Dirty Harry (

1971

) ½

In my recent review of Uninvited (1988) I mentioned that it was a movie that could be used as a guide on how not to handle sound effects. Dirty Harry is another teachable film, but rather than a lesson on what not to do, it's a masterclass in the importance of good location scouting. Hell, it starts from the very first frame of the very first scene, when we get treated to a panoramic view of San Francisco, instantly setting the scene and introducing us to our protagonist “Dirty” Harry Callahan and he surveys the city Batman-style. The scene establishes the setting, the character, his primary goal (hunting down the nefarious Scorpio killer) all in one gorgeous sweeping vista. Nor is this an isolated moment in the film, every new exterior location gels perfectly with the characters, actions, and plot throughout the entire movie. From the rooftops where Harry waits for Scorpio, to the stadium where he has his first run-in with the killer, to the skyscraper where he talks down the potential suicide, to the hospital where he visits his wounded partner, to the quiet dock where the film reaches its thunderous conclusion, every location is perfectly selected. It gives you a feeling of time and place without plastering the same few famous landmarks into the background of every shot. I've never been to San Francisco (and probably won't anytime soon given the massive amount of human shit littering the sidewalks) and I wasn't alive in 1971, but it must have been something wonderful to watch this film in the first run-audiences and see your city so perfectly captured onscreen. I'm almost jealous.

Dirty Harry tells a story that has since become familiar, but at the time was shocking. It's a tale about a cop on the edge, whose maybe a bad day or two away from chucking his badge into the bay and blasting every scumbag that looks at him cross-eyed. Before this movie cops were all law and order types, sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Sure they may bend the rules now and then to nab an especially dangerous criminal, but this was always a calculated risk. Dirty Harry has been such a pivotal film that now it's a surprise not to see a film cop whose not either violent, alcoholic, or morally compromised in some way. This trend has been on the wane for the past few decades because it's hard for people today to see such a figure as heroic, but as I mentioned in my review of Death Wish (1974), this is a luxury of our age. Crime in American cities in the 1970s was rampant and was showing no sign of getting any better. People had been told by their government for an entire decade that we needed to try more sympathetic approaches to fix the problem of violent crime, and after ten years of touchy-feely law enforcement having no effect the population at large was longing for a bit of old-fashioned, head-splitting law-and-order. I won't pretend to know what caused the massive crime spike in America in the 1960s and 1970s, nor will I suggest that more aggressive policing with less attention paid to the rights of the accused was a good thing. It's only important for the purposes of this blog to understand what was going on outside the theaters and why the people in the audience might have been sympathetic to a cop blasting a few scumbags with a comically over-sized handgun. Such a film would not work in today's America, where violent crime has been shrinking for the past two decades and stories of scumbag cops abusing their position and authority are all too common. But in 1971, the world was a different place, and a film like Dirty Harry could inspire an entire subgenre of action cinema.

Much like in real life, a serial killer is stalking the streets of San Francisco, killing without any describable pattern and sending taunting notes to the police and press. It's Ted Cruz, er I mean the Zodiac killer, er I mean the Scorpio killer. The task of apprehending him falls to detective “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a veteran investigator to track him down. One gets the impression pretty early on that Harry is more accustomed to playing fast and loose with the rules rather than dotting every I and crossing every T. He also quickly gets stuck with a rookie partner, Chico Gonzalez, a college boy who Harry initially treats with such utter disdain that he talks about him like he's not even in the room. There's little time to argue about it though since Scorpio has released another letter to the press saying his next victim will be either a priest or a black kid. The cops put beefed-up patrols, helicopters, and rooftop surveillance around every major church and throughout the black majority neighborhoods, but it's all for naught, a ten-year-old black boy is found dead shortly after the threat is issued.

Harry figures that the sick bastard now feels like “he owes himself” a catholic priest as well, so he begins to hang out on rooftops near catholic churches. Sure enough, one day, Scorpio shows himself, and a pitched battle erupts across the San Francisco skyline with Harry and the zodiac-wannabe trading potshots with each other with high-caliber rifles. Naturally, since we're only at the halfway mark of the run-time, Scoprio escapes amid a blaze of gun-fire and goes on to gun down a priest off-camera. Despite his close brush with the cops, Scorpio is not interested in hanging up his serial-killing hat, or even taking a breather for the heat to die down. He rolls right into his next heinous action: abducting a teenage girl, raping her, and then burying her alive. To top it all off, he ransom's the location of the girl's grave to the city for $200,000. For some reason, I cannot even begin to comprehend the mayor's thought process on this one, he entrusts this sensitive mission to the cop that has “Dirty” as a nickname. Naturally, Harry disobeys orders, tracks down the scumbag Scorpio and beats the living shit out of him. Not bad work, too bad he violated just about every legal principle in the book, and consequently the police can't hold the obviously guilty Scorpio on any of the charges. It isn't long before Scorpio is back up to his old tricks again, hijacking a school bus and holding the kids and driver hostage unless he's given a stack of cash and a plane out of the country. Once again Harry is set to intercept, only this time he's not gonna let Scoprio just walk away, and he's not gonna trust the law to make the right decision.

