San Francisco, 1971. A wave of revolution has broken and crashed into the sands of hopeless unrest, and a faceless serial killer lurks in the shadows. On Montgomery Street the afternoon erupts with the sound of a clanging alarm. A muffled gunshot breaks from inside a bank, folks scream and duck and scatter.
Emerging from the primordial ooze of the nearest Old West dimension, the Man with No Name steps out of the shadows and onto the street, his iconic poncho and cowboy hat now a menacing gray herringbone tweed jacket and head of wiry unkempt hair. He crosses the street in an unwavering straight line, the Colt 45 in his hand mutating into a grotesque, steroidal hunting revolver. He raises the weapon as the first bank robber rushes outside.
Ready and waiting, the Man fires, obliterating the bank robber’s shoulder and leaving him in tatters on the ground. He fires again at an approaching getaway car, killing the driver and sending the car toppling over on its side, a demolished flower cart and a busted fire hydrant in its wake. A surviving passenger climbs out, fires a pistol in the air and runs for his life. The Man guns him down in an instant and his body flies through a store window. A kaleidoscope of blood and broken glass.
Hulking like Jason Vorhees across the nightmare he’s just made of the street, the Man approaches the last living bank robber at the steps of the bank. A group of spectators tremble at the sight of the approaching gunman eclipsing everything in his path. He raises his mammoth pistol with an ere of casual bloodlust, sights fixed between the eyes of his prey.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the Man says in a cool, collected rasp. “’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?”
The bank robber recoils and the Man turns away. Still in earshot, he calls, “Hey man, I gotta know.” The Man turns, lifts his weapon again to the bank robber’s face, and pulls the trigger. Click, silence. No bullet.
Energized by the blinding fear of his prey, the Man flashes a Joker’s smile and beams outta the whole mad scene as quickly as he stepped in.
“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell,” wrote William S. Burroughs. “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Few images feel more malignant today than Hollywood’s potent, illusory image of the American policeman.
In the ’80s and ’90s, mass media went all-in on turning raging fascist cops into unassailable heroes and the public imagination never recovered. As a child of the era, I grew up watching ’80s copoganda action flicks like Lethal Weapon, Cobra, and Tango & Cash on TBS, TNT, Spike TV, and every other “dudes rock” cable channel of the era. Who wouldn’t? Those movies kick ass.
Meanwhile at the White House, Bill Clinton was busy transferring power over to big finance and doubling down on the racist Law and Order obsessions of preceding administrations — responding to Rodney King and the L.A. riots with a system that’d only accelerate the poor-to-prison pipeline, further stacking the punitive deck against America’s most vulnerable. And out on the streets, the police would be there as they’d always been, ready and willing to take names and stomp heads.
“The police exist to keep us safe, or so we are told by mainstream media and popular culture,” writes Alex S. Vitale in his book The End of Policing. “TV shows exaggerate the amount of serious crime and the nature of what most police officers actually do all day.” Though some cop-centered movies and TV infuse the genre with nuance, Vitale argues, “by and large [they] portray the police as struggling to fight crime in a complex and at times morally contradictory environment. Even when police are portrayed as engaging in corrupt or brutal behavior, as in Dirty Harry or The Shield, it is understood that their primary motivation is to get the bad guys.”
But what happens when the police are the bad guys? What happens when we look in the mirror and see a bad guy looking back?
Universally considered the movie that launched a thousand neofascist-cop fantasies, Dirty Harry was a nasty piece of genre entertainment for the new Nixonian age — recasting Western hero Clint Eastwood as unhinged Inspector Harry Callahan, on the hunt for a Manson-esque, Zodiac-inspired serial killer in the “post-apocalypse” of post-’60s San Francisco. As J. Hoberman argues in Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan,
[Harry Callahan] embodied Richard Nixon’s promise to restore Law and Order. He anticipated Ronald Reagan’s notion that the system was the problem, not the solution […] At once a hero cop and what the Panthers called a “pig,” Harry — like Reagan — was a walking contradiction, the authoritarian who hates authority. In opposition to the Righteous Outlaws of the Black Panthers and the New Left, he was the Legal Vigilante.
Dirty Harry came out on December 21st, 1971. There was a swift, visceral reaction to the fascist underpinnings of a hit movie about a cool killer cop who looks like Clint Eastwood, and never misses an opportunity to take the law into his own bloody hands. “The movie’s moral position is fascist,” wrote Roger Ebert in his otherwise-positive review, “No doubt about it.”
