Published via Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

These days, demands to preserve individual freedoms are associated with the political Right, while demands that such freedoms be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good are associated with the political Left. Half a century ago in the USA, it was quite the opposite. The leftists were those valiantly defending human and civil rights, while right-wingers were authoritarians eager to suppress them for the sake of “law and order”. The debate between those two camps found its way into Hollywood films, and the best-known example is Dirty Harry, a 1971 action thriller directed by Don Siegel, nowadays known as a genre classic and one of the most iconic films of its time.

The plot, partially inspired by the real and never-solved case of the Zodiac Killer, is set in San Francisco. It begins when a beautiful girl swimming in a rooftop pool gets killed by a sniper. The perpetrator is Charles Davis (played by Andrew J. Robinson), a sadistic psychopath who calls himself “Scorpio” and begins sending messages to the city administration demanding a ransom in exchange for stopping his killing spree. The murder is investigated by Inspector Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood), a policeman known for conducting unorthodox and often violent methods in fighting crime, which brought him the nickname “Dirty Harry”. He is assigned an inexperienced detective, Chico Gonzalez (played by Reni Santoni), as a partner, and the two of them begin working on ways to apprehend the killer, who intensifies his campaign of terror. Davis is finally caught while trying to collect the ransom after abducting a little girl. Callahan gets the confession, the evidence and the whereabouts of a girl who was actually killed, but later learns that he didn't obtain that information according to legal standards. They are inadmissible in court, and therefore Davis walks out a free man. Callahan is determined to get him one way or another, and Davis gives him another chance while hijacking a bus full of schoolchildren in order to complete his murderous ransom scheme.

During the premiere of this film, American society was deeply divided, and this division was reflected in the way it was greeted. Critics, who usually leaned left, didn't like the protagonist in the form of a policeman who violently handles criminals without much regard for the human and civil rights won in the previous decade. The most explicit of them was Roger Ebert, who accused Dirty Harry of being “fascistic”, and that accusation has stuck to this film to this day. On the other hand, the average audience was enthusiastic about this film and it turned into a huge hit that would ultimately lead to four sequels. This is often explained by the script, which used a crime story to deal with some serious issues, like the soaring crime rates in big cities, which authorities failed to stop. The fictional character of Harry Callahan offered a simple solution in which the violent thugs were to be given a taste of their own medicine with little or no regard for complicated legal procedures that often stand in the way of true justice and do more harm than good. If Dirty Harry is indeed a right-wing film, it could best be attributed to the views of its screenwriter John Milius, known as one of the rare right-wingers among New Hollywood filmmakers. On the other hand, the accusation that this film condones police brutality and vigilantism is not exactly confirmed by the script, in which Callahan at the end of the day conducts his business within the limits of the law. Milius was nevertheless forced to clarify this issue further in the script for the 1973 sequel Magnum Force.

Regardless of what someone might think about the politics behind the script, Dirty Harry works as an incredibly well-made and entertaining piece of cinema. The cast is more than superb. Clint Eastwood, who had already built a career playing “strong silent types”, enhances this film with a charismatic presence and brings to the screen a character many in the audience would love to have by their side if the situation gets rough. Eastwood's Callahan is a confident, capable and usually stoic man who keeps his emotions firmly in check, except in the harrowing scene when he tortures Davis into revealing the location of the girl. On the other side, another great performance is delivered by Andrew J. Robinson, a relatively young actor who embodies pure evil in his role. Robinson did such a good job that he later had his career hampered by being typecast in a similar role and had to wait for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the popular role of Elim Garak in order to finally step out of this film's shadow and show his proper acting range.

Those talents were well accompanied by Don Siegel, a director who had something of a test run for this film by working with Eastwood on Coogan's Bluff three years earlier. In this film he finds a perfect way to deal with some serious social issues while delivering a quick, solid action film with well-defined characters and some powerful and memorable scenes. He also puts the locations of San Francisco – a city that was the embodiment of US counterculture and 1960s social change – to good use. Viewers might be tempted to see it as the embodiment of everything that is “cool” and good in America, but Siegel very effectively shows its dark underbelly, embodied by rampant crime and a burgeoning sex industry, an area in which evil characters like Davis can be like fish in water and the forces of good must have their hands constantly dirty, like the protagonist. This very dark vision is further enhanced by the great music score of Lalo Schifrin, which uses acid jazz motifs that create the impression of a city and society that are becoming twisted by forces beyond their control. This score is much darker than Schifrin's score for Bullitt, another iconic film set in San Francisco. Comparisons between those two in many ways show how the world changed in only three years and how the prosperous, progressive and liberated brave new world of the 1960s gave way to 1970s decay, violence and grittiness. Although dark, Dirty Harry still allows the audience to enjoy it and even think about some important issues that are as relevant today as they were half a century ago.

RATING: 9/10 (+++)