FILTHY HARRY and the Clint Eastwood impersonations of Joe Dimmick

Throughout his decades in the show business industry, Clint Eastwood has become an cultural icon, playing a vast variety of tough guy characters, ranging from cowboys to cops to curmudgeons to chair yellers.  Meanwhile, actor Joe Dimmick has become an icon in his own right, playing a vast variety of Clint Eastwoods.



Dimmick is the owner of "Dimmick's Doubles," a celebrity lookalike company he founded in 1979 and of which Dimmick himself is the biggest draw.  Dimmick's Eastwood impressions, beginning in 1977 when he answered a "Variety" ad, have led him to a certain degree of squinty-eyed fame and fortune, as Dimmick has portrayed Clint characters in commercials, television and even films, playing Eastwood archetypes in Mel Brooks' ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS and the action comedy ACES GO PLACES 2.  (In the latter, his character of "Filthy Harry" is hired by a Henry Kissinger impersonator.)



But his biggest role as "Clint Eastwood" is in the 1987 film FILTHY HARRY, a feature-length epic Dimmick wrote, produced, directed and starred in that serves as an excuse to both parody DIRTY HARRY and give brief showcases to many of "Dimmick's Doubles" themselves, as impersonators of Joan Collins, Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds (as "Slick") and more show up in minimal-to-supporting roles. 


FILTHY HARRY is, as you can probably guess, not a "good" movie.  The jokes are stale and terrible, the impersonations are only vaguely convincing (Stallone is laughable) and the performances are, to be kind, amateurish.  But it also has a strange likeability about it -- there's nothing mean-spirited about the impersonations, and there's nothing in the film other than some comic violence that would give it anything more than a "G" rating if the MPAA ever touched this thing. 

Mike Sullivan pretty much nailed it in his "Shock Cinema" review when he called it "an abject failure" as a comedy, but "any film where a Yamaha keyboard actually receives an on screen credit during the opening...has earned the right to be watched sober at least once."  It's a ridiculous vanity project that's basically just an advertisement for a company that allows you to hire a mediocre Whoopi Goldberg impersonator, but it's about the most affable mindless monstrosity that you could imagine.


(This 2003 article even suggests there was a sequel, called MAGNUM FARCE, but this may have just been an offhanded comment Dimmick made.  Anyone have any ideas if this exists?)