That's the main plot, but it seems like the San Francisco Police Department is a bit short-staffed given all the resources devoted to hunting down Scorpio, so Harry is expected to pitch in with more mundane crimes in-between his principal casework. He foils a robbery during his lunch break and stops a man from committing suicide by knocking him out. These scenes do not contribute anything to the overall story but they give us a picture of Harry's character and help to inform the audience just what sort of cop he is. Obviously, a cop who stops a jumper with verbal abuse and a sucker punch is one who gets results at the expense of glamour. The foiled robbery though warrants a good deal further examination. For starters, Harry is visibly disappointed at having his hot dog interrupted by the armed robbers, and regrets it when backup doesn't arrive in time to assist; clearly, he's no glory hound. Also during this scene, he delivers his famous monologue: “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... you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?” Harry is bluffing, he knows he's out of bullets and proves it too by playfully pulling the trigger on the robber once he's been disarmed. Harry repeats the monologue at the end of the film, following his climactic chase with Scorpio. Once again, he knows full well how many bullets he has left, only this time there's another .44 caliber round in the pistol. In each case, Eastwood delivers the monologue differently, the first time is jovial almost friendly, the voice of a reasonable man giving the hood one last chance to back off. In the second scene, Harry is angrier, meaner, almost daring Scorpio to go for the gun so he can have a chance to blast him. His delivery of the monologue has changed, the Harry in the first scene was cynical calculating, and just trying to do his job and get through the day. He was aware of the dangers he faced, and though he met them bravely he had no death wish or even any wish for heroism. Harry at the end of the movie no longer gives a damn, he's been forced to question the moral code he's followed for his whole life, and his code has come up lacking. He's been knocked right over the edge he's been perched on for the entire movie, and he stands there daring the scumbag who put him there to push him across the final line. Thus even though the film ends with Scorpio getting a much-deserved dirt nap, there is no triumphal music no celebration of Harry's victory. Instead it's a somber moment, leaving us to wonder where Harry will go next, and what he'll do now (this will be unceremoniously answered in Magnum Force (1973), where we'll learn after tossing his badge into the river Harry rolled up his pant legs and fished it back out again).

Harry also has one other notable tendency that bears some consideration: He's a peeping Tom. On two separate occasions when he's surveying an area he peeks in windows and watches scenes that while interesting, are hardly pertinent police business. The first time might very well have been an accident, but when it happens again one begins to suspect, as Cinco does, that his epithet “Dirty” might refer to something besides his policing technique. I'm not sure if we're supposed to see this as a minor personality quirk, akin to Axel Foley's motormouth, or as a serious indictment of his character. After all, this is a cop who will end the film by summarily executing a criminal and tossing his badge into the river, abandoning all the ideals that it stood for. However, there's no real connection between being a vigilante and being a Peeping Tom, indeed you seldom find both traits in the same man. Something is missing like there was a last-minute revision to the script or something. Maybe it's just the only way that the filmmakers could think to work in a bit of gratuitous nudity, in which case it screams more of studio meddling than incompetence on the part of the filmmakers.

