"The Dead Pool:" Harry's last stand

Title: The Dead Pool
Released: 1988
Genre: Dirty Harry, take five
Notable for: Memorable performances by future stars
Coolest thing Clint does: Blows away the bad guy with a harpoon gun

No doubt exists in our limited minds that "The Dead Pool" is the worst Dirty Harry movie. It's the fifth and last in the series, and inspiration does not flow like a cool stream.

Here are five bad parts.

1. "You're shit out of luck" is the worst catch phrase in the Harry Callahan arsenal of catch phrases. Brad could expound on this for several paragraphs, but as a gesture of mercy, he won't.

2. It was impossible to hate the bad guy with the proper passion because he was barely in the film. "The Dead Pool" tries to be something of a whodunit, and that's not right. We don't want to see Dirty Harry solve a crime, we want him to bring bloody justice to psychotic scumbags we know are guilty almost from the opening credits.

3. The expected elements of Dirty Harry movies were by this time so predictable Clint himself plays with them as cliches. When assigned a new partner, he says out loud what everyone in the audience must think. "All my partners end up dead or in the hospital." He carries Dirty Harry's fondness for big guns to a laughable extreme by wielding a harpoon gun in the final scene.

4. The plot is stupid. It's a story about some celebrities who bet on which other celebrities will die and somehow their picks become public and for some reason a dude kills off celebrities on the list of a particular movie director played predictably well by Liam Neeson. That is all we intend to say about that.

5. Dirty Harry is no longer despised by superiors on the police force. He receives a little token complaining about the cost of a police car destroyed on his watch, but Dirty Harry has become a celebrity cop. He's so famous he's on Neeson's list of celebrities expected to die. Much of the movie's message appears intended to be commentary on the nature of celebrity and the media in modern society. No one watches Dirty Harry for that kind of crap.

Strangely enough, we still like the movie.

Jim Carrey and Neeson give good performances early in their careers. Click here to see Carrey (credited as James, not Jim) go all super-freaky. And there is a cameo appearance by Guns N' Roses.

Stupid plot or not, Clint has some great scenes blowing away scumbags. Some of them, as usual, he stumbles upon while walking down the street. Others are hit men out to kill him for sending a mob boss to prison.

One example of classic Clint comes when he's had enough of those pesky hit men. Clint goes to the prison where the mob boss is locked up and scares him shitless by fooling him into believing he, Clint, has purchased protection from the nastiest inmate goon in the prison. A couple of scenes later, mobsters are tailing Clint as bodyguards, not killers.

The ending includes fine symmetry circling back to the very first moments when we saw Dirty Harry 17 years earlier. In the first movie, Clint pretended to lose track of whether he shot all his bullets, asking punks if they felt lucky enough to assume his gun was empty. In the finale, the bad guy steals Clint's .44 magnum and blasts away at him. Then all grows quiet as Clint walks slowly toward the killer with the aforementioned harpoon gun. "You're out of bullets," Clint says. Then he fires a harpoon through the guy's chest.

Nailing that guy with a harpoon was unnecessary (translation: murder) but it is one of the more awesome displays of Dirty Harriness.

As every male knows, the worst Dirty Harry is still better than a lot of other movies. Speaking on behalf of The Clint Eastwood project, we're going to miss Harry Callahan from here on out.

Next up: "Pink Cadillac."

"Heartbreak Ridge:" This is where Clint starts getting to be an old man

Title: Heartbreak Ridge
Released: 1986
Genre: Military humor and heroics
Notable for: The script pissed off the U.S. Marine Corps enough to cancel cooperation
Coolest thing Clint does: Smashes up a thug while spending a night in the drunk tank, then tells him, "Why don't you sit there and bleed a while."

Anyone who thinks Clint emerged in the 1970s as The New John Wayne should know the vast database of The Clint Eastwood Project reveals "Heartbreak Ridge" was the first time Clint played a member of U.S. military forces in a war movie.

His character was on loan to the Brits in "Where Eagles Dare." He was AWOL all through "The Beguiled." "Kelly's Heroes" was an anti-war movie where Clint made friends with Nazis at the end. And "Firefox" was a spy story with Clint playing a military veteran pressed back to duty for a secret mission.

