I’m not entirely sure when I saw Dirty Harry for the first time. It’s almost certain that I didn’t see it until long after it came out at the cinema. Not even as lanky as I was back then could I pass for a 15 or even an 18 year old aged just 11. So it must have been in my mid-teens (at least) that I saw this iconic cop drama – on VHS video. Oddly, after watching some of the extra’s on the collectors edition DVD I picked up recently, the narrator said that the critics at the time saw this film as a modern urban western. As I re-watched it over the weekend I was having that very thought. Maybe it was natural for Clint Eastwood to follow up his equally iconic ‘spaghetti’ westerns with a Hollywood version? It certainly felt like that as Eastwood drove around the city tracking down the bad guy whilst fighting city hall.
The plot of the movie is a simple one. Inspector Callahan is a lone-gun and known maverick who is used to getting his own way. Unfortunately for him times change and political correctness is now in force from the top. Harry really couldn’t care less. His job, as he see’s it, is to keep the bad guys off the streets in the most direct way possible – usually by shooting them at least once. Clearly a reaction to what some saw as the less welcome aspects of a more liberal culture – sexual promiscuity, black rights and open homosexuality – Harry is a disturbingly right-wing hero who cuts through the bullshit to get the job done. Bringing down the bad guy – who has just abducted, raped and then killed a 14 year old girl – without due process, the courts let him go to commit more crimes. Fortunately for all of us Harry is there to save the day with his very large gun (compensating for what I wonder) and killer quips.
Despite being an enjoyable visceral experience this is, on some level (I almost said subtle then but little about this film is subtle) a deeply disturbing film, particularly the continually reinforced ethic that might is right and that justice – rather than law – flows from the point of a gun. In many ways Harry is a vigilantly with a badge. He decides who the bad guys are – admittedly its pretty obvious – and serves summery judgement on them. It’s all very simple – and simplistic – until the wrong person gets shot (which of course they never do in this movie). Despite the often questionable underlying ethic of this film you cannot argue that it is not iconic. The figure of Dirty Harry has become – from Bruce Willis to Arnold Schwarzenegger – reinterpreted ever since. Both of its time and strangely timeless you should see it at least once despite its sometimes dubious subtext.
2 comments:
Yeah, this is one of those cartoon-movies which we learned to love before we were able to think. I abhor pretty much everything about the guy now, but I loved the characterization when I first saw it. And to be fair, I love many film noirs where the "protagonist" (such as they are) is almost always an unsavory person.
Harry Callahan is especially unsavory however for being exactly the kind of shoot-first reductionist that half the American public is presently trying to elect to high office.
wunelle said: Harry Callahan is especially unsavory however for being exactly the kind of shoot-first reductionist that half the American public is presently trying to elect to high office.
If the mid-terms are anything to go by your country is back drifting to the Right again. I see big trouble ahead......
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