The reception to Dirty Harry was general kind, but quite a few voices were eager to heap scorn and derision on the film, labeling it fascist cinema. Calling things you don't like fascism is practically an American tradition, and the reception of Dirty Harry is proof that it has been one for a very long time. Just look at the essays penned by figures no less august than Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael the former which flatly says that “The movie's moral position is fascist.” It's also an American tradition to say this with little to no understanding of what fascism is, and once again the reception of Dirty Harry gives us ample proof of that. Fascism, in real life anyway, is a system of government characterized by dictatorship, one-party rule, nationalism, authoritarianism, and racial supremacy. There's little of any of that in Dirty Harry, a film about a cop chasing a serial killer. There's no mention of politics, and certainly nothing in the film that can be interpreted to be an endorsement of one-party rule or dictatorship. At the most it says that in a democracy, sometimes you get politicians who are more interested in securing their next term than they are with being good leaders; yet there's little here to suggest San Francisco would be better off with a fuhrer instead. There's no militarism, Harry is a cop, not a soldier, and war is never even mentioned in the film's run-time; there's not even a casual mention of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. As for nationalism, the depiction of America here is rather seedy and uninspiring, we see slums, perverts, freaks, criminals, and police who like to play fast and loose with the rules. It's an ugly place full of ugly people, hardly the flag-waving patriotism that was common in 1950s genre movies. As for racial supremacy, Harry explicitly says he hates everyone equally and there's nothing in his actions that contradict that stance. Blacks, whites, and Hispanics all earn both Harry's admiration and ire. He blasts a few black bank-robbers sure, but he's also friends with a black doctor and eventually gets along with his college-boy Latino partner. Besides, he spends most of the film hunting down a white serial killer and almost all of his most heinous actions are directed at Scorpio. Pretty much the only way in which Harry matches up with fascism is his tendency towards authoritarian law-enforcement. Harry thinks that regulations that keep the cops from nabbing criminals are stupid and dangerous. If it were up to him, reading Miranda rights and worrying about probable cause would be optional, a sentiment I'm sure fascists would agree with. The only problem is, that a lot of non-Nazis probably agree with that sentiment too. There just isn't enough here to call Harry a Nazi and be done with it as Ebert and Kael do in their reviews. Besides, the context of the film gives Harry pretty god-damn compelling reason to think maybe treating violent scumbags with kid gloves isn't such a good idea. Their bleeding heart regulations have just let a serial killer walk. Expressing frustration with the situation is hardly far fetched or indicative of anything more sophisticated than a character's rage and frustration over the circumstances. Besides, a San Francisco cop that plays fast and loose with the rule of law wasn't a new thing in 1971, Bullitt (1968) was doing the same damn thing three years earlier and neither Kael nor Ebert saw fit to denounce that movie as fascistic. The only difference I can see was that Bullitt was after 1% scum, not psychopathic killers; I suppose it's a case of no bad tactics, only bad targets.

Kael and Ebert may have no idea what fascism is, but at least they don't manage to expose the weakness in their argumentation that way that Noah Berlatsky does in his impassioned, and irrational take on the film. He insists that the film is racist because of the aforementioned black bank robbers, despite the fact that he notes that there are positive black characters in the film and that most of the film revolves around an attempt to capture/kill the racist (and white) Scorpio killer. I expect most politically motivated reviewers to simply ignore these facts in order to make their case like Kael and Ebert did, but Berlatsky not only mentions them but he doesn't even bother to refute them! Instead, he takes the absolutely unsupportable position that the audience is meant to secretly empathize with Scorpio and want to murder minorities and homosexuals. He goes on to castigate the film not just for being fascist but for being cowardly fascism that is afraid to openly state it's intent. Mr. Berlatsky needs to acquaint himself with Occam's razor. If the film's bad guy is murdering homosexuals and blacks, and the film's hero is trying to stop him, maybe it's not a racist or homophobic movie. By this logic The Accused (1988) is a pro-rape film, Rocky IV (1985) is a pro-Russian movie, and Birth of a Nation (1915) is pro-black. You'd have to be crazy to really believe any of this. The whole thing reads like the conclusion was written first and the author worked his way backward, gradually realizing along the way that his original thesis was unsupportable. I'm honestly not sure if this guy is a troll or not. Seriously, this must be some next-level satire against critics like Kael and Ebert who denounced the movie as fascist on release because I don't see how any real human being can be this willfully obtuse.

The fact that critics suspect Don Siegel, of all people, to be peddling fascist propaganda is laughable on the face of it. For one thing, Siegel was ethnically Jewish, though he did not practice the religion. It seems pretty absurd to think that a Jewish filmmaker from Chicago was secretly a Nazi for his entire adult life, and only tipped his hand when making a fun action movie in his late 50s after all the horrors of Nazi antisemitism had been common knowledge for decades. But even if Siegel was a member of the Aryan race I'd find it hard to accept that Dirty Harry is the fascist propaganda film that Ebert/Kael/Berlatsky(?) thought it was. After all, this was the same man that directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), a film that managed the impressive feat of being both completely apolitical itself but open to a multitude of political interpretations. I find it hard to believe that anyone who exposed a totalitarian worldview would be able to make such a film, because one of the core tenets of totalitarianism, be it communism or fascism, is that the people cannot be trusted to make up their own minds. They need someone in authority to tell them what to think. Only one with the courage to believe in democracy could have made a movie like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), or Dirty Harry for that matter. One unafraid of being smeared by the dim-witted intellectuals of the press, because he knew his work would speak for itself and that those in the audience who hadn't been blinded by ideology would be able to see his films for what they really were: Damn fine entertainment!