Arts Reconsideration: The 1971 Project — Blue Lives Madder, “Dirty Harry” Turns 50

By Ezra Haber Glenn

The path Dirty Harry (and too many of his defenders, then and now) chose to pursue — the urban policing version of “killing the village in order to save it” — was outdated and discredited even in 1971.

Clint Eastwood as the title warrior-protector in 1971’s Dirty Harry.

Unlike Clint Eastwood himself, the character he played in Dirty Harry has not aged well. The film is a part of movie history worth remembering now, half a century after its release, but less with reverence than with unease, a critical eye informed by the intervening years. The movie should be watched, appreciated, and understood, but as a relic that touches on an unresolved aspect of our culture. There is nothing here to be celebrated.

Eastwood’s “Dirty” Harry Callahan is a hard-working San Francisco cop — a self-styled warrior-protector, a rough-talking modern-day lawman with the firepower to back up his sparse words. But in the early scenes he finds himself out of step with the world around him. On the one hand, the city is slipping into a post-’60s moral free fall: a surfeit of strippers and sex parties, drugs and hippies, hoodlums and criminals. In a few short years this is the urban “scum and filth” that will make Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle to mutter a wish for “a real rain” that will wash away the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies,” and other sick, venal animals who come out at night. (The irony here — at least given Harry’s internal logic — is that he should be the one called “Dirty.”)

But even harder to stomach than the deviance and decay, Harry is foiled and frustrated at every turn by the bureaucrats, the politicians, the endless red tape, and the progressive laws that protect the freaking civil rights of criminals and degenerates. (Note: the film was made in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 Miranda v. Arizona decision, which established new limits on law enforcement that sent shock waves through municipal police departments across the country.) Unwilling to go softly into the dying of the right, Callahan goes rogue, a tough cop who becomes an avenging vigilante who will stop at nothing to rid the city of a sadistic and psychopathic serial killer known only as “Scorpio” (vaguely fashioned to evoke the real-world Zodiac Killer in name, if not in M.O.)

Film fans will, of course, remember the two iconic showdowns that bookend the film. Harry’s famous tagline is featured in each scene. Following a chaotic shoot-out (the first a disrupted bank robbery, the second a climactic chase sequence through an old quarry), Harry corners a wounded suspect — a weapon just out of reach — and stares at him past the barrel of his big gun. As we watch the perp desperately try to remember how many shots have been fired — and thus, whether there is still one in the chamber — Harry soliloquizes, “I know what you’re thinking: ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?”

This bravado proved to be red meat for the film’s (primarily male) fans. They took note of the make and model of the gun and flocked to purchase them. According to a 40-year retrospective article on guns.com, Harry’s oversized sidearm — impractical for actual police work, but not for intimidation or compensation — was the second most recognized weapon on film, just behind Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber: “For Smith & Wesson, the film was the greatest advertisement money never had to buy.” (The cultural enthusiasm for the gun is revelatory: it reverses the classic western gunslinger paradigm. Here the hardware was a bigger star than the shooter. There was relatively little attention paid to the standard elements of skill, aim, strength, and training. Size is all that mattered.)

Even more striking to rewatch 50 years on is the crucial scene where we see Harry really go over to the dark side. His change does not come after viewing the remains of a victim or facing a grieving widow or mother. No, he melts down after confronting the impotency of a cop in the face of the modern legal system. In one of the tensest moments, Harry is chewed out by the D.A. and a consulting law professor (introduced as being a visitor from the faculty at Berkeley, of course), who explain to Harry that Scorpio will be set free: the evidence — obtained from an illegal search and some, er, light-torture interrogation techniques — would be thrown out of any court in the nation. “Without the evidence … I couldn’t convict him of spitting on the sidewalk,” the DA patiently explains. “The suspect’s rights were violated, under the Fourth and Fifth and probably the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.” (Callahan, as incredulous as a caveman asked to fill out a tax return, seems completely unable to process the legal concepts at work here: “And Anne Marie Deacon, what about her rights? I mean, she’s raped and left in a hole to die…”)

