The Problematics: ‘Dirty Harry’ Still Has The Power To Piss People Off

The 1971 Clint Eastwood cop picture Dirty Harry landed on Netflix last month, re-raising this question: Does this controversial movie still have the power to piss people off almost 50 years after its release?

I was disturbed and even intimidated by it when I first saw it. Largely because I was 12 at the time, and still a tender enough lad to be upset by realistic onscreen violence and realistic onscreen use of swear words and racial epithets. The critic Pauline Kael was famously upset by it because she saw it as fascist, an endorsement of authoritarian policing. Anti-Kaelites said that was ridiculous, Clint Eastwood’s Harry throws his badge in the pond at the end, and anyway, the director, Don Siegel, is a liberal. Hell, I think I may even have taken that tack in my callow early adulthood.

As it happens, watching it now, everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong. In terms of ideology and politics, Dirty Harry plays a lot of footsie. It opens with a solemn, unironic shot of a wall containing the names of San Francisco police officers killed in the line of duty, with a title reading “In Tribute To The Police Officers Of San Francisco Who Gave Their Lives In The Line Of Duty.” If you believe David Fincher’s movie Zodiac, the movie is a semi-tribute to real-life SFPD cop Dave Toschi. If you believe Don Siegel’s entertaining but to-be-taken-with-a-salt-lick autobiography A Siegel Film, the movie is set in San Francisco because Siegel and Clint Eastwood had just done a cop film set in New York together and Siegel insisted on changing locales in the rewrite of the original script.

Either way, Dirty Harry, which came out less than half a year before the New-York-set The French Connection —these were the twin mothers of the rogue cop subgenre of the decade— had an unusual look for a gritty crime drama. Its first killing took place not just in broad daylight but in sunny, blue-sky broad daylight. The vicious, giggly Scorpio (played with unforgettable relish by Andy Robinson) shoots a young woman swimming in a rooftop pool, from another rooftop, using a rifle. Eastwood’s Inspector Callahan arrives to collect evidence, and while we’re given to believe he takes policing most seriously, when he puts a shell casing into an envelope that’s clearly discernible as being from his personal mail, one isn’t entirely sure how meticulous he is.

Callahan is not a by-the-book-cop, and he’s not a fount of human kindness, either. On being told that a cop of Hispanic origin will replace his gut-shot partner, he glowers. A little later, a fellow cop explains to said partner, played by Rene Santoni, that “Harry hates everybody,” and recites a list of words-not-said-by-us-today, including THE word (which is also used by the Scorpio killer in his ransom note), and Harry finishes it off by saying “Especially ‘spics.” Ar ar ar.

All this is played as if its standard station house banter, and so help us God, maybe it was, and maybe it still is. As it stands, the on-the-surface-offensive dialogue and action of the movie (there’s a bit too much Peeping Tom humor, if it can be called that) is in some respects, for lack of a better word, quaint, in the same way that Archie Bunker’s bigotry was on the television series All In The Family. That doesn’t make it any less venomous. It just adds a new dimension to your cringing.

Which does not, in my view, vitiate the ways the movie is effective. Like every angry cop movie that came in its wake — and in the ’70s there were dozens — this movie’s angry cop is mad about the Miranda ruling, which cops still complain about today. In 1958 Orson Welles and Charlton Heston, in 1958’s Touch of Evil, reminded us that “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state;” Harry Callahan’s position is that a cop’s job is difficult enough as it is. As J. Hoberman points out in his excellent book The Dream Life, “Dirty Harry in the only available hero in a corrupt, degenerate, cowardly civilization; Eastwood is the Last Cowboy.” And by the movie’s finale, he doesn’t even want the job anymore. Nor would you, given the grueling showdown with Scorpio that’s one of cinema’s most stomach-crunching sequences to this day.

It’s in that sequence that Callahan recites this movie’s version of the Lord’s Prayer a second time: “I know what you’re thinking: did he fire six shots or only five,” it begins. The first time he recites it, it’s to a would-be bank robber, a black man, who’s thinking of grabbing his rifle. In that early scene, Harry says it with amused contempt, the same kind of shitkicker sadism he applied in Coogan’s Bluff, the New-York-set cop movie Siegel and Eastwood collaborated on prior to Harry. But saying it to Scorpio, the vehemence in his voice, the hatred, the disgust, is palpable. And you know, here, that he knows that he does in fact have that one more shot in the .44 to blow Scorpio away.

That bank robber in the prior scene was played by Albert Popwell. Popwell began in show business as a dancer and worked in the Duke Ellington musical Beggar’s Holiday, where he got to know Billy Strayhorn. He and Eastwood were friends and I’m sure the jazz lover Clint got some stories out of Popwell, who was also in Coogan’s Bluff and all the other Dirty Harry movies. It was the scene between Harry and the robber that concerned Siegel most; he wanted to emphasize in the film that Harry was not a bigot as such, and inserted a scene in which the wounded Harry is tended by a black doctor, and the dialogue reveals the two are from the same neighborhood.

The scene doesn’t register as strongly as Siegel hoped, but it’s true that the character is unfairly summed up as a sour caricature of The Man. This resonates more in the scene where Callahan has another wounded partner, and speaks with the man’s wife about it. She asks him, about being a cop, “Why do you stay in it, then?” And he answers, “I don’t know. I really don’t.” The next Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, directed by Ted Post from a script by genuine right-wing person John Milius, would take that ambivalence back. But in the original, it’s undeniable, and it makes the movie less simplistic than its overall reputation would suggest.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Dirty Harry