Less Harried Harry

THE ENFORCER

Directed by JAMES FARGO

Screenplay by STIRLING SILLIPHANT and DEAN RIESNER

It is being advertised as the dirtiest Harry of them all, but this third adventure of the San Francisco cop who finds nothing but bureaucratic blundering above him and unpunished crime all around him shows Clint Eastwood's creation in a mellow mood. Oh, he can still total a liquor store in the course of rescuing hostages, and he still has the fastest lip in the business when backtalking a superior. But in The Enforcer, Harry appears halfway along the road to becoming a lovable old curmudgeon.

Street Pro. For example, forced to work with a female partner (nicely played by Tyne Daly, daughter of Actor James Daly), he makes the predictable grumpy noises about women's lib. Yet--surprise--he ends up not merely respecting her but more than a little in love with her. As he looks around for clues to the munitions robbery and extortion plot that are his major concern, Harry shows a gift for talking to militant blacks, if only because they respect his rough, straight-forward machismo. Indeed, it turns out that while the entire liberal establishment believes the robbery is the work of political extremists. Harry, your wise street pro, knows the criminals are using revolutionary rhetoric merely to cover their tracks. In the end, the crooks snatch the mayor, and Harry and his partner snatch him back, in the process wiping out the miscreants in a satisfying burst of not too horrific gunfire.

Are we to understand that Harry is cleaning up his act? Perhaps. Or it may be that with some of the heat burned out of the law-and-order issue, Harry can be seen not as the instinctive fascist some once thought him but as an apolitical, job-oriented man whose impatience with the niceties of the law is motivated by frustration over the slenderness of his resources and the shakiness of his backing. That is not the sound of a protofascist mob chortling encouragement at the screen when Harry lets fly, but the voice of perfectly nice people happy to see Harry do what they would all like to do--shake the System loose from its routines, pieties and general lack of responsiveness to the common needs of both keypunch operators and tough cops. One might wish that The Enforcer had the cinematic smarts imparted by Director Don Siegel to the original Dirty Harry, a tenser, tauter piece of work. But The Enforcer is fairish fun--and certainly no threat to liberal democracy. Richard Schickel

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