Far beyond the usual American antibureaucratic tendencies, there’s something deeper at play, more even than just an old-fashioned cop railing against both the law and the order aspects of “law and order.” Right from the get-go, the film’s opening shots dramatically raised these stakes, featuring a slow pan down a list of names of police officers killed in the line of duty. The roll-call is the key to the story’s underlying anxiety, an early salvo in a nascent “Blue Lives Matter” campaign, at a time when officer deaths were peaking at more than double the figures seen in previous decades. At heart, Dirty Harry is not about protecting the public, but about cops pushing back. (Noticeably, the film lacks the usual scenes of the anxious masses, which are pretty standard fare for most serial killer plots; here, in fact, the news of the deranged villain is never actually leaked to the press.)

The inconceivable cherry-on-the-top is provided by Scorpio himself, who pays a local tough to beat him to a bloody pulp, knowing that the liberal press will be quick to embrace trumped-up charges of police brutality and blame Callahan, piling insult on top of injury for the aggrieved lawman.

Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) with a potential victim in a scene from 1971’s Dirty Harry.

For those who remember that 1971 was also a pretty turbulent year with regard to America’s foreign entanglements, the image of a tough American warrior trying to make the world safe — but hamstrung by liberal sentiment and modern rules of engagement — would have resonated from North Beach to South Vietnam. The all-too-smug Scorpio sports a trippy peace-sign belt buckle, to help viewers make this connection. Here, we are led to understand, Harry is the true victim, trying to win a war with one hand tied behind his back, and then being demonized because he is the one doing our dirty work.

To its credit, for those tempted to side with reviewers denouncing the film as reactionary, fascist, or worse, the film includes a few weak-tea attempts at racial reconciliation: a Mexican-American sidekick charms his way into Harry’s grudging acceptance. (“That’s one thing about our Harry, he doesn’t play any favorites. Harry hates everybody. Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Niggers, Honkies, Fat Dagos, Chinks” — and, we learn, with a wink from Eastwood, “especially Spics.”) Scorpio is, thankfully, a white supervillain, which heads off anticipated criticism from the ’70s-era woke media. (Three bank robbers early in the film are black, and Harry even leaves one to be rescued by the EMTs; the gay characters are pretty unsympathetically pervy; women are basically absent, except as victims, hookers, and strippers.)

Add in some astounding visuals from director Don Siegel, especially the film’s many long shots on rooftops high above the city, as well as some dramatic play with contrasting shadow and light or neon. Layered throughout, Lalo Schifrin’s score is pure magic, as always.

The film spawned four increasingly violent sequels. It is also credited with ushering in a number of popular police subgenres and imitators, including both “loose cannon cop” and “rogue vigilante/revenge” plots (including the abhorrent Death Wish series, which kicked off in 1974: apparently, serial killers are not the only depraved phenomenon to inspire copycats…).

Today, five decades later, we are still struggling to restore public trust in a system of increasingly militarized and authoritarian policing. Harry’s signature Magnum pales in comparison to the firepower on our streets today. It remains to be seen if a solution can be found through reform or outright abolition, but one thing seems clear: the path Harry (and too many of his defenders, then and now) chose to pursue — the urban policing version of “killing the village in order to save it” — was outdated and discredited even in 1971. It was a dead end that led to neither law or order, but only to more violence and societal breakdown.


Ezra Haber Glenn is a Lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning, where he teaches a special subject on “The City in Film.” His essays, criticism, and reviews have been published in The Arts Fuse, CityLab, the Journal of the American Planning Association, Bright Lights Film Journal, WBUR’s The ARTery, Experience Magazine, the New York Observer, and Next City. He is the regular film reviewer for Planning magazine, and member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. Follow him on https://www.urbanfilm.org and https://twitter.com/UrbanFilmOrg

10 Comments

  1. Gerald Peary on June 6, 2021 at 7:52 pm

    Nice review, Ezra, though you should note that the first guy who is the “Do I feel lucky?” victim is black. Is this blatant racism, to enjoy a black man squirming before Dirty Harry? You bet. It’s a strategy in a bunch of Eastwood movies to place him with a minority partner and then let Eastwood loose to go after people of color.
    Back to Dirty Harry? Who is to blame for its fascist pro-cop mentality? I think it’s Eastwood plus Don Siegel. You need to check out Siegel’s Madigan for another version of the story: the weakling moderate police commissioner versus the hero cops going wild on the job, breaking every tenet of correct police procedure.

