Posted by Martin:
The Basics:
Video: B-
Audio: B
Extras: B+
Dirty Harry is of course the first film in the Dirty Harry series, released in 1971. Clint Eastwood was already a famous actor having done Rawhide and the Serio Leone Westerns, this film transfers he previous Western character into the streets of San Fransico.
It was a controversial film when it came out in ‘71, Pauline Kael was particulary against the film. The history of the film is discussed in depth in the extras that come with the disc.
The video:
The video is encoded at 1080P in VC-1 format. Which makes it look very nice. The film element itself that was transferred seems to have some dirt in some of the opening shots. One of the difficulties in transfering film to Hi-Def means every little speck or scratch can be seen. The blacks here are very deep, it is a movie shot mostly at night and it looks very good for such a film.
The Audio:
The audio on the main film is 5.1 Dolby Digital TrueHD. And the mix here is okay, the mix is primarily out of the front two speakers. The original source of the movie is in stereo, and it seems to stay in stereo here.
The extras:
All of the extras from the 2 disc special edition DVD are included here. One annoying trait is that “Dirty Harry: The Original” is presented in letterbox 16:9 in 4:3 format. In other words it will show with black all the way around the image. Annoying. It is a simple documentary and does not reveal a lot of new information about the movie.
The best extra in the bunch and worth the 85 minutes is Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows, it is new for this release. This documentary chronicales the carrer of Eastwood, from his very early days as a studio B actor at Universal all the way up through the 1990s. You will learn more about Eastwood in this documentary then in any of the other extras on the disc.
Eastwood is a very hardworking actor and director, and understands his public persona very well and uses it to his advantage. He developed the practice of doing a personal film then a more commercial film. He seems to take it personally when a movie he loves doesn’t do well publicly, such as his bio-pic on Charlie Parker “Bird”. This documentary will have you filling your Netflix queue up with long forgotten Eastwood films.
There is an audio commentary by Richard Schickel who is a film critic and Eastwood biographer. Schickel speaks of how the movie is shot without close-ups and is primarily in wide and telephoto shots. From the commentary I enjoyed learning that the suicide scene was originally scheduled to be shot over six days, but Eastwood realized that newscoverage at the time could cover the same scene without the additional expensive extra lights. Therefore he was able to get that scene done in one evening. A great lesson on filmmmaking.
Overall this is a good effort on an important American film from the early 70s. Currently this is the only Dirty Harry Blu-Ray available as an individual disc. The others are avaiable as part of the Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition [Blu-ray]
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