When Popeye Doyle Met Dirty Harry

(Formerly ecarle.)

Always interesting to me:

Some people caught it, some didn't, but I'll bring it up again now.

The French Connection and Dirty Harry both came out in 1971...in the final quarter of the year, TFC in the fall and Dirty Harry at Christmas. Popeye Doyle and Dirty Harry were compared and contrasted to each other, and the roles helped their actors immeasurably: as his biographer Richard Schickel noted, Dirty Harry "converted Clint Eastwood from a star to a superstar" and Gene Hackman (who got Popeye after Steve McQueen and a bunch of other names turned the role down) got a Best Actor Oscar and solid stardom himself (he was sort of a "stealth superstar," making good and bad movies with equal fervor, like Michael Caine.

Flash forward 21 years:

Its 1992. Clint Eastwood is trying to recover from a career slump that last roughly from 1988(when his 5th Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, got wiped out at the summer box office by the bigger and better Die Hard) to 1990(his attempt at Lethal Weapon -- The Rookie -- was mean and sick and maladroit, an art film called White Hunter, Black Heart failed.)

Meanwhile, Gene Hackman was keeping to his then super-busy schedule of appearing in just about anything, from the "class" of Postcards from the Edge(director: Mike Nichols) to the hokum of "Loose Cannons"(a cop buddy movie with the fading Dan Ackroyd.) Hackman made THREE movies in 1990 alone. And look at this list from 1988 to 1991:

Mississippi Burning(a hit with Oscar cred and a Best Actor nom for Hackman) but also from 1988 to 1991: Split Decisions, Bat 21, Full Moon in Blue Water, Another Woman,The Package, Narrow Margin, Class Action, Company Business.

Gene Hackman: The Hardest Working Man in Show Business...but not always in movies you'd remember. Eastwood was still a bigger star.

But Eastwood's star was fading and he needed a comeback, pronto: he had been sitting on a great script(now called Unforgiven) for years, waiting to use it when he was old enough and needed a career save.

He also needed some great other actors to be in it. Morgan Freeman was one. Richard Harris was another.

And Gene Hackman was the most important of all.

Now, Dirty Harry and Popeye Doyle would finally share the screen and it was 1971 all over again. Except older.

THAT's what i think about when I watch Unforgiven.

And what a winner. Best Picture for Eastwood. Best Director for Eastwood. Best Supporting Actor for Hackman(his first Oscar since French Connection.) If only Clint Eastwood could have won Best Actor too..but no...it was time to break Al Pacino's streak.