Paul Toohey, and drawing a line in the sand with the punks at The Punch ...

(Above: postage stamp sized Dirty Harry with weird subtitles for your viewing pleasure, and so you can recite the lines about feeling lucky. Well do ya, do you feel lucky? I'se gotsa tah know.)

Here's the problem when journalists are allowed to scribble about the movies.

They don't have a clue.

There's Paul Toohey jotting down The 10 best gunshot scenes in movies, and he doesn't list Dirty Harry.

Dirty Harry is a deeply fascist vigilante movie, directed by the adept Don Siegel, and one of its routines embedded itself in the consciousness of Quentin Tarantino and every other post punk reflexive modernist to bedevil film-making these past few decades, not to mention kids still littering YouTube with homages.

At one point it was impossible to attend film buff events without being confronted by pale pasty faced film buffs fantasising about the ultimate payback for bullies who'd kicked sand in their faces ... Come to think of it, and I'm not endorsing cultural stereotypes, but why were they always male and often wearing spectacles?

To leave Dirty Harry out of the macho testosterone schoolboy fantasy routine is a rough equivalent of leaving out the book of Genesis from the top ten myth-making books of the bible.

Instead of going for the obvious, Toohey plays the typical buff game of going for the obscure, awarding his tenth slot to Castle Keep. Heaven help us, but when you're putting a Sydney Pollack show up there in the top ten, clearly you prefer pretentiousness to burgers.

Worse still, Toohey doesn't mention the scene in Bonny and Clyde where the fuzz take out the car, with Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway soaking up the shots, in a hail of machine gun lead that now looks preposterous, if not outright silly, but which at the time seriously alarmed moral crusaders and Bosley Crowther, and which set the pace for some time to come for random acts of violence. Not that the original event lacked for bullet holes:

(And for plenty more nifty photos of the shootout, head off here as Gibsland celebrates what made it famous).

But back to poor old Bosley. It's fun to revisit his outrage and indignation about Bonny and Clyde here. Meantime, a few choice selections ...

It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie...

... It has Mr. Beatty clowning broadly as the killer who fondles various types of guns with as much nonchalance and dispassion as he airily twirls a big cigar, and it has Miss Dunaway squirming grossly as his thrill-seeking, sex-starved moll. It is loaded with farcical holdups, screaming chases in stolen getaway cars that have the antique appearance and speeded-up movement of the clumsy vehicles of the Keystone Kops, and indications of the impotence of Barrow, until Bonnie writes a poem about him to extol his prowess, that are as ludicrous as they are crude ...

... Arthur Penn, the aggressive director, has evidently gone out of his way to splash the comedy holdups with smears of vivid blood as astonished people are machine-gunned. And he has staged the terminal scene of the ambuscading and killing of Barrow and Bonnie by a posse of policemen with as much noise and gore as is in the climax of The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap, which opened yesterday at the Forum and the Murray Hill.

Needless to say, the show went on to make US$70 million in domestic box office, and Warren Beatty helped himself to 40% of the gross, thereafter becoming a serial pest, and the show collared two Academy Awards, along with ten nominations. Hey ho, it's the business of critics to be out of kilter with the mood of the times and of audiences ...

Perhaps even more astonishing and offensive is Toohey's refusal to acknowledge Sam Peckinpah, who went out of his way to offend every critic in the game by brooding on violence, culminating in the shoot out at the end of The Wild Bunch, which is blessed with a period machine gun. Naturally a reporter from the Reader's Digest asked Why was this film ever made?

Oh yes, that's a gun. Swing it William Holden.

And if you wanted to play the buff game, and delve into the esoteric, then how about Clint East in Joe Kidd, an early example of the long gun long range sniper fetish being called in to play.

You can see that sort of long range fetish - the bullet arriving before the sound - taken to maximum absurdity these days in the Mark Wahlberg actioner Shooter, where Wahlberg displays such uncanny accuracy over the curvature of the earth that it's a wonder any American enemies remain alive (but of course the enemy is always within).

End result? It's impossible to take Toohey's opinions on anything seriously. A line has been drawn in the sand, and the punk has to be blown away ...

Hey, these days I'm a recovered film buff, and there's an upside, since I avoid the company of white-faced men who spend too long in the dark, but it's the weekend, and we're so over scribbling about commentariat commentators scribbling about the end of the world ...

(Below: Spoiler alert. And of course the lucky punk routine pays off at the end, with an actual tad out of synch shooting).