June
3
Where's the Grit, Dirty Harry?
[Posted by Peter Debruge]
When critics inevitably say Dirty Harry looks better than ever on Blu-ray, they won’t be kidding (I wasn’t). Warner’s new hi-def edition is stunning in its clarity, to the degree that the word “gritty” (so much a staple of the Dirty Harry conversation in the past) no longer applies. These new hi-def transfers are so sharp, virtually no sign of film grain remains, a decision that surely reflects what the market currently demands, but also suggests a certain amount of very sophisticated tampering on the part of Warner Home Video.
Watching these films, I’m reminded of an interview with Eastwood’s longtime editor Joel Cox, who oversaw how the star’s films were being handled during the early days of homevid. Referring back to 1983, he told me, “We had just finished the film ‘Sudden Impact,’ and they put it through the process. They put the film out and changed the color and widened it and changed the sound around a bit. Clint had me go in and check it out, and we realized the people who did it took it upon themselves to make ‘corrections,’ figuring that we didn’t know how to time the picture or make the sound correct.”
Why Clint likes it gritty after the jump...
Cox went on to relay the following exchange:
Warner Home Video: You guys don’t know how to (color) time things. We can’t see in the background, it’s so dark.
Joel Cox: We put it up grey. Did you ever think that’s what we wanted to do?
WHV: But the public wants to see that.
JC: What about the sound?
WHV: Well, we couldn’t understand the dialogue, so we lowered the effects and music to hear the dialogue.
JC: Did you ever think we did that on purpose?
WHV: Well, you wouldn’t do that.
“See what I mean?” he went on. “It’s all perception. A director, when he’s in that dubbing room, he’s listening to what he sees as the nuance of the film, the feeling, the emotion. Clint always says, ‘You don’t have to hear every line to understand what’s going on,’ and there are some times where you don’t want to hear the word. In that particular case, on ‘Sudden Impact,’ there was a line in there, that he... I won’t say he was embarrassed, but he felt a little edgy about, so we just buried it in the music and effects, and it’s one of the ones they opened up. And he said, ‘Whoa, I buried that.’ And there was a reason for it. You could hear it if you wanted to. And he says, ‘The best thing is, if they didn’t hear it and they want to hear it, they’ll come back and see it again.’”
* "Dirty Harry" screencap courtesy of DVDBeaver.com, which evaluates the Blu-ray here.
UPDATE: Glenn Kenny weighs in on the hi-def treatment, too.
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