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When he plays Dirty Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood acts with his pulsating blood vessels. Two veins run down his high forehead like stray hairs on a Gorgon. His jugular throbs with moral indignation over sadistic criminals, liberal judges and guys who put ketchup on hot dogs. For Sudden Impact-Dirty Harry IV, Clint has grown a new worry line: an asp of a blood vessel that snakes across his left temple. Heaven knows he needs it. San Francisco is overrun with thrill-juiced punks and Mafia goons. No sweat, though: Harry has more artillery than the Cubans ever dreamed of stocking on Grenada. Interrupting a stickup in a diner, he aims a Smith & Wesson the size of Mr. T's forearm at an armed robber and grimaces, "Make my day." Then Harry insults a Mob chieftain with such savagery that the old man suffers a fatal heart attack. "Hey," he later shrugs to his apoplectic chief of detectives, "how'd I know he was gonna vapor-lock?"
Such pleasantries occupy the film's first ten minutes; then Harry gets down to business. In the cozy village of San Paulo, a sextet of lowlifes, who make the Manson family look like the Cabbage Patch Kids, are being killed one by one by a method delicately described as "a .38-cal. vasecto-my." The vengeful dispatcher is an artist who had been raped by the San Paulo Six a decade before. Since she is played by Eastwood's frequent co-star Sondra Locke, you can guess what Harry's verdict will be when he catches up with her. Right: the hardhearted cop at long last has found the first criminal he wants to mollycoddle.
"You're a walkin', friggin' combat zone," Harry's boss tells him. "Your ideas don't fit any more." Alas, they do. Dirty Harry is the raging vigilante voice inside every put-upon urbanite. In the past, Eastwood has carried this contradiction within his own antihero character; now Harry has found a comely avatar. Joseph C. Stinson's script says it is O.K. to kill half a dozen people if you have soft blond hair and a righteous grudge. Agree who will. The rest of the audience will enjoy Director Eastwood's knowing cinematic jolts, the outsize hammery of the performances and Big Clint's return to form as a box-office powder keg. —R.C.
GORKY PARK
Novelist Martin Cruz Smith managed two entertaining tricks in Gorky Park: he believably evoked the ordinary life of Moscow as a background to a mystery story, and he created a detective hero, Arkady Renko, who was persuasively motivated by neuroses in his pursuit of the solution to an ugly murder. Dennis Potter's adaptation vitiates both these strengths.