So why not welcome back San Francisco police Inspector Harry Callahan as a wonderful way to kick off the holiday season? Nothing to make you feel all warm and fuzzy like the sight of Harry as he whips out (so to speak... )his cannon-like .44 Magnum to blow grapefruit-sized holes in assorted creeps, crooks and crazies.
Maybe that seems 'been there, done that' in today's climate of mass shooters and Nazi ex-Presidents, but 51 years ago, "Dirty Harry" upended cinema's usual depiction of cops as staid, stalwart upholders of the rule of law.
With big cities so awash in violent street crime they resembled Wild West saloons, Harry arrived to give San Fran a. much needed enema. And what about the Miranda decision? Reading perps their rights? Screw that....Harry never got the Miranda memo. (Or if he did, he mistook it for a napkin while wolfing down his fast food lunches...)
Instead of Miranda-izing undeserving scumbags, Harry loved reciting them his now legendary mantra....("I know what you're thinking.....did I fire five shots or was it six?") In a participatory, democratic spirit, Harry invited his cornered crumbums to play Russian Roulette with him.....and dared them to take control of their own fate.
(I should point out here that in Harry's view the worst crime committed by the jerks in the opening sequence seems more related to interrupting his hot dog lunch rather than their armed robbery.....a trope repeated in a few of the film's sequels.)
To no one's surprise, most opted out of dueling with Harry, with the singular exception of his most formidable foe......a nameless, gibbering wild eyed loon, played to the very hilt by Andrew Robinson.
Robinson's sadist, psycho sniper, modeled on the 'Zodiac' killer, is nothing less than a flesh-and-blood incarnation of "Forbidden Planet"s invisible Id monster........a babbling Grim Reaper who tries extorting the city, demanding they pay him not to kill people.
Harry's clearly this guy's only equal (and the only one who understands the idiocy of caving in to his demands) ......but he's reigned in and restricted by both the weakling mayor (John Vernon) and Harry's equally timid superior (Harry Guardino).
So round and round they go, Harry and his mad, mad, mad adversary, in a series of increasingly brutal encounters brilliantly directed by that master Hollywood pulp fictioneer, Don Siegel. (of "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers", "The Killers" and "Coogan's Bluff", his and Eastwood's warm-up for 'Dirty Harry')
For anyone who didn't get this clash was on the level of primal, Mano-e-Mano gladiatorial combat, Siegel places Harry and Loony-Toon alone on an empty football field.....a God's eye view of the combatants, punctuated by the killer's screams as Harry grinds his foot Loony's severe stab wound, previously delivered by....guess who.
Siegel made 'Dirty Harry' come out like the film he'd been waiting to make his entire career.......he probably enjoyed a satisfied laugh at the the way 'Harry' appalled critics with its unabashed cruelty and warped moral compass. (And aggravating the critical community further by making a bona-fide superstar out of Eastwood, whom they enjoyed deriding as monotone and impassive.)
Foolish critics......they failed to comprehend Eastwood's canny underplaying of Harry, an essentially modern day urban version of John Wayne's solitary warrior Ethan Edwards from John Ford's "The Searchers". Like Edwards, Harry stands alone in his battles, barely tolerating those lesser humans around him and resigned to a lifetime of existing outside a civilized society that calls upon him for its defense.
Only a few years later, in one of cinema's most ironic twists, young screenwriters John Milius and Michael Cimino turned the tables on Harry in their script for "Magnum Force", the first of four sequels for the character.
In "Magnum", Harry faced a cadre of fellow police who took his disregard for the legal rights of violent offenders to its ultimate extreme......simply forming a death squad to execute the city's most scummy criminals before their lawyers got them off on technicalities.....(for the full review, see our post of 12/23/17.....)
The homicidal cops, as you knew they would, fatally misjudge Harry, thinking he'd appreciate their bending of the rule of law to achieve justice. But to Harry, they were just another bunch of rampaging murderers who needed immediate...uh...Magnum Force......no different than the maniac Zodiac he pursues in the first film.
And just like "Dirty Harry", "Magnum Force" was Warner Brother's Christmas gift to theaters everywhere......so that must be why, right around this time of year, I want to get in the spirit of the holidays.....
.....and Deck The Halls with Dirty Harry. 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.
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