Sudden Impact was the point when the Dirty Harry series lost it for me.
I love the first two movies in the series, but after 1973’s Magnum Force, the quality of each film dipped and the character of Harry became progressively both more reactionary and all-conquering – with the movies differentiated as much by the level of ordnance Harry gets to use to wipe the out the cardboard caricature baddies as anything else.
The third movie, The Enforcer, is far from great, but Sudden Impact (which was the only Harry movie Clint directed himself) was a significant further step downwards. Its main legacy is it gave Harry a fresh (and subsequently much parodied) new catch-phrase: “Go ahead, make my day.”
This was the period when every Clint movie seemed to also include his girlfriend Sondra Locke, who plays a vengeful rape victim. I found the ending, where they walk off together arm in arm, somewhat disturbing given by this point Harry knows full well that she has executed several men in cold blood – guilty bad men, for sure, but nonetheless it does seem a rather unsubtle swingeing endorsement of vigilante violence.
Clint at this point seemed to have a stable of character actors he worked with regularly. One other curiosity of the Harry movies is that the actor Albert Popwell features in all the instalments up to this point playing different characters in each- a gunman, a pimp, a Black revolutionary and in this movie, he graduates to playing Clint’s cop buddy. (He doesn’t survive long in this one.)
Bad as Sudden Impact is, it is a masterpiece compared to the final Harry movie The Dead Pool, which was pretty much a parody of itself. Thankfully Clint hung up his .44 Magnum after that one.