Pauline Kael was famously more scathing:
Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. If crime were caused by super-evil dragons […] we could all be licensed to kill, like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.”
There’s indeed no getting around Dirty Harry’s “small-f” fascist aura. John Milius, the legendary right-leaning bohemian uncle of the New Hollywood and self-proclaimed “zen fascist” (or “zen anarchist,” depending on the day) did an uncredited rewrite on Dirty Harry, taking partial inspiration from a trigger-happy Long Beach detective he knew and imbuing the character with a monk-like sense of frontier justice — “God’s lonely man” with a touch of “California uber alles.”
But that’s not the whole story. Like I mentioned before, I grew up watching Dirty Harry’s countless Reagan and Clinton-era imitators on TV. Clint Eastwood was also a huge fucking deal in my house, though primarily as a Western guy (Don’t think a week went by without my Dad reciting lines from The Outlaw Josey Wales like it was Shakespeare, god I miss that) so it wasn’t util adulthood that I actually sat down to watch Dirty Harry from beginning to end. By then my experience with the movie felt closer to what screenwriter Josh Olson describes on Trailers from Hell:
[Dirty Harry] was originally conceived to be a little more shaded than it’s perceived now. If you listen to the voiceover at the beginning [of the trailer], it says, “This is the story of two killers.” Harry Callahan was conceived as being somewhat darker than he’s now taken to be. [Director Don Siegel] didn’t see Harry as a straight-up good guy. He saw him as a pretty dark and twisted character, and based on his trailer, it was pretty clear the studio thought the audience would too.
Olson goes on to point out that Eastwood’s casting sort of stunted the masses from reading the film with nuance, giving rise to both a ravenous “back-the-blue” fanbase and a vocal cohort of disgruntled liberals. Though not without its flashes of terrifying white-guy rage, Eastwood’s portrayal is so damn charismatic and appealing, it’s hard not to root for him, in parts at least, like a giddy mid-century schoolboy watching Saturday-morning Westerns, his face mere inches away from the black-and-white TV. I certainly derive a lot of pure aesthetic pleasure from watching Eastwood tower over the San Francisco skyline in the opening credits, composer Lalo Schifrin’s groooovy-ass jazz score absolutely cooking in the background.
As one item of IMDB Trivia notes, “John Milius wrote his draft of this movie inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s studies in lone-gun detectives, while producer and director Don Siegel tackled the material from the viewpoint of bigotry.” I’m not usually one to cite IMDB Trivia and call it good, but you don’t have to squint to see these same sensibilities competing for dominance in nearly every frame of the film.
Take the famous bank robbery scene on Montgomery Street, where Harry mercilessly guns down a trio of bank robbers and annihilates a city block. As Andrew Chamings observes for SFGATE, “Watching the scene now, post-Black Lives Matter, reveals an ugly dynamic in which the righteous white cop demeans, belittles and terrifies a Black man in public for fun.” The moment in question, where Harry plays an impromptu game of russian roulette with a man he’s already disarmed (prompting the oft-misquoted line, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?”) is a true horror show in the wake of George Floyd (or any other public instance of police murdering a BIPOC person in the last 50 years). A workman-like master of his craft, Siegel frames Eastwood with a visual cadence of extreme menace, laying bare the uncanny beauty and abject ugliness of the American frontier in a recognizably modern, urban setting. Vividly shot from the low-angle POV of his victims, Harry takes on a monstrous form that makes it damn near impossible to see him as a White Hat, or even a totally reliable anti-hero.
Dirty Harry’s first and arguably still most fascinating generation of imitators emerged in the mid-‘70s and included such vigilante classics as Death Wish and Rolling Thunder (in its pessimistic reconfiguration of Old Hollywood masculine archetypes, the film also portended the stoney, existential neo-noirs of the era, such as The Long Goodbye and Night Moves). A more critical prism through which to understand Dirty Harry though, is via The French Connection. Released two months prior, William Friedkin’s grimy police procedural cast Gene Hackman as detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, a seething, racist New York cop on the trail of a French drug-smuggling outfit. Hackman famously took home the Best Actor Oscar for the role at the center of what I’ve called a “Bosch-like portrait of New York in the early ’70s and a vivid slow-motion glance at the vicious, blunt futility of American policing.”
