Movie Review: Magnum Force (1973)

Harry Callahan's second outing is the most ambitious of the original trilogy. Two years after Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood reprises the role of the grizzled San Francisco Inspector, and in Magnum Force he comes face to face with a more extreme version of himself: a police death squad cleaning up the streets when the justice system fails.

When a mob boss is acquitted on a technicality, a motorcycle cop catches up with the mobster's limousine and kills him and his entire entourage. Callahan wants to investigate the case but is soon butting heads with his superior, Lieutenant Briggs (Hal Holbrook), who is proud never to have used his gun, and who thinks that Harry is a relic.

The extra-judicial killings continue: another mobster and all his outdoor pool guests are wiped out by a machine-gun wielding cop; a vicious pimp is pulled over by an officer and gunned down; and another crime boss is eliminated in his penthouse suite. With Briggs and his men floundering, Callahan and his partner (Felton Perry) begin to suspect a tight-knit group of new young police rookies, including Officers Davis (David Soul), Sweet (Tim Matheson), and Grimes (Robert Urich), of running a death squad. Ballistic tests confirm his suspicions, and soon Callahan is faced with the choice of joining the killers or standing in their way -- and becoming one of their victims.

Magnum Force combines prolonged scenes of intense action with welcome interludes to humanize Harry. We see him having dinner with the estranged wife of a fellow officer; and he enjoys a tryst with a neighbour from his apartment building. As Harry is portrayed in a more sympathetic light, the film poses the tricky question: is the death squad not an extension of Harry's own preferred methods? Magnum Force tries to make a distinction between Callahan pushing the limits from within the system as being better than the rogue cops operating completely outside the system, but screenwriters John Milius and Michael Cimino do not seem too convinced by their own arguments.

Ted Post directs with confident panache, frequently filling the screen with an assortment of roaring oversized American cars that were enjoying their peak in 1973. Eastwood is supported by a worthwhile cast: Holbrook bring some weight to Lieutenant Briggs, while the young cops David Soul (Starsky and Hutch), Robert Urich (Vegas), and Tim Matheson (Animal House) all went on have reasonably prominent careers.

The second outing was never going to retain the freshness of the original, so Magnum Force did the next best thing: it added depth to the character, and presented him with a suitable moral dilemma to grapple with and lots of bad guys to blow away with that cannon of a handgun.

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Movie Review: Animal House (1978)

The film that invented the modern teenage gross-out comedy, Animal House has a lot to answer for. It's a genre that refuses to die, despite running out of fresh ideas decades ago. Nevertheless, in 1978 Animal House struck a chord, created a superstar, generated enormous profits, and set a standard. Franchises like Porky's (starting in 1982) and American Pie (starting in 1999), and films from Revenge Of The Nerds (1984) to There's Something About Mary (1998), owe their existence to Animal House, as do numerous other less famous and fortunately less successful titles.

The film tracks the adventures of the Delta fraternity on the campus of Faber College in 1962. Larry (Tom Hulce) and Kent (Stephen Furst) are new students who join Delta, and are soon acquainted with the other members including the slob Bluto (John Belushi), the biker D-Day (Bruce McGill), the smooth Otter (Tim Matheson) and his friend Boon (Peter Riegert). The Deltas are hopeless when it comes to academics, so they spend their time holding parties, starting food fights, going on road trips, chasing girls, irritating the snobs at the Omega fraternity, smoking pot with the cool Professor Jennings (Donald Sutherland), and making life miserable for Dean Wormer (John Vernon). Wormer is doing all he can to have the lot of them expelled, and he eventually succeeds. In revenge, the Deltas wreck the College's homecoming parade.

Not that any of the plot elements really matter. Animal House is all about the colourful characters and the quick, funny scenes of juvenile antics. Belushi's Bluto has all the subtlety of a cartoon character (think a combination of Yosemite Sam and the Tasmanian Devil), but he is genuinely funny and creates many of the best moments in the movie. With a twitch of the eyebrow Belushi signals that something is happening in Bluto's dense brain, and many of his lines and scenes have become legendary:  "Holy Shit!" (repeated three times with increasing panic); "Toga! Toga!"; "...when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour..."; "when the going gets tough...(long pause to remember the rest of the phrase)...the tough get going!"; the exploding zit in the cafeteria; and his encounter with the guitar player are all classic comedy moments.

Supporting Belushi is a more than capable cast, with Sutherland and Vernon providing some weight, and Karen Allen (as Boon's girlfriend) making a memorable debut as seemingly the only person in the movie with a head screwed on straight. Tom Hulce went on to a distinguished acting career, while Kevin Bacon, who has a small role, achieved stardom.

Director John Landis does not try to keep a lid on the proceedings, allowing most of the scenes to go way beyond the edge of sanity and ludicrousness. Why crash into one car in the parking lot when there are five that can be smashed? Why have one topless girl in the window when six can be frolicking in a pillow fight? Why insult one ethnic group at the Omega recruitment gathering when three or four ethnicities - and a person with a disability - can be lined up on the couch? And why disrupt only the College parade when the whole town can be brought down?  Landis was not only directing Animal House he was inventing the DNA of an entire genre, where the motto can be summarized as "push to excess."

Animal House is funny, and compared to more modern examples of the gross-out comedy, surprisingly subdued. But other than its genre-creating legacy, it is mostly memorable for showcasing Belushi's comic talent, sadly lost to the movies just four years later.

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