‘You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
There is no doubt that at a time when trust in the police force, particularly in America, is under more scrutiny than ever, Dirty Harry is not a film for our times. Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is racist, violent and ruthless. He doesn’t play by anyone’s rules but damn does he get results. Whether the film is a right-wing fantasy that sees a conservative icon consistently hamstrung by unrealistic liberals or whether it glorifies police brutality (there is a strong argument for both) doesn’t change the fact that this is an exceptional crime thriller…
With the so-called Scorpio killer (Andy Robinson) stalking the streets of San Francisco, grizzled cop Harry Callahan (Eastwood) pursues the case with the rabid ferocity that defines his moral stance as a police officer. Charge in. Wreak havoc. Ask questions later.
While the first half of Dirty Harry is made up of a lot of fairly dull table setting, often frustratingly shot in opaque darkness, the second half is unstoppable. Robinson makes for an eerily convincing serial killer and his psychopathic schemes have echoed throughout cinema in everything from Speed to Spider-Man 2 to The Dark Knight Rises. Similarly, ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan has set the blueprint for every dirty cop movie since. Whether you can stomach the politics of Don Siegel’s genre classic is irrelevant – the film’s influence simply cannot be denied.
Dirty Harry was a controversial film upon release (legendary film critic Roger Ebert decried it as “fascist”) and it remains a controversial film but it is also vital cinema. A snapshot of both America at the end of the hippie movement but also of cinema in that era: gritty, hard-hitting and visceral.