Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry (1971)

Runtime: 102 minutes

Directed by: Don Siegel

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Andrew Robinson, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, John Vernon

From: Warner Bros.

I can thank some people on a messageboard for discussing the entire series and finally inspiring me to see this for the first time in many years. I still rate it highly. You can read my Letterboxd review below if you wish: 

While perhaps with the events going on in the United States in the past week this isn't the perfect time to watch a film with such a lead character, the impetus behind me seeing this for the first time in many years is that a recent messageboard discussion was all about the entire franchise and I remembered not seeing any of those films in a really long time so I figured this was the time to do so.

I imagine most know the plot of how loose cannon cop Dirty Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department goes after a deranged hippie known as the Scorpio Killer who starts killing for the simple reason that he wants the city to give him a lot of cash. So I'll mention how this movie is still incredibly influential. It's a huge reason why we got the poliziotteschi genre, not to mention all the other copy cats. People still know what you're talking about when you use the stereotype that a police officer “is like Dirty Harry”. The “do you feel lucky” speech (not “do you feel lucky, punk?”, as many people have misremembered it) is a part of pop culture. This created several tropes in the cop genre still used today, such as the experienced cop who does not want a new rookie partner, not to mention the whole “loose cannon cop” thing.

With all that said and several of the elements here not feeling as fresh as they did back in 1971, this is still a thrilling and exciting movie to watch. While it certainly can be argued that Dirty Harry's ignoring of the laws in order to capture the killer comes across as different now than it did back then, I know it's a product of its time and back then, people wanted an escapist movie where they can cheer an awful human being get his just desserts, and they did make the Scorpio Killer a dangerous criminal who needed to be stopped. Callahan is definitely politically incorrect, yet he does this so he can get the job done as a police officer, hating how things seem to be restrained by such thing as red tape and bureaucracy. The cast does a nice job as a whole, but it is Eastwood as the title character and Andrew Robinson as Scorpio who are the standouts.

It's an exciting and thrilling picture nicely directed & put together where we get to see plenty of lovely San Francisco and it's backed by a groovy score from Lalo Schifrin... to me that's a winning formula. It's great entertainment and it's easy to see why Dirty Harry became an iconic figure.