    • Ezra Haber Glenn on June 7, 2021 at 2:20 pm

      Yes, great point., Gerald. I did note that these victims were black, but only in passing (“three bank robbers early in film are black, and Harry even leaves one to be rescued by the EMTs…”), but you’re spot-on about the key racist undercurrents in this opening-scene dynamic: the terror of the victim — lying, unarmed, at Harry’s mercy — is played for laughs, and I think the actor is even asked to play up the dialect: as Harry turns away without revealing whether he has another shot remaining, the poor guys pleads, “I gots’ to know…!”). Ugh.

  2. Jason M. Rubin on June 7, 2021 at 11:50 am

    I laugh at Woody Allen films, I get excited when Dirty Harry shoots up a coffee shop. Yet I consider myself a woke, progressive, BLM-type guy. Is this cognitive dissonance or escapism, or are these films just so well-made that the substance of them eludes self-critique? I don’t know, but I enjoy them just the same.

    • Ezra Haber Glenn on June 7, 2021 at 2:26 pm

      Jason:

      Thanks for reading — and for commenting. I very much understand where you’re coming from here — and I specifically asked to re-review this one because I remember loving it so much. The acting is sold, the character is an amazing creation, the direction is bright and engaging; but unfortunately the central problems here remain unexplored, which a more reflective director would not let stand. A far more interesting film could have kept the plot the same, but framed it so we felt both Harry’s righteous fury over “the system” but also recognized the problems — and the harm — of the path he choose. Reality is complicated, and the best films lean into this complexity.

      –Ezra

  3. Jonathan Silverstein on June 8, 2021 at 12:10 pm

    The New York Times printed this Don Siegel quote in 1972:
    “I enjoy the controversy,” he said, “because if you make a film that’s safe, you’re in trouble. I’m a liberal; I lean to the left. Clint is a conservative; he leans to the right. At no point in making the film did we ever talk politics. i don’t make political movies. I was telling the story of a hard‐nosed cop and a dangerous killer. What my liberal friends did not grasp was that the cop is just as evil, in his way, as the sniper.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/31/archives/siegel-at-59-director-rebel-star.html

    Siegel went on to say that he would never win awards because he was a “rebel” who didn’t get along with producers. One can see how that might lead him to identify with Harry metaphorically, if not literally. Anti-authoritarian themes were also central to Siegal’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version).

    Siegal and Eastwood reunited in 1979 on the great Escape from Alcatraz. While Eastwood’s facial expression and tone of voice remained frozen in the position he has sustained since A Fistful of Dollars, the context turned Dirty Harry‘s values on their head. Here, convicts were sympathetic humans, African Americans who defend themselves are victimized by a racist justice system, and the warden is an inhuman monster.

  4. Jake on June 19, 2021 at 9:56 am

    I’m sorry, but I think this article is a bunch of unnecessary overreacting, just like all of these think pieces getting all antsy about the fictional rogue cop. I love the rogue cop hero and I don’t give a damn how any activist feels about it.

    Like god damn, why can’t audiences just enjoy a police show/movie that’s just meant to be just plain fun and exciting? I’m a Black person who supports social justice and treating others better. But at the same time, I’m so sick of all the high-minded snotty stuff about how police procedurals need to be “meaningful” and “sensitive” now post-2020. Or those people who are calling for the Punisher and his merchandise to be banned because of how some bigots use his imagery.

    Uh- uh. Leave the Punisher alone, leave Law and Order SVU alone, leave Brooklyn 99 alone, leave Harry Callahan alone. They’re not the problem. This is panic-thinking, and it’s borderline censorship. I’ll never support that.

