- For the Heltah Skeltah album, see Magnum Force (album).
Magnum Force is the 1973 sequel to the 1971 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 Eastwood 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. This film features early appearances by David Soul, Tim Matheson and Robert Urich as the vigilante traffic cops. It is also the longest Dirty Harry film, clocking in at 124 minutes.
Plot
Carmine Ricca (Richard Devon), a known organized-crime kingpin, drives away from a court case where he was declared not guilty for a massacre of a whole family, a fact that has brought out a mob of angry protesters at the courthouse. Soon after, a motorcycle traffic 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 four men in the car, then calmly drives off.
Later, "Dirty" Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) and his new partner Earlington Smith (Felton Perry) stop by to check out the crime scene, but Harry is no longer working in homicide due to his handling of the Scorpio case in the first film. Harry butts heads with his new superior, Lieutenant Briggs (Hal Holbrook), who orders him to return to his assigned stakeout. Harry instead takes his new partner to the airport for the "best hamburgers in town".
At the airport, he foils an aircraft hijacking, by impersonating a pilot that the hijackers were demanding. When one of the hijackers is distracted as Harry goes through the motions of preparing the plane for take-off, he slams on the brakes and takes the hijacker's gun after punching him unconscious, and shoots the first one dead.
Back at the police academy, Harry encounters his friend Charlie McCoy (Mitchell Ryan), a fellow cop who is despondent, having just separated from his wife. When Harry suggests Charlie should retire, McCoy angrily vows never to do so, but to "go out fighting." At a shooting range Harry meets a group of rookie 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). The next day a motorcycle cop attacks a pool party being held by a mobster, using a satchel charge and machine gun to kill multiple people.
Harry visits Charlie McCoy's wife and kids and finds out McCoy has been suicidal and living with a stripper. McCoy's wife makes a pass at him, but is interrupted by the noisy play of her children. Harry then gets a phone call from Early, who informs him a robbery at the store where they've been on stakeout is about to take place. Harry travels to the store and enters the back way, viewing the suspects through a one-way glass. The robbery takes place, but Harry, Early, and another police officer foil the robbers, killing all but one of them who gets away in a car. When they return to headquarters for the mandatory paperwork on the incident, Harry and Early pass by the four motorcycle cops, who are friends with Early.
Later that night a pimp (Albert Popwell) grabs one of his prostitutes (Margaret Avery) and kills her in a taxicab, and the next morning a motorcycle traffic cop killer pulls him over underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and shoots him dead. Following this killing Harry and Early are transferred back to Homicide and Harry visits the city morgue with Lt. Briggs and their superior, Captain Avery. When Harry examines a bullet from the pimp's car and sees that the pimp had offered a traffic cop a bribe, he begins to suspect someone the crook would never suspect, and his suspicions nag at him further when Briggs assigns Harry to tail Frank Palancio, once one of Ricca's right-hand killers.
A motorcycle traffic cop murders drug kingpin Lou Guzman and two coke-addicted lovers in his penthouse suite, but on the way out he encounters Charlie McCoy coming in, and kills him to avoid any witnesses to the murder. Not knowing that Charlie has just been killed, Harry presents his suspicions about Charlie to Lieutenant Briggs. Briggs informs Harry of McCoy's death and also that Davis was the first on the scene of the shooting.
Harry turns his suspicions towards the rookie cops. During a shooting competition with the four present, Harry intentionally loses the competition to Davis by shooting a police officer target. He borrows Davis' gun for another run through the targets and misses one target on purpose, embedding the slug in a wall. Later that night Harry returns to the range and digs the slug fired from Davis' gun out. He checks ballistics and confirms that bullets from Davis’ gun match those found at the crime scene involving the kingpin and Charlie McCoy.
Lt. Briggs insists that mob boss Frank Palancio is behind the murders, and issues a warrant for his arrest. Harry requests two of the four rookies, Davis and Sweet, as his backup. Palancio and his gang are called shortly before the raid and told that they are about to be hit by men dressed as police officers. Motorcycle patrolman Sweet is shot and murdered by Palancio during the shoot-out. Palancio and his men are also killed.
