Call me old fashioned, but I think Lichtenfeld should show more respect for Clint Eastwood's "Make my day." Even though I never saw Sudden Impact, the Dirty Harry movie it was uttered in--I only saw the trailer--I rank "Make my day" as the greatest action flick one-liner of all time. Admittedly, in the quarter-century since its introduction "Make my day" has lost much of its freshness, and the phrase was sullied by Ronald Reagan when he used it to threaten veto of a tax increase in 1985. But there's a reason Reagan and various others co-opted "Make my day." It was and remains a small masterpiece of economy.

Imagine a tough cop saying to some violent punk, "You're doing me a favor by forcing me to act in self-defense because I will actually enjoy killing you, something I wouldn't have the opportunity to do otherwise, given the rules imposed by the law and by my profession, not to mention the ethical consensus imposed less formally by civilized society--rules that I am compelled, grudgingly, to obey." Kind of a mouthful, right? "Make my day" communicates all this in a three-word Haiku. As a bonus, those three words perfectly express the uniquely warped psyche of the Dirty Harry character. Yes, "Make my day" is an expression of individual derangement and egomania rather than a summing-up of the collective American mythology. So what? This is an action movie we're talking about, not some damned folk song.

I saw the first two "Die Hard" movies when they came out, and, to be honest, I don't even remember "Yippee Ki-Yi-Yay motherfucker." I think probably that's because the line was so clearly improved on later when Arnold Schwarzenegger said "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2. At any rate, compared to "Make my day," "Yippee Ki-Yi-Yay motherfucker" is downright loquacious, and action movie heroes are supposed to say as few words as is humanly possible. It's also less exhuberantly fascistic, and let's face it, we don't exactly want our action movie heroes to be card-carrying members of the ACLU. "Yippee Ki-Yi-Yay motherfucker" is "Make my day" with the pathology washed out of it, and where's the fun in that?

I'm seriously having a problem with this. I repeat: These aren't one-liners.

Sure, they're single lines. But a one-liner is a form of joke. These are catch phrases.

I'm no William Safire, but goddammit, this is making me nearly as angry as when a bunch of TV critics described Meadow trying to "double park" in the Sopranos finale. (She was parallel parking.)

Personally, I think one of the great movie single lines (I agree that the term "one-liner" applies to jokes, which these are not) is John Wayne's, from True Grit.

Marshal Rooser Cogburn, on horseback, is confronting Lucky Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall) and three of his gang.

Cogburn: I mean to kill you here and now, Ned; or take you in to Judge Parker, to be hanged at his convenience. Which will it be?

Pepper: I call that bold talk from a one-eyed fat man.

Cogburn: FILL YOUR HAND, YOU SONOFABITCH!

And Rooster charges the four outlaws, reins in his teeth, shooring a Winchester '73 in his right hand and a Colt Peacemaker in his left.

However, the line would not be so memorable if Robert Duvall hadn't set it up with his line. It helps when you have two great actors playing off each other that way.

Those are wonderful lines! I have always been partial to "Well, you can kiss my sister's black cat's ass" from The Wild Bunch.

I do have to disagree with Tomothy Noah's perception that Inspector Harry Callahan has a warped psyche. Contrary to liberal gospel on Dirty Harry, he is not a kill-crazy psycho who gets his rocks off by killing people. (If they want an example of that kind of person, they have no further to look than the so-called "Scorpio killer" from Dirty Harry.)

Harry Callahan is actually a disillusioned idealist, as I see him. We do not know much about his life before he became a cop; merely that he was married and his wife was killed in a way unrelated to his job shortly before the first movie. But he exhibits all the signs of somebody who joined up to make a difference and feels he is trying to keep the river of crime from overflowing its banks by building the levee higher. If the materials to do that include the bodies of dead criminals, that's fine with him. He has no illusions about the legal system dispensing justice; he has had too many cases thrown out on technicalities, e.g., Scorpio and the punks we meet at the start of Sudden Impact, to confuse justice with the practice of law in America.

I'll concede that by Harry's standards, to some extent 'justice' is what leaves his Model 29 at high velocity. But stop and think about it: Can you name an instance where Harry shot somebody who was not shooting at him first or for whom Harry did not have proof, admissible or not, that the bastard at the other end of the muzzle had committed a capital crime? I didn't think so.