    Let me enjoy John McClane, Dirty Harry, Shaft, and other badass cop: detective characters in peace, alright? Like, I’ve seen assholes who get mad about the rabbit heroine Judy in Zootopia, because she was a cop who broke some rules. And I’m like, so what? Let me like what I like.

    It’s time for the public to pull their rods out of their asses, already. People are so damn serious nowadays. I’m tired of it. They sit there and watch videos of brutality and injustice over and over again on a loop, dooms rolling through Twitter and Tumblr, getting angry at every single negative thing on a loop, and it’s turning them too cynical. They’ll get the impression that every cop, every soldier or politician, or big businessman is out to get them, and that’s not true.

    Personally, I think Dirty Harry is a masterpiece. And no, I’m not that critical about its message. I don’t care if Harry is fascist or authoritarian, or whatever. I like watching him kick ass and shoot people. I don’t think he’s a shining example of how law enforcement should operate, but I refuse to be shamed for anything that I enjoy.

  5. Brent Payne on June 26, 2021 at 9:34 am

    I enjoyed Dirty Harry for decades, but first started to have doubts about the film after watching David Fincher’s masterpiece, Zodiac. A film that highlights just how hard it is to catch a serial killer due to the fact that with most homicides the victims knew their killer so there is no personal connection or motive when their death is at the hands of a serial killer. After watching Zodiac, like Mark Ruffalo’s detective who walks out of a special viewing of Dirty Harry, I lost my motivation to rewatch Dirty Harry.

    Now we live in an age of video cameras and cell phones that captures police abuses for the world to see that would have been covered up in 1971. In Dirty Harry it is assumed that his instincts on a suspects guilt or innocence is always right. I know it’s just a movie and to your point it is a very entertaining movie, but I often imagined if Dirty Harry was a real life cop how many innocent people, knowingly or unknowingly, would he have beat up, killed, or sent to prison?

    Brent

  6. Derek on July 23, 2021 at 11:59 am

    Dirty Harry is a masterpiece that truly holds up viewing it today. It is also surprisingly relevant as it came on the heels of similar cultural upheaval and change as we are going through today (one that isn’t necessarily black and white for most people). The first movie is actually, for all its bold explosive violence, rather more nuanced than our impression of Dirty Harry (as a result of the later films and the cultural memory). It isn’t glorifying what he is doing at all. What it is doing is providing a release valve for people who feel powerless against rising crime and violence. As we’ve seen in the present day with the rising violence, people feel powerless. They don’t necessarily want someone to go Dirty Harry, but with rising homicides and violence, it can be cathartic to watch a film like this. Also Harry is someone broken by the end of the first film. If you watch the first movie on its own, it isn’t saying people should do what he did.

  7. Ted Nugent on November 5, 2021 at 11:58 pm

    Meh. I love the movie and everything in it. The stadium scene where Harry steps on the creeps wounded leg is a CLASSIC as is the bank robbery scene. All you people whining about the stadium scene need to watch the scene again and pay attention. The camera is the lens of the eye. The camera recoils, pulls back quickly, almost running away, away away away to reveal……………night and fog. Get it? As for the rest of it, the S&W Model 29 .44 Magnum is probably the most iconic firearm in movie history and I’m proud to own 2 of em’, the 6″ and 8 3/4″ , both versions were used in the film contrary to popular belief. It’s no longer the most powerful handgun in the world but it’s still the most badass.

  8. Lynn Rooker on April 20, 2022 at 10:16 am

    ”five decades later, we are still struggling to restore public trust in a system of increasingly militarized and authoritarian policing… It remains to be seen if a solution can be found through reform or outright abolition, but one thing seems clear” – If that’s your opinion, fine, but I think you’re nuts.

    We’ve entered into the same cycle all over again that made Callahan a cultural touchstone 50 years age: Part of society felt that law enforcement was the problem. The other half thinks illegitimate criticisms of and interference with the police is causing crime to become a problem.

    Dirty Harry isn’t outdated because of its message. It’s become relevant all over again.

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