The Screengrab

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.)

Read More...

CHICAGO: "No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema" (April 5--May 23) at the Gene Siskel Film Center presents eight films from the vaults of Nikkatsu Studios, a crowd-pleasing outfit that in the '60s specialized in gaudy, glamorously stylized action flicks: yakuza films, police thrillers, youth-exploitation melodramas. Long shut out of serious discussion of Japanese cinema, the studio's output is largely unknown in the West outside of the work of the gonzo cult hero Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, et al). The program eschews Suzuki's work in favor of what, at least for American audiences, are total obscurities with such titles as A Colt Is My Passport, Gangster V.I.P., Velvet Hustler, The Warped Ones, and the "Eastern Western" Plains Wanderer. Grady Hendrix describes this "liberating blast of hot cigarette smoke and cool, jet-set jazz" as "Japan’s version of the French New Wave, except bleaker, more stylish, and aiming primarily to entertain rather than enlighten.”

Read More...

Jean-Claude Van Damme just turned forty-seven or ninety-four, depending on whether you subscribe to Nugent's Law, which states that anyone who's starred as identical twin brothers in a movie has to age for both of them. To celebrate the occasion, one of our favorite party planners, Grady Hendrix, pays appropriate tribute to the birthday boy in Slate. "Jean-Claude Van Damme started out in life as a baby, which was tremendously frustrating for him because babies are, by their very nature, skinny and weak. In adolescence, a thick pair of enormous glasses were added to the equation, and in photos of him at this age he looks like an annoyed duck. Finally, his dad couldn't take it anymore and enrolled him in karate classes. Jean-Claude trained fanatically, took up bodybuilding, and then, realizing that he would never be as big as the other karate students, he trumped them by becoming more flexible, and he took up ballet." From there it was a hop, skip, and a pirouette to movies, though some might say that, as an actor, Kid Flexible has a limited range: "Jean-Claude has three expressions: worried, charming, and doing a split. Of the three, doing a split is the most convincing." — Phil Nugent