Sudden Impact

The fourth Dirty Harry film, and the only one Eastwood directed himself. The narrative here is split. On one side Callahan is fighting his superiors in San Francisco again and gets sent out of the city. On the other is Jennifer Spencer, a painter tracking down, one by one, the men who raped her and her sister years earlier. The film brings them to the same town. So the series breaks its own formula: the person opposite Callahan is a killer, the film stands with her, and the real question is what the law failed to do. Sondra Locke plays Jennifer. The series' most quoted line comes from this film, spoken as Callahan levels his gun and invites a man to try something; it later travelled as far as American politics. Familiar ground for anyone who knows the series. Not the place to start, and the way the film uses its scenes of rape sits very badly now.