We conclude Clint did not much care for war movies, and he made an odd one when he finally gave it a whirl in "Heartbreak Ridge."

Andrew finds "Heartbreak Ridge" entertaining and judges it "not the best, but pretty good." Brad thinks it is mostly stupid because it is two different movies crammed unconvincingly into one.

Clint plays a tough Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who has a habit of getting drunk and finding trouble. The makeup people put scars on his face and Clint put extra gravel in his voice.

He is assigned to lead a platoon of young Marines who are complete screw-ups. One actually talks a little like Gomer Pyle. The rest behave, ludicrously, as if they can ignore commands. No wonder the Marine Corps withdrew its support.

The first part of the movie is basically a comedy where Clint whips the screw-ups into shape. It has some fine moments. Clint runs around growling about how he's drank more beer, pissed more blood and banged more quiff than anyone alive.

"Heartbreak Ridge" is set in the early 1980s and Clint's character is a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. He is a little frustrated to have no wins on his war record. At first, the young Marines think he is a crazy old man. His asshole major calls him a relic.

"This is the new Marine Corps," the major says. "Characters like you are an anachronism." It sounds exactly like the crap Dirty Harry took from his superiors.

Comedy stops abruptly with 30 minutes left in the movie. Clint's Marines are put on alert and sent to invade Grenada. From then on it's all blood-and-guts battle scenes that show what a wonderful job Clint did making his guys combat-ready.

Victory is sweet for Clint, who savors his first war win. It seems inconceivable that anyone who fought in Korea and Vietnam could put Grenada on the same level, but Clint does it anyway.

The film ends with a glorious homecoming as a band plays "Stars and Stripes Forever." As far as we know, that exhausts the film library of Grenada Invasion stories.

"Heartbreak Ridge" may be most notable in the annals of Clintdom because it is the first film to address head-on the fact he was growing old. Clint was 56 in real life. He appeared in great physical shape for the movie, but he could no longer pass himself off as a youthful hero. He played a character his real age, a dude struggling with the approach of mandatory retirement.

Unlike some action stars we could name, he was man enough to accept the truth. And some of his most celebrated roles were still ahead.

Next up: "The Dead Pool."

"Pale Rider:" Clint was western when western wasn't cool

Title: Pale Rider
Released: 1985
Genre: Mysterious-stranger western
Notable for: Clint's first return to the saddle in nine years
Coolest thing Clint does: Beats gang of thugs senseless with hickory stick

One of Clint's seldom-mentioned accomplishments is a key role in saving, or at least prolonging, the life of the American western drama.

It started with "Pale Rider."

Anyone old enough to remember knows it seemed vaguely stupid and pathetic in 1985 for Clint to make "Pale Rider." Cowboy movies were out of style. By today, they could easily be just as dead as the TV western.

Then "Pale Rider" came out and it kicked ass. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby called it "the first decent western in a very long time."

Seven years later, Clint won his first Oscar for another western, "Unforgiven." Then many male stars started making westerns for fun and profit.

"Pale Rider" is never included on lists of the best westerns ever (here's one list and here's another), but it should be. Because it came out at a time when no one made westerns, it never received the full credit it deserves.


Believe it or not, Clint plays a mysterious stranger who rides into town and never reveals his name or the exact nature of his bloody past. Quite a stretch, huh?

He comes to the aid of a community of small-time gold miners who are brutally oppressed by the town's gold tycoon. The villainous tycoon wants their land so he can rape it with modern mining methods.

After beating the snot out of a few of the tycoon's goons, Clint puts on a preacher's collar and, from then on, is called "The Preacher."

A side-story veers close to pedophilia (not a first for Clint) when The Preacher is sexually propositioned by a 14-year-old girl. Clint declines but spares her feelings by assuring her 99 men out of 100 would nail her. Statutory rape must not have been a crime yet. He rejects the girl because he is more interested in her widowed mother. As romances go, a mother-daughter love triangle is either edgy or creepy.

"Pale Rider" was acknowledged to be a rip-off of the classic "Shane," but more interesting similarities are found to the story of ghostly vengeance Clint delivered 11 years earlier in "High Plains Drifter."

