(sirens blaring)
(gun clicking)
(tires screeching)
- Go ahead, make my day.
- Sudden impact was the fourth movie
in the Dirty Harry series
about the rogue cop,
and was also the only
one in the entire series
directed by its star, Clint Eastwood.
By that point, Eastwood had already
directed nine feature films.
His 10th feature film was Sudden Impact.
What's interesting about this movie
is that it was probably
the most successful
of all the Dirty Harry movies.
It began a kind of a
phase in Eastwood's career
when he started to basically turn
his own critical
perspective on the persona
that he had established in earlier movies.
What he wanted to do was to make a movie
that I think was critical
of his own persona
as the right-wing vigilante
figure that was so successful,
and actually so much of
its time in the early 1970s
in the first Dirty Harry movie
and in its followup Magnum Force.
In this case, Dirty Harry Callahan
has been sent because of
his rogue maverick ways
out of his home town of San Francisco,
and he is sent to a smaller town
in order to track down a serial killer.
- It's a murder case, Harry.
- And you're shipping me out.
- Dammit, Callahan, I'm doing you a favor.
You're a walking fricking combat zone.
People have a nasty habit
of getting dead around you.
- This serial killer
has been murdering men,
but murdering men in a most unusual way.
Usually with a bullet to the head
and another one to the groin.
The direction of the film,
it looks really great
but it also, what you can feel is
that thing that comes
up over and over again
in Eastwood movies, which
is a kind of a sort of
a laid back almost indifference
to what is going on.
What Clint thought was funny about himself
may not have reflected what most people
in the world thought was funny,
but he was Clint Eastwood,
and we were willing to basically allow him
to do anything on screen.
He's very comfortable in his stardom,
he knows that he's an icon
as well as anything else,
but the objectionable politics,
the over the top graphic violence
and this weird kind of dichotomy
between horrific violence
and this kind of weirdly
boneheaded comic tone to it
was probably had as much to do
with the success of the
film as anything else.
So I certainly understand what it is
about Clint Eastwood, I
understand why he's an icon,
I understand why people
have loved him for so long,
but I also think Clint Eastwood
has been more interestingly
used by other directors
than when he directs himself.
- [Announcer] What movie
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