The Enforcer | | Cast : | Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly | | Director : | James Fargo | | Studio : | Warner Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | December 22, 1976 | | DVD Released Date : | September 02, 2003 | | Language : | Unknown (Dubbed), English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | June 09, 2005 | | Summary | Clint Eastwood in his third Dirty Harry Outing | Content
 | In the first movie in this series, "Dirty Harry," Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) hunted a serial killer. In the second movie Detective Callahan went after a group of vigilante cops. To expand the scope of those deserving of Harry's attentions, this movie adds domestic terrorists, who really are little more than glorified kidnappers and thieves.
Clint Eastwood had fully established Harry Callahan's role by this third movie, so most viewers knew what they were getting. However, near the beginning of the movie several vignettes are offered to show Harry Callahan in all his stylistic glory. We see Harry kick a man who appears to be having a heart attack, admonishing him to "get up," to the chagrin of bystanders. We see Harry deal directly and violently with an armed group of robbers by giving them a car when they requested it. We also see Harry try to make new detective candidates understand the real world while being typically politically incorrect.
While Clint Eastwood is reminding fans of Dirty Harry what kind of person he is, there is a group of people who initially appear to be after some sort of "power to the people," but are in reality being led by Bobby Maxwell to do a bit of old-fashioned murder and mayhem, with the goal being large quantities of money.
Eventually the supposed terrorists and Dirty Harry must intersect, and that intersection is provided by an encounter between the criminals and Lt. Al Bressler (Harry Guardino), Harry's most recent partner. Bressler and his new partner encounter the robbers at a warehouse containing arms, where they have already killed one man. When the robbers critically injure Bressler we know that Harry will track them down and bring them to his own unique style of justice.
The movie drags a little while Harry is trying to locate the crooks. During this time we are treated to Harry's own cold opinion of bumbling politicians and what might be Harry's opinion of women. One scene to watch for is when his new partner, Inspector Kate Moore (Tyne Daly), stands behinds a LAWS rocket as it is being prepared for test firing.
The movie speeds up again when the crooks kidnap the Mayor (John Crawford) and Harry finally determines they are on Alcatraz Island. Callahan and Moore head out to bring the bad guys to justice and to rescue the Mayor, with the action remaining constant to the end.
The interactions between Harry and Kate are quite interesting. Harry has no respect for Kate initially, not because she is a woman, but because she has no experience in the field. The movie goes out of its way to explain that Harry would treat anyone with Kate's level of experience the same way, male or female. However, Harry begrudgingly begins to accept Kate as a partner, and by the end of the movie Harry has developed a greater respect for Kate than for the Mayor, and all the other politicians in this movie. The end scene firmly establishing that respect and is one of the rare emotionally moving scenes in the Dirty Harry series.
I have always considered the Dirty Harry movies to be a comparison of how we sometimes perceive criminals are treated versus the way we would like to see them treated, especially considering the violence criminals perpetrate on others. Of course, such behavior falls into the category of fanciful thought, because Harry's actions often border on being illegal, and in real life it is hard to constrain such violence to the criminals. Still, these movies can be enjoyable to watch.
This particular movie is dated and the pacing is slow in places. This movie is well below the level of the original, and is a bit weaker than the second movie. However, it remains a Dirty Harry movie, and they can be addictive.
Several scenes in this movie are humorous or unbelievable. When Harry leaves a government building through a metal detector he does not set it off. When Bressler and his partner approach the warehouse being robbed by the terrorists, why did Bressler continue to proceed once he knew how many people were involved? Then his partner stands in front of the crooks speeding vehicle as it bears down on him during their escape. The Mayor's driver should have turned the limousine the opposite direction from the way he turned, and simultaneously called for help, instead of turning the way he did. However, these implausibilities help set up the confrontation between Harry and the crooks. Could the plotting have been more believable? Probably, but that would have required more care in development of the plot, and apparently speed was more important than quality in this movie.