Saving the miners from the evil tycoon is a given for Clint's character in "Pale Rider," but the real intrigue centers on his connection to the spirit world.

In "High Plains Drifter," Clint played the revenge-seeking ghost of a murdered sheriff. "Pale Rider" is far less clear.

The movie title comes from the Book of Revelation, which says death rides on a pale horse. Clint, as director, made that obvious by having the verse read aloud while The Preacher is seen riding a gray horse.

So maybe Clint is death incarnate. Or maybe not.

In one scene, viewers see Clint has five bullet scars in his back, wounds that look as if they must be fatal. When the tycoon hires a paid killer, Clint reveals he has a score to settle with the dude. At the end, the killer stares hard at Clint, then says, "You!" Clint shoots him five times, leaving a pattern exactly like the scars in his own flesh.

So maybe Clint is a ghost. Or maybe not.

After shooting the bad guy five times in the chest, Clint fires once more and plugs him in the forehead, causing one of the greatest death-grimaces ever recorded on film. Clint does not have a scar on his own head, so this seems like an extra shot he never received.

So maybe Clint is just a mortal man who did not want to repeat the bad guy's mistake of leaving wounds that could be survived. Or maybe not.

The aforementioned Mr. Canby speculated that Clint's character was supposed to be God. We're not sure why God needs to retrieve guns from a bank safe-deposit box, as The Preacher did, to smite someone down. But why not?

God or no god, Clint helped raise western drama from the near-dead with "Pale Rider."

For that we thank you, Clint.

Next up: "Heartbreak Ridge."

"Tightrope:" Cinematic art for men, complete with kinky sex, lusty prostitutes and severed limbs

Title: Tightrope
Released: 1984
Genre: Detective story, heavy on the whores
Notable for: Clint cast daughter Alison Eastwood in supporting role
Coolest thing Clint does: Pulls a severed arm off his throat

Clint was never accused, up to this point in his career, of appealing to female audiences. But "Tightrope" may be his one film that least resembles a chick flick. Estrogen must react to this movie like vinegar in a baking-soda volcano.

For starters, the film is shot in blackness extreme even for Clint. Women like movies that look bright and sunny. Dark lighting matches a dark story. It's a tense murder mystery with a creepy killer who wears masks and stalks prostitutes.

Also, the film has lots of good-quality violence and a fair amount of gratuitous female nudity, although usually the naked parts belong to women who are dead. As a subtext to murder, "Tightrope" features a cornucopia of male sexual perversions and fantasies.

Women must have left the theaters of 1984 and spent 40 minutes bitching about how thoroughly disturbed they were by "Tightrope."

In short, it's one of Clint's best non-cowboy films ever for the testicle-wearing audience.

Clint plays a police detective in New Orleans who investigates a series of murders in the sex district.

His cop character has a backdrop of semi-normal family life that is unusual for Clint's roles. He plays a divorced dude raising two daughters. The oldest daughter is played by his real-life daughter, Alison Eastwood, then 12. Little Alison went on to be a model, actress, film director and the head of a clothing line. Best of all, she posed for Playboy.

Clint's murder investigation is hampered by his chronic inability to ignore his boners. While questioning prostitutes and strippers, he cannot resist some kinky stuff. There is even a highly unClintlike suggestion that he has tried gay sex.

Every woman is gorgeous and they all want to screw Clint as soon as they see him. Click here to see some especially laughable sexual banter. Even the good girl Clint romances between whores wants it rough.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear the killer is really targeting Clint, not random prostitutes. Before it's over, the killer attacks Clint's nice girlfriend and his daughters, and he stuffs Clint's old-lady babysitter into a washing machine.

The final scene ranks as one of the greatest in the chronicles of Clintdom.

Clint and the killer wrestle hand-to-hand in a fight to the death along some train tracks. A train bears down on them as they roll in the dirt. As the train passes, Clint rolls away from danger but the killer still has Clint's throat in a death grip.

As the camera backs up, we see the killer is no longer attached to his arm. It was severed by the train. Clint pulls the dead limb off his throat and throws it aside.

Sorry ladies, but that is some seriously manly shit.

Next up: "Pale Rider."

