Dirty Harry (1971) - film review

When a young woman is shot dead by a rooftop sniper, San Francisco police inspector Harry Callahan is tasked with finding the killer.  Nicknamed Dirty Harry, Callahan has a reputation for not doing things by the book and he is not pleased when his superiors saddle him with a rookie cop as his partner.  In a ransom note, the killer identifies himself as Scorpio and threatens to go on killing unless he is paid $100,000.  After being pursued across town by Callahan, Scorpio doubles his ransom demand and threatens to kill a teenage girl he has abducted.  Callahan agrees to take the ransom money to the killer but, predictably, the drop ends in a bloody confrontation.  Scorpio escapes, having been badly mauled by his police attacker, and files a complaint against the San Francisco police department.  Even though Callahan has accumulated enough evidence for a conviction, the process by which he acquired it makes the evidence inadmissible, and so Scorpio is allowed to walk free.  Callahan knows that the killer is a dangerous psychopath who will strike again and decides to take the law into his own hands.  Scorpio must die...

Although it met with a barrage of controversy and bad press when it was first released, Dirty Harry was the defining police thriller of the 1970s.  Arguably the most influential film of its genre, its portrayal of a maverick cop being forced to step outside the law to deliver his idea of justice was to provide a template for countless films and television series throughout the decade.  The film was originally seen as fascist propaganda in some quarters, a reaction to liberal policies that favoured criminals rather than the victims of crime.  The fact that it proved to be an enormous box office success shows that it touched a nerve.  At the time, the ineffectiveness of policing and the leniency with which dangerous offenders were treated by the judicial system was a major public concern across America, and indeed across the entire western world.  Dirty Harry offered a vision of the cop as guardian angel which many were willing to embrace.

Director Don Siegel had trod similar ground with his previous gritty action films, Coogan’s Bluff (1968) and Madigan (1968), but Dirty Harry is where he finally managed to get his message across, whilst delivering one of the most stylish and tense action thrillers of the decade.  The film does not, as some claim, condone vigilantism but rather shows that in an increasingly violent world the police have no option but to be as ruthless and determined as criminals if society is to be protected, otherwise anarchy will prevail.  Some would argue that, over the past decades, the pendulum has swung far too far in favour of the criminal, and so the issues that the film raises are just as topical today as they were when it was first released.  Dirty Harry is not about revenge killing, it is about the appropriate response the law enforcers need to take to keep law abiding citizens safe in an increasingly violent world.    

As the eponymous Harry, Clint Eastwood gives us one of cinema’s great icons – the lone wolf maverick cop, a saturnine anti-hero who is as charming as his merciless.  Eastwood had originally found international stardom in a series of spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone, including the classic The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).  The solitary hard man persona that he perfected in these films made him the perfect casting choice for the role of Harry Callahan, a tough uncompromising San Francisco cop who lives by his own rules.  The actor would play the character in the four subsequent sequels – Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988).  The role so suits Eastwood that it is hard to separate the actor from the character and his public persona would be linked to this, his most celebrated role, for many years.  And with good reason – this is Clint Eastwood at his absolute best, and where he gets to deliver his most quotable line.  "You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ’Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?"

© Chris Alderton 2010

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