Magnum Force

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For the Heltah Skeltah album, see Magnum Force (album).
Magnum Force

Magnum Force theatrical poster
Directed by Ted Post
Produced by Robert Daley
Written by Characters:
Harry Julian Fink
Rita M. Fink
Story:
John Milius
Screenplay:
John Milius
Michael Cimino
Starring Clint Eastwood
Hal Holbrook
Mitchell Ryan
David Soul
Felton Perry
Robert Urich
Tim Matheson
Music by Lalo Schifrin
Cinematography Frank Stanley
Editing by Ferris Webster
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date(s) Flag of the United States December 25, 1973
Running time 124 min
Country Flag of the United States United States
Language English
Preceded by Dirty Harry (1971)
Followed by The Enforcer (1976)
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Magnum Force was the first of the sequels to the film Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood as maverick cop Harry Callahan. The film was released in 1973 and directed by Ted Post, who also directed Clint in TV's Rawhide and the feature film Hang 'Em High. The screenplay was written by John Milius (who provided an uncredited rewrite for the original film) and Michael Cimino.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Carmine Ricca (Richard Devon), a known organized-crime kingpin, drives away from a court case where he was declared not guilty. Soon after, a motorcycle patrol cop stops Ricca’s car and begins to write out a ticket for the driver, saying he had crossed the double-line. Suddenly, the cop pulls his service revolver, a .357 Magnum, shoots all 4 men in the car several times, then calmly drives off. Harry and his new partner stop by to check out the crime scene, but Harry is no longer working in homicide due his handling of the Scorpio case. Harry butts heads with his new superior, Lieutenant Briggs (Hal Holbrook), who orders him to return to his assigned stakeout. Callahan instead takes his new partner, Earlington "Early" Smith (Felton Perry) to the airport for the "best hamburgers in town".

At the airport, he foils an aircraft hijacking which leaves the two hijackers dead. Back at the police academy, he encounters a new group of motorcycle police officers, fresh from the Airborne Army Rangers, United States Army Special Forces, and out of the police academy: Philip Sweet (Tim Matheson), John Davis (David Soul), "Red" Astrachan (Kip Niven), and Michael Grimes (Robert Urich). He also runs into an old friend, Charlie McCoy (Mitchell Ryan), a frustrated veteran motorcycle cop who is going through a rough time, having separated from his wife. Meanwhile, more killings ensue, including a black pimp (played by Albert Popwell), and a host of underworld members at a private house party.

Harry and his partner are called in, and from the clues he finds, Harry thinks it’s a traffic cop, namely Charlie McCoy. Before he can act on this suspicion, Charlie McCoy is coincidentally and secretly killed by Officer Davis, who has just murdered a criminal kingpin — Davis does it on the spur of the moment since he cannot risk having any witnesses to his crime.

Harry begins to look elsewhere. He finds his suspects in the four motorcycle rookies he met earlier. Harry then sends a message to the motorcycle cops during a pistol shooting competition wherein Harry purposely hits a police-man target during the combat competition with Davis. He checks ballistics and confirms that bullets from Davis’ gun match ones found at the crime scene involving the kingpin.

Motorcycle patrolman Sweet is sacrificed in a raid on mob boss Frank Palencio and his gang to throw any possible investigators off track. Harry next encounters the three remaining renegade cops in the parking garage of his apartment. When they give Harry an offer to join their cause, he sternly responds, "I’m afraid you've misjudged me." Callahan then avoids having a bomb go off from his mailbox, left by the vigilantes in case he refused their offer. He calls Briggs to warn his partner, but Early Smith does not get the call from Harry before opening his own mailbox with a bomb that does explode.

Briggs arrives and asks Harry to drive his car while he looks the bomb over more closely. Just then, Briggs pulls out his revolver and points it directly at Callahan. “Your gun’s out of your holster, Lieutenant. First time?” Harry says, in reference to a comment Briggs made to him earlier in the film. Harry is told to turn over his .44 Magnum revolver and his speed loaders, which are dumped in the back of the car and out the window.

Harry Callahan (right) talking to his partner, Earlington Smith.
Harry Callahan (right) talking to his partner, Earlington Smith.