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| Rating | | | Date | May 14, 2005 | | Summary | THE COWBOY WAY | Content
| You gotta give Harry Callahan credit for taking the law seriously. When hoods robbing a liquor store demand a car, he gives them one; he doesn't smile much but he makes great wisecracks; and Clint Eastwood made five of these movies, all of which basically show us the cowboy's way is probably the best way to deal with the loonies he's given to chase. In this one, Harry goes after a supposed citizen's group who are really nothing more than a bunch of psychopaths killing for money. This group is even supported by a young Catholic priest, and in one ironic scene, Harry kneels in the communion line just to tick he priest off. Tyne Daly is very good as Harry's partner, a big issue in the seventies, when female cops were far and few between. A talented bunch of character actors lend good support: Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, John Crawford and Albert Popwell particularly. The movie is dated in its music and in some of its philosophies, but the Dirty Harry movies were not meant to be great social commentaries; they were a vehicle for the star power of Eastwood and giving the bad guys their due whether it was politically correct or not. And in that case, THE ENFORCER delivers. |
| Rating | | | Date | January 17, 2005 | | Summary | DIRTY HARRY & THE LADY COP | Content
| is the basic premise of the third installment in the series. THE ENFORCER tackles some mid-1970's issues, most notable women being indoctrinated into mainstream law enforcement and the front line men having to accept their presence. The times they were changing, but Clint keeps Harry Callahan true to the old guard: when in doubt, shoot. Plenty of action in this nominal storyline about a group of west coast revolutionaries, who Harry discovers to be just a group of street thugs looking for easy money and piling up bodies along the way for their own enjoyment. They meet with the rath of Callahan in predictable fashion. But along the way, you get a first rate performance from Tyne Daley, solid work by Harry Guardino and some hysterical dialogue, whether it was intended to be that way or not. |
| Rating | | | Date | October 16, 2004 | | Summary | Dirty Harry and a female partner face hippie revolutionaries | Content
| In the original "Dirty Harry," Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) went after a serial killer and in the "Magnum Force" sequel he went after vigilante cops. To balance the latter, with its liberal nightmare, the third film in the series, "The Enforcer," offers up a conservative counterpart by having the villains be long-haired hippie freaks in something called the Ecumenical Liberation Army (i.e., think about Tanya, a.k.a. Patty Hearst, and the SLA). The obvious point is that when it comes to be judge, jury, and executioner, Dirty Harry does not make distinctions, ideological or otherwise.
On the one hand the villains in "The Enforcer" are the weakest of any of the films in the series, but then the ELA is only Dirty Harry's target and not his opponent. That would be Kate Moore (Tyne Daly). The film begins with another example of how Dirty Harry has this bad habit of going after criminals on the streets of San Francisco in his own special way (hey, criminals ask for a car, Harry gives them a car), which always gets him punished by being transferred from Homicide to something less fun like the Personnel department, which is where he ends up this time, working on the promotion board. When he first Moore she is up for a promotion and although he puts her through the wringer, making clear his disdain for the idea that a woman can be a good cop, the politics of the time not only ensure that she gets promoted to fullfill some quota, but the ironic frame of the film means she ends up being Harry's partner when he is put back on the street so that he has a chance to go around and shoot more people, who, this time around at least, tend to start shooting first so that it is more self defense than natural orneriness when Harry starts firing back with greater accuracy and bigger bullets.
Moore surprises Harry because she is not stupid, either in what she says or does, and manages to learn from him despite his attitude and unwillingness to explicitly teacher her anything about the job. Of course, in due time she actually saves Harry's life and he is forced to mumble something about how he could have a worse partner than Moore. Of course, in retrospect we are not surprised that Tyne Daly, who went on to win four Emmys (including three in a row) for her consummate performance as Mary Beth Lacey on "Cagney & Lacey), can hold her own with Clint Eastwood. Given how laughable the hippie revolutionaries are this film could have ended up being a big joke without her performance and the chemistry she has with the star, which is made all the more impressive by the fact that there is absolute nothing sexual about their relationship.
The best parts of this movie are Harry and Moore establishing their relationship and becoming a team. These are the scenes that have not only the most humor, as Harry's chauvinism runs into Moore's competence, but also that actually bet beyond the facade of the character of Dirty Harry. This is what makes many of the action sequences, in contrast, to seem so cartoonish, especially in the film's end game when the mayor is kidnapped and Harry gets to use a bazooka during the final shootout on Alcatraz Island. It might seem strange that the interpersonal relationship is the best part of a Dirty Harry movie, but that is the part of "The Enforcer" that gets five stars, while the violence that was supposed to be the big attraction gets only a three (and the film almost loses another star because of the costumes and music, even more so now that they are both so outdated). |
| Rating | | | Date | October 05, 2004 | | Summary | Mediocre Dirty Harry | Content
| I think that 1976's "The Enforcer" is where the Dirty Harry series quit trying to be about something. Part one was about how inadequate the law can be in some extream cases. Part two was about the police vigilantes. But this is not really about anything. The story is about extream radicals who are terrorizing the San Francisco area, not for any lofty ideals, but for money. Clint Eastwood was by this time a major action star, and all of a sudden it was not impotant for him to be in a good movie, just in a profitable one. And it really shows. The acting is wooden, the camera work is nothing special, just point and shoot. If there was any good sequences it was the last showdown in Alcatraz Island; that was fast paced and exciting. All though Eastwood was going through the motions, his new partner was really good. Tyne Daily plays Callahan's most resiliant and memorable partner. She is a good cop, just promoted past her abilities. If given time, she could have been a good police officer. All in all this was pretty poor entry, the weakest of the series. |
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