Do you remember Sudden Impact? Me either. Actually, that’s not quite accurate: it was on HBO circa 1984 which is around the time my family got it’s first VCR. Actually that’s not quite accurate: it was a Beta. Yeah, we were that family. Don’t hate: the word on the street was that Beta was better. Just ask Mac users. Anyway, by virtue of having this incredible new machine that recorded movies (including R-rated movies), it was obligatory that I tape virtually everything that was on HBO (copies that were useless by the end of the decade when the Beta machine broke and, of course, the only thing on the market were VHS players; it was painful to essentially discard a small library worth of movies, including horrible copies of TV-sanitized versions with commercials not edited out (who needed Tivo, we had the fast-forward function; that was cutting edge enough for the mid-’80s). One lost gem is the TV-edited version of Caddyshack which, in addition to having the obviously so-ludicrous-they-were-funny heavy-handed editing (“Hey, we’re all gonna get laid” replaced by “Hey, let’s all take a shower!”, etc.), also had a handful of scenes that didn’t make the official cut of the movie (which, I eventually found out, was not uncommon practice in those days: when a TV station would put the R-rated version on the operating table to lobotomize it for TV, they would usually get the initial, full cut of the film, so they were, in essence, working with a sort of half-assed Director’s cut of a particular film). This version of Caddyshack had an extra, and truly awful, scene with Bill Murray and Chevy Chase. Forgettable, and therefore probably priceless. Invariably, that these copies were worth nothing (no machine to play them on!) circa 1990 probably means, had I saved them, they’d be worth hundreds now on eBay. Think I’m joking? There are sites out there where audio cassette enthusiasts (i.e., freaks) pay unhealthy amounts of money to procure blank cassettes from back in the day. Not to use or for recording, just to have them. I’m not judging; to be honest I never understood stamp collecting either.
All of which is to say, I know I had a copy of Sudden Impact and I probably watched it a dozen times. Even then, I thought it was pretty weak (certainly compared to the original Dirty Harry; a masterpiece then and now, and the not-shabby effort The Enforcer (’76) which followed up the pretty crappy Magnum Force (’73)–a movie that, if it did nothing else, introduced the world to David “Hutch” Soul and Tim “Otter” Matheson; actually, Matheson began his celluloid life as the voice of animated hero Johnny Quest, whose faithful companion Bandit, is seen above).
To bring it full circle from Bandit to Beta to Sudden Impact? That movie was on TV last night, and I don’t think I’d seen a second of it since the ’80s. Therefore, while flipping around, I was surprised and delighted to see the character I had totally forgotten about; the one who should have won an oscar for best supporting actor that year. I’m referring, of course, to Meathead, Harry’s bulldog. He steals every scene he is in (not too difficult considering he is in scenes with Clint Eastwood, who looks more like a dirty old man than Dirty Harry, and Sandra Locke, who is movie history’s Linda McCartney), and it was him alone that kept me tuned in, unable to turn away, in the hopes that he’d turn up in another scene. He did. And sure enough, once it occurred to me that some genius must have posted one or two of these scenes on YouTube, I was not disappointed. To add to the bliss, the person who uploaded the clips is French, so we have the added pleasure of seeing the following description: Le bulldog de Dirty Harry dans Sudden Impact. It don’t get no better than that.
I’ve done all I can do here. Take it away Meathead!
