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The Aristotelian query ("What makes a man crazy enough to join the cops?") is posed right after Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan negotiates a hostage situation by plowing his vehicle into a storefront. The case at hand has a gang of radicals making off with a vanload of military weapons and kidnapping the mayor, led by a psycho with a penchant for shiving people in the kidneys (DeVeren Bookwalter). In addition to a murdered partner (John Mitchum) and office bureaucracy ("A written request?!"), the inspector's woes also include accepting "the mainstream of twentieth-century thought," i.e., fighting alongside a skirt-wearing rookie (Tyne Daly). After the fierceness of Siegel and Post, James Fargo is a mechanic following blueprints, though the action sequences are staged with enough punch to scratch the travelogue patina for San Francisco's grungy underbelly—a rooftop chase crashes into a porno set, a massage parlor melee spills into a backroom where piles of salacious letters are smooched by lipsticked old biddies. The would-be revolutionaries take refuge in church, the leonine informer (Albert Popwell) sees right through them, it's all about money. The new partner meanwhile endures the coroner's gallows humor, shoots a villainess disguised in nun's habit, and generally "learns to hold her end of the log" while tweaking Callahan about his phallic hand-cannon. The hero's scowl as his superiors congratulate each other on a botched mission is strikingly prophetic of governmental quagmires to come ("Doesn't it bother anybody that there were no weapons found?"), High Noon is properly updated (or degraded, if needed be) to make room for "seven-point suppositories" and Chekhov's rocket-launcher. Eastwood himself takes the next logical step by rolling all three installments into Sudden Impact. With Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman, Samantha Doane, Jocelyn Jones, and John Crawford.
--- Fernando F. Croce |