Pauline Kael hailed The French Connection as a commendable “urban gothic” work reflecting “the modern big city as Inferno,” its protagonist both an “existential hero” and “the anti-hero carried to a new lumpenprole low” — “the mean cop who used to figure on the fringes of melodrama (as in Sweet Swell of Success) moved to the center.”
Kael argues that The French Connection works because it “turns old clichés into new clichés by depriving the central figure of any attractive qualities.” In contrast, she claims “Dirty Harry is not one of those ambivalent, you-can-read-it-either-way jobs, like The French Connection. Harry Callahan, she adds, “is not a Popeye — porkpie-hatted and lewd and boorish. He‘s soft-spoken Clint Eastwood […] a Camelot cop, courageous and incorruptible and the protector of women and children.”
Kael’s assessment of the stars of these two cop thrillers, and the impact they had on the respective material, is pretty spot-on. But with 50 years of distance and a whole cache of reactionary cinema between us, I’d argue there’s ample space for a “you-can-read-it-either-way” angle to both movies. “If you take Dirty Harry as a mythic solution to a popular desire, then it’s not fascist,” argues Eastwood essayist William Beard. “If you take it as a real picture of how police work oughta go, then it definitely is fascist.”
Don Siegel doesn’t necessarily approach the material with Friedkin’s hazy, documentarian’s eye. Instead, he movie takes a wicked-cool genre exploitation approach, filtering the Old Hollywood tradition of Bogart and Cagney-era tough-cop films through the incendiary lens of the budding, conflicted action genre. Under Siegel’s direction, Harry Callahan’s San Francisco is as much a “modern big city as Inferno” as Popeye Doyle’s New York City, if only on a less-grimy level of hell.
And it’s along the path of Harry’s Inferno that our “tale of two killers” unfolds. To paraphrase one of the film’s dope taglines, Harry is the killer with the badge. The other killer is Scorpio, played with manic theatricality by then-first-time film actor Andrew Robinson. Loosely based on San Francisco’s own Zodiac killer (still at large and faceless to the public at the time), Scorpio was an ill-defined amalgam of post-Manson anxieties, personifying the American fear of a counter culture gone horribly wrong. His crimes are violent and senseless, and when he’s finally caught, he works the press and judicial bureaucracy to be released on a technicality. Dirty Harry was written partly as a comment on the recent passing of liberal police reforms, extrapolating common fears that the system would favor perpetrators over victims. Out of these fears, Scorpio materializes as a true boogey man for the reactionary right if there ever was one.
One can’t help but think how this movie might’ve played to its initial audience had an equally recognizable name and face occupied the Scorpio role, positioning the character on more equal footing with Eastwood’s Harry Callahan. Still, the film’s structure and rolling series of visual parallels pull a lot of weight in poeticizing the two-sides-of-the-same-coin dynamic of our villain and anti-hero. The first half cuts proficiently back and forth between Scorpio — on the run from capture, but also on the prowl for his next victim; and Harry — a loner in the police department whose “vigilantics” are both condoned and encouraged depending on the political concerns of the day. “You don’t assign him to murder cases…” reads another tagline for the film, “You just turn him loose.”
Both characters are sort of entombed in their alienation from society, however self-imposed. Around the precinct, Harry’s dynamic with the other cops, though mutually respectful, is characteristically antisocial. When another detective asks him when the hell he’s gonna get a haircut, he replies, “Who’s got time? I was up till 3 a.m. checking the search patterns.” When he’s assigned a Mexican rookie as a partner, he doesn’t hesitate to join in on some casual racial-epithet throwing with another veteran cop, but you also get the sense that Harry’s been paired with a minority officer because he’s the only other outcast in the department. “Now you know why they call me Dirty Harry,” he’ll later tell his new partner, having just used typically unconventional methods to bring a potential jumper down from atop a building. “Every dirty job that comes along.”
As the plot moves forward and Harry closes in on Scorpio, the seering daytime action morphs into an increasingly tight, prolonged nighttime chase, claustrophobic and unforgiving in its saturated blackness. Right at the midway point, Harry tracks Scorpio down to his hideout at Kezar Stadium. The two killers face off in the middle of an empty football field, creating one of the film’s most indelible images. If “crime is a disease,” Harry Callahan and Scorpio are the yin-yang demon-gods of American crime, locked in a barren, echoing gladiatorial arena, bleeding all over each other across hyperspace.
