The release this week of all five "Dirty Harry" movies starring Clint Eastwood on DVD and Blu-ray gives fans the chance to settle in for a long weekend spent admiring the charismatic intensity and skillful range of a familiar but sometimes underappreciated American actor--Albert Popwell. Popwell, who died in 1999, goes way back in the Dirty Harry franchise: he has a small role as a hippie in the movie that many see as a precursor to the Harry Callahan character (as it was molded by Eastwood and director Don Siegel in the 1971 Dirty Harry) and TV's McCloud to boot: the 1968 Coogan's Bluff. In that film, the first collaboration between Siegel and Eastwood--they'd later team up for The Beguiled, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Escape from Acatraz--Eastwood plays a shitkicker cop from Arizona who hits New York City at the height of the counterculture era to track down an escaped hood and inspires everyone's reluctant admiration for the effectiveness of his uncivilized approach enforcement. Popwell would go on to appear in a small but key role in Dirty Harry and return, in a different role each time, in the first three of its four sequels. Grady Hendrix recently noted that Popwell "twice the actor Mr. Eastwood is in the series;" his repeat appearances also serve as a handy guide to what possibilities were open--and closed--to talented African-American character actors in movies of the period. (I don't necessarily mean to imply that things have changed a whole hell of a lot.)
In Dirty Harry, Popwell has perhaps the movie's most memorable scene, albeit one that he has to spend lying on the sidewalk with a gun in his face. He plays the survivor of a bank robbery that interrupts Harry's lunch. A crackerjack action set piece peerlessly directed by Siegel in his knuckle-cracking prime, it establishes Harry's unearthly cool and mastery of the violent approach to crime-solving; he figures out what's going from one look at the getaway car and proceeds to foil the robbers by shooting their car. He then proceeds to fake out Popwell, who's lying within reach of his gun, by taunting him with the famous speech about just what Harry's gun could do to him if he had any bullets left, which he may or may not--"Do you feel lucky?" After backing down, Popwell calls out to the departing Harry in raspy-voiced desperation--"I gots to know" he says, with as much dignity as imaginable under the circumstances--and Harry points the gun in his face, pulls the trigger--click!--then walks away chuckling. The audience is meant to cheer Harry for not only defeating the fallen criminal but messing with his head and rubbing his face in it, and most of them do cheer, but Siegel's inclusion of a small grace note--a close-up of Popwell muttering, "Son of a bitch" as Harry walks away--can perhaps be taken as the director's covert acknowledgment that, for all his bitching and moaning about the things he's forced to do to compensate for the ineffectual lily-livered politicians and other liberals who would shackle the lawgiver, there's a big part of Harry that enjoys his job way too much.
There are no such grace notes in Popwell's flashy, repulsive scene in 1973's Magnum Force; he plays a pimp who brutally murders a hooker. But by then, grace notes in the "Dirty Harry" franchise were already getting to be few and far between. (Magnum Force is itself conceived as a raised middle finger to those who criticized the first film as a reactionary endorsement of vigilante police power. It pits craggy old Harry against a secret police death squad consisting of fresh-faced young up-and-comers--Robert Urich, Tim Matheson, David Soul--and their fearless leader, Hal Holbrook.) In 1976's The Enforcer, made in the wake of the SLA kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and other manifestions of the last insane, dying ripples of "revolutionary" counterculture politics, Popwell turns up as "Mustapha", a troubled-looking black militant who slips Harry some information that will help him bring down the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force", a bunch of pimps and hookers posing as a terrorist cell. (Like the Mothers of Invention, they're only in it for the money.) However we're meant to view his character, he does again manage to suggest a much deeper and more complicated range of thought and emotion than Harry. Popwell made the full jump to good guy in 1983's Sudden Impact, the only film in the series directed by Eastwood himself. By now, the tensions of the sixties are fully submerged and the movie is in total action-cartoon mode. There isn't much Popwell can do to leaven it, but he does get more screen time than ever before. He plays Harry's partner, which is the series equivalent to being the drummer in Spinal Tap. It is a role traditionally assigned to representatives of "minority groups", such as the Hispanic rookie detective played by Reni Santoni in Dirty Harry and the woman cop played by Tyne Daly in The Enforcer, so that Harry can show that for all his angry-white-male bluster, he can respect and work with the unwhite and the unmale when they prove to him that they have the right stuff. Paradoxically, they invariably prove it by getting taken out of the action by getting injured or killed, so that Harry can also show that only he is tough enough to single-handedly prevail in the end. Popwell's role does not break the cycle.
Popwell's career was hardly limited to his association with Clint Eastwood. He was a very active presence in TV, appeared in Siegel's Charley Varrick, and left a fond impression among fans of family-blacksploitation films with his role as Matthew Johnson, who, with his brother Melvin (Caro Kenyatta), lent their martial-arts skills to the efforts to keep heroin out of the neighborhood in two films starring the late Tamara Dobson as the amazon avenger Cleopatra Jones. But he deserves to be remembered for being to Dirty Harry what Frankie Faisan has been to Hannibal Lector. Faison, it will be remembered, appeared in all the movies featuring everyone's favorite cannibal psychiatrist--Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon--up until the more recent and less successful Hannibal Rising. It would be nice to surmise that Popwell's absence from the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, was closely connected to that film's disappointing returns, but it did have, mmmmmmmmmmm, other problems. Eastwood himself was 58 at the time, and the appearance of this box set, twenty years later, can probably be taken as a declaration, should anyone have been in doubt about it before now, that we have indeed seen the last of Harry Callahan and his big phallic killing device. Eastwood may not be the master filmmaker and great actor that a number of critics have insisted on taking him for in his dotage, but, give him a little credit: he's less shameless than Sylvester Stallone.