Star Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel's hugely influential crime thriller is one of three of Eastwood's movies getting a 4K release from Warner Bros. this week.
The city of San Francisco is being terrorised by a sniper who calls himself Scorpio, picks victims at random, and says he will keep killing unless he is paid $100,000. City mayor John Vernon is willing to cough up but reckons without no-nonsense Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) who is frequently happy to ignore the rulebook to see justice is done.
It's almost impossible to understate the effect of DIRTY HARRY on cinema, and especially crime cinema. Responsible not just for a string of sequels, and for inspiring the entire Italian poliziotteschi genre, The Sweeney in the UK, and 1980s action movies in the US, as one of the extras on here states, it brought the Western, and its figure of 'God's lonely man' (thanks John Milius) into the urban environment. It also helps that the film is superbly written, shot and scored, with excellent support performances, especially from,Andy Robinson as the killer. Most iconic of all, of course, is Eastwood himself as Harry, likely the only man who can dress like a geography teacher and still be the essence of cool as he eats a hotdog and blows hoodlums away on a busy city street.
Warners' 4K comes with a couple of new extras and a bunch of archival ones. Generations & DIRTY HARRY is 6 minutes of academics and film-makers of different ages (including millennials) offering their positive opinions of the character. Some balance would have been fun but this is a DIRTY HARRY disc after all. The Cinematography of DIRTY HARRY, like similar pieces on Warners' other 4Ks is eight minutes about DP Bruce Surtees.
Archival material includes a commentary track from Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel, the 87 minutes BBC Arena coproduction from 2000 'Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows', DIRTY HARRY's way: a seven minute piece about the making of the film from 1971, and DIRTY HARRY: The Original, a 30 minute 2001 documentary about the character. Also, and rather out of context, is an 'Interview Gallery' which includes tiny snippets of interview footage left out of that documentary. Consequently we get clips of Patricia Clarkson (2 minutes), editor Joel Cox (3 minutes), Evan Kim (2 minutes), Andy Robinson (2 minutes) and others talking about Eastwood and their involvement with him although you are often left on your own to work out which film they're talking about. Finally from 2021 there's Clint Eastwood: A Cinematic Legacy - Fighting for Justice which is more in the same vein as the 'Reinventing the Western' piece on Warners' other discs, with the same talking heads including Mel Gibson and John Milius as well as Gene Hackman and Shane Black.
Don Siegel's DIRTY HARRY is out on 4K UHD in both regular and posh steelbook editions from Warner Bros. now
No comments:
Post a Comment