Classic lines and the movies they're not from

When I was about ten minutes into watching Dirty Harry for the first time on Monday night, my eight-year-old knocked on the door to the living room, as he is wont to do.

Oftentimes his excuse for interrupting us after we've already packed them away for bed is that he wants to give us a final bedtime hug. It's the perfect scam. He gets to prolong the inevitable, but we aren't allowed to be mad. And frankly, we have no inclination to be. How can you reject the affections of a sweetly pajama'd boy wanting one last embrace?

My wife wasn't watching with me so maybe he thought this gave him a bit more leeway. I'd paused the movie, of course. He asked "Is this a violent movie?"

It hadn't particularly been so far, but I knew it would be. "Yes," I told him.

He asked a few more follow-up questions. I don't totally remember what they were. But apparently I was feeling charitable as I volunteered that this was a movie with a famous line in it, and I wondered if he'd ever heard it.

Then, doing my best Clint Eastwood interpretation: "Go ahead. Make my day."

Of course, that was a bit of a can of worms as then I had to contextualize the line. I explained that it was tough cop with a gun staring down a bad guy. And that needed further clarification, so I had to explain that it was the equivalent of saying "Give me an excuse to shoot you. It would make my day to shoot you." So then of course I had to explain that Dirty Harry was actually a good guy, but he just got results by whatever means necessary.

I was actually surprised to see that Dirty Harry was not, as I had assumed, the San Francisco cop equivalent of the Man With No Name. I expected him to be unflappable and emotionless and never for a moment at a disadvantage, as that's how the Man With No Name strikes me. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in this movie involves Harry running from phone booth to phone booth as he needs to keep answering calls from a man holding a woman for ransom, threatening to kill her. He's flappable as hell in these scenes, and seems to have no certainty whatsoever that everything will turn out alright. Just one of the many reasons I was very positively surprised by this movie.

A bit of a disappointment, though? The line I quoted is not actually from Dirty Harry.

I waited all movie for this line, and it never came. I had to settle for "Do you feel lucky, punk? Well do ya?" A good line, to be sure, but it's no "make my day."

Checking online afterward, I realized that the line I most associate with Dirty Harry is from Sudden Impact, a film that didn't come out until a full 12 years after this one, and is not even the second movie in the series. In fact it's the fourth film after The Enforcer (1973) and Magnum Force (1976). How often does the fourth film in any series produce its most quotable line?

But what I think surprised me more was not that it came from a later movie in the series, but that it came from a movie as recent as 1983. When I first became aware of that quote, it couldn't have been long after 1983. Which makes a certain sense, of course, as I probably caught it when it was just coming into bloom as a cultural phenomenon. Because I didn't see movies like Sudden Impact in 1983 (being only nine and ten years old), I must have thought it was an older reference that I was only learning just then because I'd grown old enough to know about such things.

Of course, there's also a chance that I didn't know "Go ahead. Make my day" until much later, maybe even the 1990s. I just don't remember. It's all lost in the swirl of memory.

Having liked Dirty Harry as much as I did, I now feel there's a decent chance I will eventually watch the other movies in the series, even though I imagined I'd only watch this one to correct an oversight in my filmography.

Then again, will it be worth watching The Enforcer and Magnum Force -- about which I hear very little -- just for Sudden Impact to "make my day?"

I may actually find out.