Wednesday 8 August 2018

The mysterious mugging victim from Magnum Force, revealed.


Here's an interesting story – I was sifting and reading through a lot of cuttings and articles some time ago and came across an original 3 page Magnum Force review (Magazine unknown) but looks like it originated from the U.S. 

The review features an image (left) from one of the deleted scenes, namely the car park mugging - these scenes are of course nothing new. However, what makes this particularly interesting is that it actually names the actor playing the victim. 

It's the first time (to me) that this information has ever appeared (alongside the image from Magnum Force). 






The African American actor Peter Fitzsimmons is credited on the imdb, but as 'uncredited' and simply as 'Black man'. 

This was of course insufficient to link to that actual scene - until now.... It would be great of course to chat with Mr Fitzsimmons, if only to see if he could shed a little more information on the scene and perhaps how he remembers it. 

It would also be great to hear from the actors who played the muggers or any of the extras used in the scene. I'm hoping Peter is still around; he did appear in the Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happiness (2006).


As a point of interest, the caption in the review does have it all wrong. It seems to imply that Callahan is grabbing the man by the neck - when in fact (as I remember it in the script) the victim suffers from a heart attack during the mugging - and Harry is actually thumping his chest in an attempt to revive him. 

Thankfully, we also now have another rare cutting (left, provided by our friend Davy Triumph) which shows Harry actually applying the blows to the chest. 

I guess this information wasn't available to the magazine editors at the time, or possibly they just made a (bad) guess. And of course, as it was a deleted scene the full information may have not been available alongside the corresponding press still or on any attached legend. It's an interesting one. 

Are you out there Mr Fitzsimmons?

1 comment:

Callahan said...



I remember seeing a scene from Magnum Force in Films & Filming showing Harry holding a broken bottle against a guys throat

Can we not get a version of the film from the US with the cuts in?

Or did they never make the final cut