Otto Penzler ranks, analyzes, & celebrates the 106 greatest crime films of all-time. Catch up on the series and find new installments daily here.
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Dirty Harry (1971)
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TYPE OF FILM: Police
STUDIO: Warner Brothers
PRODUCER: Don Siegel
DIRECTOR: Don Siegel
SCREENWRITERS: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, and Dean Riesner
SOURCE: Unpublished story by Harry Julian Fink and Rita Fink
RUNNING TIME: 102 minutes
PRINCIPAL PLAYERS:
Clint Eastwood … Harry Callahan
Harry Guardino … Lieutenant Bressler
Reni Santoni … Chico Gonzalez
Andy Robinson … Scorpio
John Larch … Chief
John Mitchum … DeGeorgio
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DID YOU KNOW?
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The role that made him a Hollywood superstar nearly didn’t go to Clint Eastwood. The story of Dirty Harry had been planned for Paul Newman at Universal Pictures, but when that didn’t work out it was taken on by Frank Sinatra. Irving Kirschner was hired to direct the motion picture, then titled Dead Right. When Sinatra suffered a hand injury, the role of Harry Callahan was offered to John Wayne, who turned it down. Clint Eastwood’s production company, Malpaso Productions, then acquired the rights to the screenplay, and the rest is history. Although Eastwood had enjoyed a huge career boost and many happy paydays making westerns in Italy for Sergio Leone, he did not move into the elite of Hollywood’s players until Dirty Harry.
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THE STORY
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A psychopathic sniper attempts to hold the city hostage unless his demands are met. At first, he demands $100,000 or he will shoot one citizen a day. When he isn’t paid, he escalates his demand to $200,000 to reveal the location of a teenage girl he kidnapped and buried alive. Unable to capture him in traditional ways, the mayor and police chief call in the experienced but unpredictable Harry Callahan to pay off the killer, who calls himself Scorpio.
Callahan and his new partner, Chico, go to deliver the ransom. Scorpio surprises Callahan from behind and beats him viciously until Chico comes out of hiding, only to be machine-gunned by the killer. Callahan manages to stab him in the leg with a pocketknife, but he escapes. Callahan tracks him to a football stadium, torturing a confession and the location of the buried girl out of him, but when she is found she is already dead.
When the killer is brought in, the District Attorney reprimands Callahan for violating Scorpio’s civil rights and he is released. Chico, recuperating from his wounds, quits the police force in disgust. Scorpio hires a thug to have himself beat up so that he can go to the media with the story that “Dirty Harry” was responsible.
Scorpio strikes again, kidnapping a school bus and demanding a ransom plus an airplane for an escape. Callahan, now officially off the case, nonetheless goes after the killer, who crashes the bus and, as Callahan continues to chase him, takes a young boy hostage, holding a gun to his head and warning Callahan to drop his gun. Instead, the cop shoots Scorpio, wounding him as the gun falls to the ground and the boy escapes. Callahan gives him the choice of surrendering or reaching for the gun. It is possible, he tells the desperate killer, that he has used all six of his bullets. Scorpio goes for the gun and Callahan shoots him, then disgustedly throws his badge away.
***
The killer and the events were drawn from real life, with Scorpio loosely modeled on the notorious Zodiac killer who terrorized San Francisco.
Before the role of Scorpio was given to Andy Robinson, Audie Murphy had been considered. Murphy, a World War II hero, had gone to Hollywood after his heroics and made many western and war movies, but died in an airplane crash in May of 1971 and the role went to Robinson.
Dirty Harry was a seminal motion picture with its depiction of screen violence being committed by a policeman who was not also corrupt. While tough vigilante cops who are as violent as the criminals they chase have become a staple of television and movies since the release of Dirty Harry, it was shocking at the time, especially coming as it did in the very liberal climate of the early 1970s.
Paving the way for the even greater violence of Death Wish and its sequels, and indeed for the subsequent Harry Callahan movies, Dirty Harry was a favorite target of the liberal media, which deplored its police brutality and accused it of other social insensitivities.
After the brunt of media attacks at its release, it is amusing to read the reviews of its four sequels, which wax nostalgic about how brilliant Dirty Harry is but how far Eastwood and all those associated with the ensuing films have fallen.
Magnum Force (1973) was the first sequel, doing even bigger box-office business than the original picture, and it was followed by The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988), all of which were extremely successful commercially, in spite of increasingly hostile (almost stridently so) reviews.
The Dirty Harry movies have enriched the language, putting some pretty good tough guy lines into Callahan’s mouth. Both Eastwood and his director thought the most memorable lines from any of the five films would be his response when asked who would handle a situation and he replied that it would just be the three of them. The apparently solitary cop elaborated: “Me. Smith. And Wesson.”
Far more frequently quoted of course, is the plea that he makes as a punk starts to reach for a gun. “Go ahead,” he says. “Make my day.”
Beginning another motion picture tradition, which makes it patently clear that police departments take psychological profiles of cops to be certain that they can pair the most mismatched members of the force, the grizzled old reactionary, Harry Callahan, has a different partner in every film, including a young Mexican man, a young woman, a black man, and an Asian-American.
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BEST LINE
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Although off duty, Harry Callahan notices a bank robbery, stopping it by killing two of the gunmen. The third is wounded and lying on the ground, his shotgun nearby. Callahan sees him considering whether he ought to make a grab for it and says, “I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clear off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question…do I feel lucky today?”
