It’s felicitous, and perhaps there’s something in the way the planets are aligned, that the top ten list Raymond Benson is presenting on Britannica Blog is focused on 1968 since I seem to be taken up with movies from the late sixties/early seventies these days. Today he gave us his number ten, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and I’m chagrined by the fact that I haven’t seen it. Of course, I was twelve when it came out and it’s entirely possible I saw it in later years on TV but, if so, I don’t recall it. However, the upside is that there is a reportedly fabulous movie waiting for me to see. So it’s high on my list of “to be viewed.”

Currently, I seem to be taken up with the Dirty Harry movies (the 1970’s). I’ve recently watched the first three (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force and The Enforcer) and soon will see the last two (Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool). On Saturday I watched Dirty Harry (1971) again and wrote a review about it, which I haven’t really highlighted because I’ve found I don’t entirely agree with what I wrote and plan to do a revision of it.

Essentially, I consider it an urban western. After watching a number of the DVD features, I find I’m not alone in this opinion. Oddly, for what seems, on the surface, a pretty simple movie, Dirty Harry is a difficult film to get a handle on, and to a lesser extent so is the Dirty Harry series, because of the perceived politics of the film and the violence.

It should be mentioned that the first movie, Dirty Harry, is a classic (to use an over-used term). The other films in the series, while to varying degrees entertaining, are not in the same league at all. I think this is at least partly due to the fact that those movies, and the character of Harry, are somewhat muted in comparison. In the original, Harry is pretty darned focused and is motivated, simply, by hatred for bad guys and “the system.”

But I’ll leave all that to my revised review, when I get around to that revision.

(I wonder what Benson’s number 9 movie from 1968 will be?)

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