me six times last month, or only five? To tell you the truth punk, I'm not too sure myself. In all this confusion, I kind of lost track. But being this is a forty four magnum blog, meaning it had 1444 visitors last month, and not the sort of visitors that you get on Johnston Press websites either, not your type of visitors Fry where each visitor represents you and your friends hitting the refresh bar on your keyboards repeatedly, anyhoo, being this blog had 1444 visitors last month, yeah real actual people, not just fingers, real actual people who recognise good writing when they see it, writing which is so marvellous it could blow your head clean off, I figure you've got to ask youself a question. Do you feel lucky today? Do yah... punk."
The way Clint spat out the word punk at the end seemed to express his true assessment of the merits, business skills, acumen and humanity of the Johnston Press and all who sail in her.
I found it highly amusing.