Briggs reveals that he was the one who started the vigilante cops' executions of the criminals who dodged trial and explains the cause of the vigilante cops, and that there are plenty more where the rookie vigilantes came from. “You’re a good cop, Harry. But you’d rather stick with the system,” Briggs adds. Harry’s response is that although he hates the system, he will stick with it until some rules come along that make some sense. Briggs ends the repartee with the statement, “You’re about to become extinct.”

Harry notices he is being followed by motorcycle cop Grimes, but Harry hits a bus and knocks out Briggs in the process. Grimes then pulls out his gun and shoots the car during a car chase. On the run at the docks, Harry abandons his car after running over Grimes, as the remaining 2 vigilante cops show up. Harry runs aboard the hulk of an old aircraft carrier docked in a scrapyard and hides out through the ship, with no gun, waiting to find a way to elude his pursuers or neutralize them. Astrachan finds Harry first and tries to shoot him as he runs through the ship. Before Astrachan reloads his gun, Callahan surprises him and beats him to death. He tries to take the officer’s gun and reload but he doesn’t have time before Davis comes along, so Harry takes off. Davis finds Astrachan, and then hears someone trying to start a motorcycle up top on the ship's deck. He races to the top to get on his motorcycle and chases Harry. They both make death-defying jumps across the upper decks of the ship until they run out of deck, after which Davis ends up sending his motorcycle and himself straight into the bay. Davis’ body comes floating up to the surface, dead.

Just as Harry thinks the whole incident is finally over, Briggs appears, bloodied, with Grimes's gun in his hand, declaring he will prosecute Callahan with his own system, and starts to drive off in his battered car. A few seconds later, the car is blown up with the letterbox bomb that had been left in the back of the car, which Harry activated just before backing away at gunpoint.

The last shot of the movie is a close-up of Harry's face as he lets out a slight smile and says, "Man's got to know his limitations", a phrase he taunted Briggs with earlier before he walks away from the scene.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Controversy

The film received negative publicity in 1974 when it was discovered that a scene in which Drāno is used to murder a prostitute had allegedly inspired the infamous Hi-Fi Murders, with the two killers believing the method would be as efficient as it was portrayed in the film. However, the killers admitted that they had been looking for a unique murder method when they stumbled upon the film, and that had they not seen the movie, they'd have simply picked a method from another film. The drain cleaner reference was repeated in three other films, Lethal Weapon (1987), Heathers (1989) and Urban Legend (1998).

[edit] Trivia

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The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • The film was somewhat of an answer to critics[citation needed] that said the first Dirty Harry movie glorified violence toward suspected criminals. Harry's refusal to join the vigilante squad was to be proof that he was not above the law; though in the morgue scene he did actually express approval for putting "the courts out of business" and only really turned against them after the killing of his friend Charlie McCoy.
  • Harry mentions to his new partner, Early Smith, that his previous partner was wounded on the job but is now a school teacher, in reference to Chico (Reni Santoni) from the previous film, Dirty Harry.
  • Harry's tagline for this film was "A man's got to know his limitations", or variations on this phrase. This replaced the line from the first film "Do you feel lucky?".
  • At one point when Harry is in his apartment by himself, he looks at a photo of him and his wife: the only time the audience ever gets to see the late Mrs. Callahan who was mentioned in the previous film.
  • A very young Suzanne Somers plays a girl at a pool-party thrown by one of the underworld crime lords. She shows off a new diamond ring and ends up going topless into the swimming pool before a bomb goes off and everyone at the party is shot.
  • The actress playing Sunny (Adele Yoshioka) had to stand on a box at times when filming scenes with Clint Eastwood due to there being an over 12 inch difference in their respective heights.
  • Harry Callahan is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. This is indicated in the scene where Harry first runs into Charlie McCoy, who says, "We should'a done our 20 in the Marines."
  • Magnum Force is the first Dirty Harry film where Harry loses his .44 Magnum revolver. The gun was surrendered to Briggs, who threw it in the back of the car, where it was presumably destroyed when Briggs' car exploded. The second time he loses it is in Sudden Impact.
  • Although the movie was filmed and released in 1973, according to the British Film Institute, it is set in 1972. This is confirmed when Harry Callahan is told by Inspector Kate Moore in The Enforcer (1976) that losing Fanducci in '68 and Smith in '72 wasn't his fault after losing his partner Frank DiGiorgio.

[edit] External links

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