Daily Blague

About Mr Emerson's little list...

I posted the list as-is. I will post my version of the list, with five substitutions, presently, at Portico. For the time being, I'm knocking off the films that I've never seen. I believe that there are thirteen; you can easily find out by opening the permalink for the list and asking your browser to find "(N)" until you've counted through all of them. Not surprisingly, the ones that I've never seen are among the most aggressively macho.

Yesterday afternoon, for example, I watched Dirty Harry, and I can tell you right now that I am going to knock it off the list, possibly for Unforgiven, which would preserve a slot for Clint Eastwood, and possibly for The Conversation, for San Francisco and shady dealings. The Conversation was made three years after Dirty Harry, and they share a similar look and feel. What they don't share, happily, is Dirty Harry's cast, which, aside from Mr Eastwood himself, is pretty uninspiring. Andrew Robinson's Scorpio - the bad guy - is totally over the top, and not in a good way, but at least he's acting, which nobody else seems to be inspired to do. John Vernon's mayor is almost embarrassing; perhaps it's his representation of an elected official that has pushed so many voters toward the red. The movie needs whatever it was that Criterion did to The Third Man, in order to make the many night-time scenes legible on TV.

The worst thing about Dirty Harry is that it's so politically tendentious. Its crux is the exclusionary rule, which bans evidence obtained without a warrant from use in court, and which is also a useful shibboleth for distinguishing people who understand rule of law from those who don't. Its zero-tolerance approach to police error (cutting corners or acting hastily) makes moralizers very unhappy, but it serves as a vital curb to the tolerance of armed expediency. Yeah, we all want to see the bad guy suffer. But we have to check that impulse when we join civil society.

The only thing that could make Dirty Harry worse would be to replace Clint Eastwood with Charles Bronson.

Also, I have no active plans to collect these lists. Make your own and tag some friends with the meme. As long as the keyword is somewhere on the page, someone will eventually have a field day compiling them. That someone won't be me.