Feeling Lucky

Not every actor becomes a movie star, and not every movie star becomes an icon. Over the course of his career, Clint Eastwood has managed to be all three, spending sixty years building a body of work in front of and behind the camera and almost always knowing exactly how to shape a given project around his persona.

(I love the bit in David Fincher’s Zodiac where someone tells Mark Ruffalo’s Dave Toschi that "Dirty" Harry Callaghan was based on him, and Toschi just rolls his eyes: Maybe that was true in the development stage, but there’s no way Clint Eastwood is playing anyone but Clint Eastwood. Even in 1971.)

And as he nears the end of that run, Warner is celebrating its relationship with him by reissuing three films his fans remember most fondly – Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider – in new 4K restorations. The results speak for themselves.

Impossible as it may seem, there was once a time when Dirty Harry was just another cop picture – one of literally dozens of mid-range American movies about an unyielding police detective on the trail of a maniac. Eastwood had already made a few of those, and he’d make a lot more afterward – including four subsequent Harry Callaghan pictures. But America was in a moral crisis and Dirty Harry was the exact right movie for that moment, with the exact right actor in the role: Inflexible, terse, cynical, cruel.

Pauline Kael insisted Eastwood and Don Siegel had made a fascist picture; I think on the whole, the movie is a little more layered. Siegel keeps reminding us that Harry breaks more laws than he enforces in pursuit of Scorpio, insisting his ends justify the means. It’s Eastwood who shows us how much the guy enjoys those means. Yes, he only delivers physical harm to irredeemable shitbags like Andrew Robinson’s sniveling Scorpio … but that beloved early scene, where Harry pins down a suspect and plays a little game with him about how many bullets are left in his revolver? That’s torture, too.

Five years later, with Malpaso Productions set up at Warner and Eastwood firmly established as a director and producer, The Outlaw Josey Wales found him once again walking a morally cloudy line: The eponymous Missouri farmer joins the Confederate Army after his family is slaughtered by Union sympathizers, then becomes a fugitive after his compatriots are lured to their deaths by a promise of amnesty.

On the way to join other fleeing Confederates in Mexico, Wales keeps finding people to rescue aligning himself with women and Indigenous characters and killing the bounty hunters and soldiers who threaten them. The script, co-written by Philip Kaufman, always positions Josey as a noble man forced by circumstance to embrace violence, but Eastwood plays him as a lot less conflicted. He’s happy for the excuse.

By 1985, there was no such ambiguity in Pale Rider. Eastwood’s nameless preacher is literally an avenging angel, conjured to defend a town of homesteaders from a mining tycoon (Richard Dysart) who wants the gold deposits underneath their feet. Dressed as a man of God but more than willing to show the frightened menfolk of Carbon Canyon how to fight, it’s clear that the Preacher has someone’s blessing to judge the sinful … and with its reference to the horsemen of the apocalypse, Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack’s script flirts with the idea that he might not have been sent by the man upstairs, but the other guy.

That’s not the case, though: The Preacher is a hero through and through, a mirror image of the vengeful stranger Eastwood played in his earlier High Plains Drifter. This specter is kinder, more courteous, and much gentler with women; in fact, his chivalry is essential to his relationships with teenaged Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny) and her mother Sarah (Carrie Snodgress) – whose attraction to the Preacher complicates her engagement to the quiet, gentle Hull (Michael Moriarty). It's all entirely unspoken, but it’s absolutely there, and the actors – Eastwood included – make the most of the tension. Good movie.

The 4K editions (available in standard packaging and collector-friendly steelbooks) include most of the archival supplements from previous releases of Harry and Josey – Richard Schickel audio commentaries, feature-length documentaries, interviews and promotional featurettes – as well as some newly produced material.

Each film gets two new featurettes, one looking back at a given movie from a modern perspective (“Generations and Dirty Harry,” “An Outlaw and an Antihero” and “The Diary of Sydney Penny: Lessons from the Set”) and another highlighting the work of cinematographer Bruce Surtees, who shot all three pictures (“Lensing Justice,” “The Cinematography of an Outlaw” and “Painting the Preacher”). Warner also throws in an episode of the HBO Max 2021 documentary series Clint Eastwood: A Cinematic Legacy on each disc – though Josey Wales and Pale Rider each get the same one, “Reinventing Westerns,” while the “Fighting for Justice” episode is included on Dirty Harry.

Pale Rider, previously featureless on DVD and Blu-ray, also offers the feature-length documentaries “The Eastwood Factor” and “Eastwood Directs: The Untold Story,” made by Schickel for Turner Movie Classics in 2010 and 2013 and included in previous Eastwood boxed sets. They’re not exactly confrontational works; as you’ll hear on his commentaries for Dirty Harry and Josey Wales, Schickel was an unabashed fan of Eastwood’s, and treats him as a living legend here. But Eastwood responded to that, and could be more relaxed for Schickel’s camera than he ever was for his own, so we get plenty of thoughtful anecdotes from him and affectionate testimonials from plenty of his famous colleagues on Eastwood Directs. It makes for a pleasant experience.

Still, it’s the restorations that are the real treasures here. Warner has gone back to the original camera negatives for these new masters – even scanning Dirty Harry and Pale Rider in 8K for maximum visual fidelity! – and delivered beautiful, faithful presentations of all three features. Bruce Surtees turns out to have been as central to Eastwood’s success as anyone else.

The sharp images and vivid colors of Dirty Harry’s daytime scenes have never looked better – and the bright red stage blood that was common to the period looks even more lurid – while the nighttime material is just as crisp and textured. Josey Wales goes darker, much darker, with Surtees embracing natural light and expressive angles to subtly frame his folk hero as a legendary figure, cloaking Eastwood in shadow even when he’s outdoors.

Interestingly enough, Pale Rider is a little less mythical despite having an actual magic-realist element; Surtees takes a slightly flatter angle here, framing the story as a conventional studio Western, the better to let the cast carry the dramatic weight. He’d save the real style for Unforgiven a few years later.

All three films offer Dolby Atmos remixes alongside the original theatrical soundtracks (mono for Harry and Josey, Dolby Stereo for Pale Rider). I sampled the Atmos tracks, and they’re decent enough, but I’ll always prefer the original experience.

That said, Warner’s team has had a lot of fun with the expanded soundscape of Dirty Harry, with gunfire reverberating around the room and Lalo Schifrin’s score pounding through the speakers. If you’ve got the setup, you kind of owe it to yourself to watch it that way at least once.

Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider are now available in individual 4K editions from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. They’ve also been released in steelbook packaging, if that’s your thing.

Up next: Shout! Studios brings Robert Zemeckis’ only thriller to 4K, and I finally get to the end of that Arrow DTV collection.