Harry next encounters the three remaining renegade cops in the parking garage of his apartment. When they give Harry an offer to join their organization, he sternly responds, "I’m afraid you've misjudged me." Leaving the garage, Harry discovers a pipe bomb in 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 and is killed by a second bomb.
Lt. Briggs arrives and asks Harry to drive his car while he looks the bomb (intended for Harry) over more closely. Once they are moving, Briggs pulls out his revolver and points it directly at Callahan. Harry is forced to drop his .44 Magnum revolver in the back seat and dump his speed loaders out the window.
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. “You’re a good cop, Harry. But you’d rather stick with the system.” Harry’s response is that although he hates the system, he will stick with it until some rules come along that make some sense, and that McCoy did not deserve to die. Briggs ends the repartee with the statement, “You’re about to become extinct.”
Harry notices he is being followed by a motorcycle cop (Grimes), but Harry hits the side of a bus and distracts Briggs. Harry grabs Brigg by the neck and rams his head on the dashboard knocking Briggs out . Grimes pulls out his gun and starts shooting at Harry's car during a car chase. On the run at the docks, Harry hits a concrete post causing the car door to break open and knocking Briggs out of the car. Later Harry hits Grimes head-on with his car, killing him and heavily damaging the car. He abandons the car as the remaining two vigilante cops show up.
Unarmed, Harry runs aboard the hulk of an old aircraft carrier docked in a scrapyard and a cat-and-mouse game begins throughout the ship. Astrachan finds Harry first and tries to shoot him. Before Astrachan reloads his gun, Callahan surprises him and beats him to death. Harry realizes he has no time to find and reload Astrachan's gun before Davis comes along, so Callahan runs back to his motorcycle. 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. Harry ditches his bike to stop quickly, and Davis ends up sending his motorcycle and himself straight into the bay. Davis’ dead body comes floating up to the surface.
Harry returns to the car, but Briggs has regained consciousness. Harry surreptitiously activates the timer on the mail bomb and leaves it on the front seat as he backs away. Briggs gets in the car with a gun in his hand, declaring he will prosecute Callahan with his own system as a cop killer, and starts to drive off. A few seconds later, the car explodes, killing Briggs.
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 with which he taunted Briggs earlier, before he walks away from the scene.
Cast
Controversy
The film received negative publicity in 1974 when it was discovered that a scene in which drain cleaner 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).
Box office performance
In the US, the film made a total of $44,680,473 (USA).[1], making it more successful than the first film.
Points of interest
- The inspiration for the pimp's execution scene of Magnum Force can be viewed in an episode, "The Kill", of the early noir TV series "Peter Gunn", starring Craig Stevens. Here, two hitmen masquerade as police officers in order to be able to approach the crime boss's limo, whereupon they execute him. exactly as the motorcycle patrolman does in "Magnum Force".[citation needed]
- The film was something of an answer to critics[2] that said the first Dirty Harry movie glorified violence toward suspected criminals. Harry's refusal to join the vigilante squad was proof that he was not above the law — although in the morgue scene he does actually express approval for putting "the courts out of business". He does turn against them after the killing of his friend Charlie McCoy, citing him as an example of an innocent who did not deserve execution.
- Harry mentions to his new partner, Early Smith, that his previous partner was wounded on the job but is now teaching college, in reference to Chico (Reni Santoni) from the previous film, Dirty Harry.
- Harry's catch-phrase 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 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. Somers would guest star in episodes of Starsky and Hutch (which featured Magnum Force co-star David Soul).
- 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 when his gun is knocked into the ocean.
- In the 'Meet the Sniper' video for Team Fortress 2, the song playing throughout the video is an homage to the Magnum Force opening theme music.
- The two escort carriers that were shown in the Magnum Force movie were USS Rabaul(CVE-121) (which was acquired by the navy after World War II but never commissioned and never saw service of any kind) and USS Badoeng Strait(CVE-116) (which was completed too late to serve in World War II but saw action in the Pacific - including combat in the Korean War).
References
See also
External links
