When "Dirty Harry" was released toward the end of 1971, Richard Nixon was riding high, using an appeal to "law and order" to feed a backlash against the civil rights and anti-war movements, the counterculture and liberalism as a whole. A central tenet of the conservative or right-wing view at the time was that society had gone too far in protecting the rights of criminals and convicts, while tying the hands of the police and leaving ordinary citizens defenseless.
The cultural expression of this viewpoint was "Dirty Harry," produced and directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood as San Francisco detective Harry Callahan, a cop whose single-minded pursuit of justice placed him on a collision course not only with rapists, robbers and murderers but also with his timid police department superiors, vacillating politicians and permissive district attorneys and judges.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of "Dirty Harry," the film which enabled Eastwood, the lone Western gunman, to redefine himself as the lone urban gunman, Warner Home Video has released new DVD editions of "Dirty Harry" and its four sequels, plus a feature-length documentary, "Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows," narrated by Morgan Freeman (Eastwood's co-star in "Unforgiven"). The movies, each rated R, cost $19.98 apiece or $79.92 in a boxed set with the documentary.
Looking back at "Dirty Harry" today, one sees various elements that helped make the film such a great box-office success. First of all, it's a skillfully directed action movie, with strong pacing and several very suspenseful sequences. In addition, Eastwood's Harry is undeniably cool and unbelievably brave. In an early scene, he interrupts bites of his hot dog at a lunch counter to single-handedly stop a bank robbery in progress, delivering his now-famous soliloqy about the power of his .44-caliber magnum handgun.
Yet it's also striking how blatantly and crudely the deck is stacked to push a particular ideological perspective. The culprit (Andy Robinson) is a sniper with hippie-length hair and a peace symbol belt buckle who almost foams at the mouth as he gleefully shoots total strangers, then rapes and buries alive a teenage girl.
And what does Harry get for chasing down the creep and arresting him (after Harry, unarmed, was stomped on by the criminal when delivering a ransom payment, and his partner shot) — he gets a lecture by the D.A. on how he violated the suspect's rights by searching the room in which he was living and seizing his rifle without a warrant. The suspect is then freed from police custody.
(Why the police don't even attempt to keep an eye on this obvious psychopath is never explained, probably because it wouldn't fit with the plot's necessity of having Harry, against orders, do it by himself.)
Later, when the culprit pays a man to beat him up so that he can set up Callahan for alleged police brutality, Harry gets suspended. But, of course, when the bad guy strikes again, this time hijacking a school bus and abusing the kids, Harry single-handedly takes him down — the hero vigilante triumphing over the powerless and ineffectual criminal justice system.
The filmmakers clearly knew that they were dealing with what were highly flammable issues in 1971, and "Dirty Harry" works hard to avoid getting tagged as racist: When Harry is treated at a hospital, his doctor is not only an African American, but an old childhood buddy from their Potrero Hill neighborhood; Harry's new partner, whom he bonds with quickly, is a Mexican American (Rene Santoni); and the killer is a racist whose victims include a 10-year-old African American boy.
In a new 30th-anniversary documentary, "Dirty Harry: The Original," one of the bonus features on the DVD, Eastwood calls the idea that the film was making a political statement "nonsense" — a disingenuous comment, to be sure.
"Dirty Harry" did receive enough negative critiques that when Eastwood returned as Harry Callahan in 1973's "Magnum Force," Harry's enemies were not just the usual scum of the Earth but vigilante cops who had formed a Death Squad and were systematically assassinating San Francisco's bad guys and their friends.
Harry, of course, is an early suspect in these murders, given his often-expressed feelings about criminals. But in the end, when he confronts the lieutenant (Hal Holbrook) who's behind the vigilantes, Harry says, "I hate the (expletive) system. But until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I'll stick with it."
Harry's still a tough guy and a violent cop, but he's friendly with his partner, a young African American (Felton Perry), and he's a defender of the system he condemned so vociferously in the first film.
By the time the third Harry Callahan film, 1976's "The Enforcer," came along, Eastwood and the filmmakers tried to have it both ways. Just like "Dirty Harry," it has a "don't negotiate with hostage-takers" message, and also just like in the first film, Harry single-handedly saves a group of hostages taken by three robbers during a liquor store holdup, only to be reprimanded by his police captain (a sniveling Bradford Dillman) for using excessive force.
He's punished with a transfer to the personnel department, where, when evaluating a female cop up for a promotion, he voices his distaste over the department's new policy of promoting women with little experience to the rank of inspector (detective), ahead of men who've put in more time on the streets.
Stereotypes of political radicals flow thickly as Harry gets his detective job back to go after a group calling itself the People's Revolutionary Strike Force, whose leader is another crazed, psychopathic killer, and the murderer of Harry's partner as well. The police brass also suspect a black militant group called Uhuru, whose members appear to know few words besides "honky" and "pig."
As if to balance these characterizations, Harry ends up getting partnered with the very same female detective (Tyne Daly) he had disparaged earlier, and she wins his respect through her courage and loyalty.
In addition, Harry and Mustapha (Albert Popwell), the leader of the black militants, develop a mutual respect based, we assume, on their both being straight-shooting men of action, and Harry learns from Mustapha that the revolutionaries are actually common criminals who are just posing behind radical rhetoric.
By the fourth Harry Callahan film, 1983's "Sudden Impact" (the first of the series that Eastwood produced and directed), Harry had become sympathetic to an actual murderer, mirroring American society's growing recognition that abused women may be justified in striking back at their assailants.
In this case it is a woman (Sandra Locke) who is systemically killing the men who had gang-raped her and her sister (now catatonic) many years earlier. But that doesn't stop Harry from again, with much violence and property destruction, killing a group of gunmen who had taken a waitress hostage.
It is here that Eastwood utters one of Harry's immortal lines, "Go ahead, make my day." a line that was picked up by President Ronald Reagan as a threat to a Congress that was contemplating raising taxes.
By the time Eastwood made his final film in the series, "The Dead Pool" (1988), the slant had switched from law and order to a critique of the media's incessant promotion of celebrity. But the film stays in sync with the earlier Harry Callahan films by having Harry still being ticked off at his department, still getting suspended by his superior officers and still having to deal with a younger, minority partner (Evan C. Kim).
Thus, each film also comes with a free history lesson — one showing how genre films such as "Dirty Harry" and its sequels can often reveal much about the political currents of the times in which they were made.