The former, which takes place near the San Francisco of Vertigo, shows Dirty Harry’s identity blending into the killer he is tracking (his wife at the time, Sandra Locke). This serial killer/pursuer cliche is pushed to uncomfortable lengths, until Harry’s goals are indistinguishable from the killer’s.

Firefox is a spy film that is incredibly dark and slow, with a minimum of dialogue. Eastwood is a man just doing a job while the idealists he is helping are murdered all around him. It’s like a cross between the Jean-Pierre Melville and Bresson, if I may indulge in some hyperbole. Eastwood acts like one of Bresson’s impassive “models” as he sleepwalks through a Melville landscape of wounded anti-heroes. It’s astonishingly morbid for a Hollywood thriller.

As per your claim that “Sudden Impact” is the director’s “Vertigo,” I like it a lot. As we recently discussed, there is a particular richness to his films of this period, and so I can see how it would follow that his “Vertigo” would be a product of his real phase of self-revisionism. (Perhaps before my Eastwood lecture I may re-screen “Sudden Impact” to test the claim.) Either way, this is the richness and most exciting thing about auteurist criticism: the unending possibility for discovery and especially re-discovery, where new viewings can entirely redraw the contours of a director’s career. So why not “Sudden Impact”?