1971 was a glorious year in film. It was the year that screens attacked with movies such as A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, The Devils, and Sweet Sweetback’s Basdasssss Song. Vanishing Point, Duel and Two Lane Blacktop ruled the roads whilst distinctive voices captivated audiences in films as diverse as Punishment Park, Harold and Maude, Get Carter and Death in Venice. The French Connection won Best Picture at the Oscars and even the Carry On films hit their zenith with …At Your Convenience. All years have their classics but 1971 really takes the biscuit …as does Dirty Harry, one of three Clint Eastwood films from that year.
Revisiting Dirty Harry (an act inspired by Empire magazine’s thumbs up for The Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition boxset) really hasn’t done much to change my mind about Don Seigel’s simplistic piece of comic book nastiness. Loosely based on the real life Zodiac killings the film itself is certainly well put together with it’s sharp editing and fantastic soundtrack courtesy of Lalo Schifrin but the central plank, that Harry Callahan is heroic, is a ridiculousness all of it’s own…
For starters his kill rate and fetishistic love of weaponry (the line “My, that’s a big one” says it all) is equal to (if not above) that of Scorpio his nemesis. Talking of whom, at least the villain of the piece actually has a personality – Harry doesn’t even rate as a decent performance. When the similarly void Robocop and Judge Dredd turned up their creators had the sense to place them within satirical environments, but Harry is supposed to be a real world inhabitant – that is if you believe San Francisco to be run by the kind of fiendish liberals that make up Fox News’ ‘reality’.
For me Dirty Harry is wish fulfilment cinema and succeeds and fails on this one definition. The character’s enduring popularity speaks to a belief that due process is simply too much hassle when you ‘just know’ that someone is guilty (although one suspects that if they were ever accused of a crime they would want the rights they would deny others in the name of expediency) and that resolutions are all that matter – the real life Zodiac case remains open whilst this movie closed it with a .44 Magnum. Either way Dirty Harry offers a world that is cleaner, simpler, devoid of substance and crammed with rhetoric.
Released in a year when Popeye Doyle (a character who shares many traits with Callahan) showed us that tough cops and broken men go hand in hand, Dirty Harry shows us that depressingly in both art and reality people crave certainty above all else.
…which probably explains why Eastwood’s other output in ‘71, Play Misty For Me and The Beguiled, are somewhat overshadowed despite being far superior efforts.
