Besides The Man With No Name, today’s subject is probably Clint Eastwood’s other most famous role—and one that, for better or worse, cast a mile-long shadow over many a film, book, TV show, and probably pinball machine to count. Still, even on release Dirty Harry was received rather divisively, and 55 years on there’s still things to talk about—so the question is, does this film feel lucky?
Let’s put this into context—it’s the early seventies, in the wake of what was a tumultuous decade not just for the US but for most of the world in some way. California had been rocked by the gruesomeness bought to full media display like Manson and the Zodiac Killer, with law enforcement often seen as ineffective against them. This wasn’t the first major film about a law-bending hard cop, that one being Bullitt with Steve McQueen—though that one pretty famously ended on said cop’s methods being all for naught at the end. This one…well, we’ll see.
The setup is simple—Clint plays Harry Callahan, an anti-heroic San Francisco detective who’s happy enough to resolve things at the end of a very large revolver (which many gun nuts would seek for decades to come, finding that it comes with such side-effects as dislocating your wrist potentially). Enter the Scorpio killer—a demented young loon who kills at will, forcing our rough and tumble lead to try and track him by any means necessary, if it means alienating his superiors and more.
It’s pretty on the nose that this was tying directly into recent events, and there’s perhaps a touch of wish fulfilment here for Californian natives considering Zodiac was never caught. It’s also worth nothing that director Don Siegel and Eastwood bought fairly opposing interpretations of the character to bear, the latter playing him as a straight hero and the former seeing him as not much better than his serial killer opponent. Bear in mind a few years before Eastwood had already done a film that deconstructed vigilante justice harshly with Hang ‘Em High, so he wasn’t necessarily a stranger to this sort of thing.
But as a film itself, how it does hold up? I mean, compared to so many imitators, the originator sometimes feels oddly different, in a way. There’s no buddy cop mentality here, and things being relatively low-key do actually make it stand out. There’s memorably brutal scenes like one moment where our racist bad guy gets someone to beat him up as a frame—and we’ll also get to the ending as well.
On the other hand, you do get your strawmen characters like an inexplicably Berkley-teaching judge that do kind of scuff the whole attempt at impartiality here. Still, the key thing both then and now is Eastwood himself—sure, his expression often defaults to someone trying to scrutinize a quantum physics equation, but the key thing that he does his patented squint and growl with all the confidence you need to sell it. Objectively speaking, that’s what gives the film its feel then and now.
For me though, the most memorable part is the ending, which is something overlooked—where, spoilers ahead of course, Harry of course captures his bad guy, but by then, it’s almost too late. Murders have been done, Harry squandered his chance to get his man arrested legitimately with his brutality, and he ultimately tosses away his badge in the middle of nowhere, with no triumph nor coda. That right there actually encapsulates the supposed double approach of actor and director, with the viewer being left to make of it all. Callahan got his man, but he’s not even a hero to himself.
Of course though, there were sequels, so never mind about all that! Magnum Force is probably the best known, and was sort of a rebuttal to criticisms of the first one as Harry takes on a group of corrupt vigilante cops (even if some of his verbal takedowns feel a little rich). And of course, by the 80s, we had a million billion cop characters who, like, don’t play by the rules, man! Naturally, by then there wasn’t even an attempt at a somewhat grey ending note as the original Dirty Harry left on, and it’s something that by the 21st century is much harder to sell unless you’re doing an outright comedy.
People can talk about how the whole ‘break the rules to get the bad guy’ thing perhaps spills over to RL mentalities, and, well, they’re not wrong. Where Siegel and Eastwood at least portrayed some kind of cost to that, others remembered only big revolvers going boom. Then again, everyone likes easy answers in general, right?
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