Dirty Harry The Enforcer And 1976
It goes without saying that even fairly recent successful Hollywood films couldn't be made today. I've already talked about the Jason Bourne films that put the CIA in a darkly threatening and subversive light that's now a bit too topical. By the same token, the Dirty Harry series starring Clint Eastwood not only couln't be made now, but I wouldn't rule out cancel culture taking DVD copies off the market entirely. But recently I saw the third film in that series, The Enforcer (1976), which I think is by far the best and, like the Bourne films, retrospectively revealing. The first Dirty Harry flim, which had that title (1971), had a contemporary, San Francisco-based story, dealing with a Zodiac style serial killer. The second, Magnum Force (1973), wasn't so much rooted in current events and dealt with a police vigilante squad. But The Enforcer took a real issue by the horns, a terrorist group made up of upper-class twentysomethings allied with Lumpenprol...