"City Heat:" Sometimes things look nicer with low expectations

Title: City Heat
Released: 1984
Genre: Gangster action-comedy
Notable for: Clint stars with Burt Reynolds
Coolest thing Clint does: Walks down the middle of the street like God himself in gunfight with four hoods

"City Heat" is probably the most over-exaggerated "disappointment" in Clint's career.

Hollywood drooled dollar signs when Clint was paired with Burt Reynolds for a blockbuster action-comedy. Those idiots failed to realize two stars with a combined age of 101 were overripe to really kill audiences in a genre dominated by Eddie Murphy.

Ticket sales were disappointing to Hollywood idiots, but the film still cleared about $13 million in profit. With inflation, it made $26 million in today's dollars.

As an entertainment product, we give "City Heat" a solid 7.5 on the Clint-O-Meter. It's nowhere near a 10 ("The Outlaw Josey Wales"), but it has plenty of gunfights and is enjoyable if viewed without the burden of high expectations.


Clint plays a steely police lieutenant (what a stretch) in 1933. Reynolds is his former partner turned wisecracking private eye.

The comedy mostly springs from banter between the two stars. Their interplay is characterized by Clint calling Burt "shorty" and Burt calling Clint "ape face." One recurring "gag" has Clint watch Burt get beat up or shot at without lifting a finger to help, until a bad guy accidentally spills his coffee or fires a stray bullet through his windshield. Then Clint grimaces, rises and delivers swift and harsh vengeance. See? He cares more about his coffee than Burt!

None of it is laugh-out-loud funny, but that was predictable even in 1984, considering the comic track record of Mr. Reynolds.

The action in action-comedy comes when the boys are thrown together to fight two competing mob gangs. Bullets fly, although in a comic-book sort of way instead of the menacing-danger style of Murphy in "Beverly Hills Cop."

You may ask how Clint and Burt come to fight two gangs of mobsters at once. We wish we could answer clearly, but unfortunately the script avoids coherent plot development.

Conflict starts when Burt's partner in the private eye business, Richard Roundtree, is very predictably murdered after double-crossing one mobster in a scheme to screw over another.

Never mind all that. The point is, Burt and Clint have a crapload of fistfights and gunfights and never get a scratch.

The best action scene has Clint turn bullet-proof as he slowly walks down a city street and kills four gangsters. His shotgun blasts make a car explode into a fireball and make a fire hydrant spray water on the blaze. Even we can see that is intended to be a gag because Clint plays his "Fistful of Dollars" image so over-the-top.

Whorehouse humor comes into play in the final scene, when Burt dresses in a wolf's head and girl's nightgown liberated from a bordello customer with a Little Red Riding Hood fantasy. Thus disguised, he beats up some hoods who kidnapped his horny, high-society girlfriend (Madeline Kahn, who should have been in more scenes).

Art, it ain't. But to paraphrase a popular song of the era, boys just want to have fun.

Twenty-six years later, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could expect more than a little boyish fun by putting Clint in a comedy with the dude from "Smokey and the Bandit."

Next up: "Tightrope."

"Sudden Impact:" So much more than an overused catch phrase

Title: Sudden Impact
Released: 1983
Genre: Dirty Harry, take four
Notable for: "Go ahead, make my day"
Coolest thing Clint does: Goads mafioso into heart attack at the mafioso's daughter's wedding

After several weeks of country singing, comedy with apes, half-baked spy stuff, and fake cowboys coping with a harsh modern world, we were nearly distraught from withdrawal from real Clint Eastwood.

Thank God for "Sudden Impact." The return of Dirty Harry is like a Colt 45 tall boy to a sweaty alcoholic.

Clint is accused of dragging out the Dirty Harry franchise too long, but that's mostly bullshit because "Sudden Impact," the fourth of five, may be the best in the series.

Harry's gun is bigger than ever and assorted scumbags receive his usual dose of death or public disgrace.

Clint spits his overused catch phrase, "Go ahead, make my day," through clenched teeth while confronting a coffee-shop robber. Just as good but less catch-phrasey is the scene where he grabs a smirking punk in an elevator and tells him, "To me you're nothing but dog shit, understand?" If you get blue-ray, the vein that pops out in Clint's temple during that dog-shit speech looks bigger than a garter snake. Just as good is when Clint goads a mafioso into a fatal heart attack. The mafioso is not even listed in the credits but he's played by Michael V. Gazzo -- Frankie Pentangeli from Godfather II.