Dirty Harry’s back half is where the righteous vigilante justice of it all plays out to mostly-satisfying cinematic ends. At the stadium, Harry tortures Scorpio until he reveals the location of his latest victim. The police don’t find her in time to save her life, and Scorpio is released from custody on account of Harry’s, uh, illegal methods of information extraction. In the thrilling finale, Scorpio hijacks a school bus full of kids, and Harry ditches orders to track him once and for all.
“Harry Callahan is similar in a lot of ways to John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards,” explains Josh Olson. “Both men finally get around to doing the right thing but not entirely for the best reasons. In the end, Harry throws away his badge, walking away from civilization in kind of the same way that Ethan does at the end of The Searchers.”
Harry gets his man in the end, but the movie ends on a dour note. A final, high-angle long shot sees Harry waking away through a barren landscape. No triumphant ride into the sunset. Just God’s lonely man reduced to a breathless hulk in a dusty brown suit.
In real life, the Zodiac was never caught, leaving everyone involved in the investigation (and the country at large) permanently haunted by his enduring spectral presence. There’s this great scene in David Fincher’s Zodiac where detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) dips out of a special SFPD screening of Dirty Harry. He’s clearly rattled by the fictional resolve of a brutal case he couldn’t wrap up himself, maybe even struck by the overwhelming realization that, in the words of police scholar David Bayley, “The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it.”
As for Harry Callahan, we’d see him again in four more movies over roughly a decade and a half. 1976’s The Enforcer is a dud — aggressively dumb, seething with misogyny to an eye roll-inducing degree, and not even that entertaining for your trouble. Sudden Impact, Dirty Harry’s first Reagan-era chapter, is ok. Eastwood takes the director’s chair, and the film benefits greatly from his taught, economic style. That said, it doesn’t really amount to much more than a flattening entrenchment of the series. I’m a fan of the final and most maligned Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, mostly because it sinks into the realm of silly, harmless fun (there’s a great pre-fame cameo from Jim Carrey playing rockstar in a music video, lip-syncing “Welcome to the Jungle.” Check it out!).
The first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, is a fucking banger though — by far the best of the lot. Director Ted Post picks up the baton from Siegel with stylistic aplomb, capturing America’s sea change from the Summer of Love to the Summer of Sam with a similar sense of bare-boned genre spectacle. Aided by Michael Cimino, future director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate, John Milius pens a story that not only subverts expectations but challenges the entire fascist bent of the first film. Magnum Force recalibrates Harry Callahan as a more agreeable protagonist, smoothing out his roughest edges to make him more like the hero the public saw anyway. Real James Bond-type shit. It works, thanks to Milius’ fuckin’ fire script, which pits Harry against a troop of young rogue cops who, aided by an unknown higher-up, run a shadow vigilante force from within the department (a setup that’ll sound familiar to anyone who’s studied such real shit as the deputy gangs in the LAPD Sheriff’s Department).
“You ‘heroes’ have killed a dozen people this week. What’re you gonna do next week?” Harry asks in his first direct confrontation with the new faces of law enforcement.
“Kill a dozen more.” One of them replies. “We began with the criminals that people know so that our actions would be understood. It’s not just a question of whether or not to use violence. There simply is no other way, Inspector. You of all people should understand that.”
“Either you’re for us, or you’re against us.” Says another.
As if talking directly to his audience, Harry retorts, “I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me.”
It might be the most well-written scene in the whole series, and it’s a palpable rush to see Harry assume a notably anti-fascist, borderline ACAB posture in the face of total corruption.
As a pop-culture icon, the American cop forever speaks volumes of our fractured national psyche. Dirty Harry is a dangerous movie (Jesus, don’t we miss those?), a perversely entertaining thriller, and the broken image of justice we deserve. “If there aren’t mentalities like Dirty Harry‘s at loose in the land, then the movie is irrelevant.” Roger Ebert observes. “If there are, we should not blame the bearer of the bad news.” As time continues to fold diabolically in on itself and we all face the same paranoia, institutional ruin, and “collapse culture” that gripped us 50 years ago, you may find yourself staring down the barrel of a .44 Magnum, and you may ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky?”