And remember the ending of the movie Sudden Impact. Harry had an admission from Sondra Locke's character that she had shot and killed at least four of the people who raped her and her sister. He had the murder weapon she used (and it's a good thing for her that those small town cops aren't smart enough to dust the cartridges as well as the grips - she'd have a hard time explaining why her prints were on them). Yet he pins the blame for those murders on a real crazy who shot and killed the local chief of police, kidnapped Locke and tried to kill Harry himself. As far as he is concerned, in the matter of the two rapes justice has been served. The bastards who did it are all dead, either at his hand or Locke's; and the chief of police who covered up the crime because his son was one of the perps is dead at the hands of the chief rapist. Let the dead bury the dead, says he, without uttering a single falsehood when the local yokels ask what happened.

If Harry were the psycho-killer the liberals love to paint him as, he'd have signed on with the gang of vigilante street cops Hal Holbrook was running in Magnum Force. Holbrook offered him the chance, and he refused; and in the end he took them all down. No, Inspector Callahan is in some ways a chivalrous knight. A cynical, disillusioned knight in dented and oxidized armor, but a knight nonetheless. He is not a man who gets his kicks by killing people, even criminals. His true faling is that he is concerned with JUSTICE, and not the fine points of the law as practiced in American courtrooms.

I would tend to agree with your characterization of Eastwood's character in the Dirty Harry movies -- he really was a disillusioned idealist and was far less "fascist" than many other "action hero" characters.

While I agree with you on the line John Wayne yells as being one of the best movie catch phrases -- it is an 1892 Winchester, not an 1873, he spins while charging Lucky Ned Pepper and friends.

You're right, trapdoor. The Model 1892 has had a long movie career susbstituting for earlier models of lever action Winchesters because of its ready availability. Given that the story is set circa 1885, Rooster could not have been carrying that model Winchester, so I allowed myself just a bit of license.

I inherited a standard model (that is, without the Yakima Canutt modified lever) chambered for the basic .30-30 WCF round. I had occasion to bring her in to have a screw replaced at a busy gun shop last year and to generally be checked over by the gunsmith. Given the modern and exotic rifles that filled the gun racks, I felt a little sheepish about it. I mean, the model is as common as crabgrass and mine, while well maintained, isn't anything out of the ordinary. There's no decorative engraving; neither Granpa, Dad nor I have ever considered mounting a scope or sling swivels on her; and while she has a walnut forearm and stock that have been carefully oil treated and polished by hand (literally; you use just your hand, no cloth or anything, if you're doing it right) so the wood has a mellow glow to it, at bottom she's simply a short-range deer rifle meant for use in heavy brush.

The good ol' boys in the shop drifted on over and asked could they see her. They'd pick her up, check the sights (factory standard; no need to update something that works), and work the action, usually with a raise of the eyebrows as they felt the silky smoothness of the lever throw. The gunsmith did likewise and commented, "My, isn't she sweet?"

Coming from a pro of his caliber, that is praise indeed. I am fond of that rifle.

wouldn't be able to take the piss out of the original films.

Cyrano -- if you're is a 30-30, it is not an 1892, it's an 1994. The 1892 was chambered in .32-20, .38-40, .44-40 (the same calibers used in the 1873 -- the 1892 was designed by John Browning as a replacement for the 1873), and then in the 1990s it was reintroduced and made in .44-40 and .45 Colt. All of these rounds can be chambered in a Colt Peacemaker, making it easy to pair up a rifle and revolver. I have a '92 made in 1905, chambered for the .32-20, an '94 made in 1964 chambered for the .30-30 and an Italian made clone of the 1873 chambered in the period-incorrect .45 Colt.

I, too, have to go with "Go ahead, make my day" for the concision and precision of the line (not to mention Eastwood's trademark whispery menace in reading it.)

It's five words have more meaning that such shorter phrases as "I'll be back," or "That's hot" (oh, sorry, that second one isn't from a movie, but we're looking for shortness, here.)

"Sudden Impact" was the fourth of the "Dirty Harry" movies, which came somewhat after the first three (it was an eighties movie seven years after the last one), and which, compared to the great Don Siegel original, was a bit of a mess.

Luckily, "Make my day" comes early in the film, so you can watch the scene in which it appears and shut the movie off.(In the same scene, Harry tells the crooks "We aren't going to just let you walk out of here...("Who's we?")...Smith, Wesson, and me."

Now:

The antecedent for the line comes in Howard Hawks' Western "Rio Bravo" (1959.)

The great John Wayne says it, to a baddie reaching for his nearby gun, as Wayne pulls his:

"Go ahead...I wish ya would."

Just one word longer than the Eastwood classic, with much the same meaning, but more personal passion.