Damn good stuff and it has nothing to do with the real plot of "Sudden Impact."

"Sudden Impact" is really about a female serial killer taking revenge for a gang rape. She tracks down each rapist, shoots him in the balls, then in the head.

Sondra Locke plays the cock-shooter and we say it is her best performance in a Clint Eastwood film. It's a role suited to her talents.

Dirty Harry is investigating her string of penis-disfiguring murders, but he comes to realize the victims deserve to die. He practically joins forces with Locke when the scumbags kill his partner (yes, again) and cripple his dog.

The climax comes when the worst scumbag rapist falls through a carousel and is impaled through the chest on the horn of a unicorn. Our guess is symbolism is intended.

At the end, Clint sets both Locke and his audience free. This is Locke's last appearance in any Eastwood film because an ugly split-up loomed in real life. Who could have seen that coming?

Testosterone, protruding temple veins, and rapists brought to crotch-searing justice. A man needs to know what he does best. Thanks, Clint.

Next up: "City Heat."

"Honkytonk Man:" What happens when Clint tries a tear-jerker

Title: Honkytonk Man
Released: 1982
Genre: "Grapes of Wrath" meets "Tender Mercies"
Notable for: Clint co-stars with son Kyle
Coolest thing Clint does: Robs a poker game to collect a debt

Spoiler alert! Clint dies at the end of "Honkytonk Man."

We mention that dramatic fact because it caused semi-scholarly interest as we watched Clint cough blood from lungs ravaged by tuberculosis.

"Has Clint ever died in a movie before?" Andrew asked. We have watched his first 38 films and our limited brainpower could not remember a single one in which his character dies.

Question: Could that lack of death scenes possibly be correct? Answer: Almost.

Combing the archives of The Clint Eastwood Project, we discovered just one forgotten death scene. Clint's character was murdered by sex-crazed schoolgirls in the weird 1971 movie "The Beguiled."

"Escape From Alcatraz" was fuzzy on whether Clint lived or died but certainly did not kill him off. "High Plains Drifter" had a death scene but that was a flashback. Clint played a ghost who remembered his murder. (Sez us, that's who.)

Not until "Honkytonk Man" did Clint ever go for a tear-jerker death. Once again, he was obviously trying new things as a movie star who just turned 50.


"Honkytonk Man" starts as a comedy set in the Great Depression. Clint plays a drunken small-time country music singer who relies on petty larceny to pay the bills.

The story revolves around his opportunity to make it big with an audition at the Grand Ol' Opry. Predictably, he sings in this movie and the results are not highly pleasing to the ears. Marty Robbins must rescue the title song from Clint's vocal stylings.

Mostly, it's a story about man-and-boy buddies on the road. The boy is played by Clint's real-life son, Kyle Eastwood, who was 14. Kyle plays Clint's nephew, whose parents inexplicably send him with Clint on the road trip from dusty Oklahoma to the big audition in Nashville.

Clint's idea of providing guidance to Kyle's character should have sent the poor kid to reform school. Under Clint's influence, Kyle screws a whore, drinks whisky, steals chickens, breaks Clint out of jail, gets accidentally stoned on weed and helps rob a poker game.

On the road to Nashville, the story turns more to tragedy as we realize Clint is deathly sick with tuberculosis. Hey, at least it provides some excuse for his singing voice. By the time he reaches the Opry, everyone knows Clint will die soon, but he insists on making some records.

Then he croaks. After the funeral, one of his records plays on the radio. So he made it big after all, we guess.

Tears were not successfully jerked from our eyes, but that's good. We don't like that kind of crap.

To our surprise, we both enjoyed "Honkytonk Man" quite a bit. Clint was appealing as the rogue with a heart of gold. Well, maybe not gold but some minor semi-precious metal. Kyle Eastwood did a creditable acting job for an amateur.

Judging from the slogan on the poster, this movie is largely about Clint teaching Kyle to be a man. Being a man means following your dream no matter how high the cost. Or maybe it means getting drunk every day and finding whores. We're not sure which Clint had in mind.

Next up: "Sudden Impact."