It\u2019s hard to argue against Kael\u2019s accusations, even if other parts of her review are patently ridiculous (her sarcastic assertion that \u201cthe greatest artists would be those who gave us heart attacks\u201d reads as an accidental truth bomb). Dirty Harry<\/em> indeed bears a fascist streak a mile wide, and it is clearly working as a right-wing power fantasy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the surface, the same would seem true of the four sequels that came about over the next 17 years, all of which hit the same expected beats set out by the first one: Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), a gruff, trigger-happy detective with the San Francisco Police Department, investigates a series of high profile murders, butting heads with his wishy-washy superiors and the liberal bureaucracy of his city\u2019s government, before ultimately taking matters into his own hands and blowing away the bad guy in the end. Along the way, he will stumble upon one or several unrelated violent crimes\u2014usually some sort of armed robbery committed by black or brown criminals\u2014which he intercedes and stops by using excessive force, causing massive property damage and a PR headache in the process. He will also invariably find himself tagged with a new partner, usually an inexperienced member of a minority group, who will inevitably get killed or maimed in the line of duty. About the only things that change from one film to the next are the rising body count and number of cracks that line Eastwood\u2019s grizzled mug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, watching each film in the series back-to-back-to-back (as I did recently), it\u2019s not merely the tropes and repetitive structure that one notices. Throughout these five films, a strong sense of political anxiety consistently rises to the fore, anxieties that betray a deeper ambivalence about their core ideology and thus reveal them as more than simple right-wing power trips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The original Dirty Harry<\/em> was part of a wave of \u201870s movies<\/a> about renegade cops working outside the confines of the law in order to get the job done. That these films came about shortly after the institution of new protections for individuals, such as Miranda rights, is no coincidence. As a whole, they can be seen as a backlash to the expansion of social liberties that conservatives, for all their talk of constitutional rights and individualism, claimed only helped criminals, but they also represent a wider recognition of the brutality, corruption and fascist leanings that have always been inherent to American policing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More than any of these other examples, including the extremely similar The French Connection<\/em><\/a> <\/em>from the same year, Dirty Harry<\/em> wore its reactionary politics proudly on its sleeve. Indeed, the film, which pits Eastwood\u2019s proud, equal opportunity bigot (\u201cHarry hates everybody: limeys, micks, Hebes, fat daggos, niggers, honkeys, chinks\u2014you name it\u201d) against a mad sniper called Scorpio, is one of the most reactionary American thrillers ever made, in that it was literally conceived in response to the real-life Zodiac murders that terrorized San Francisco only a few years prior. Of course, the real killer managed to elude justice, but Dirty Harry<\/em> gave audiences a brief catharsis by having his fictional counterpart brought to justice (i.e.: gunned down) by a stalwart lawman, no thanks to the bureaucrats and bleeding hearts that stand in his way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Even though no one knew the identity, let alone the politics, of the real Zodiac killer\u2014and as anyone who\u2019s even briefly familiar with the case can tell you, one of the prime suspects was a blue-collar good ol\u2019 boy\u2014Dirty Harry<\/em> nonetheless casts him as a flower child gone bad, which makes it as much a response to the Manson Family murders of three years prior [elements of infamous kidnapper Gary Stephen Krist were also incorporated]). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dirty Harry<\/em> is in keeping with several other great works from its director Don Siegel (such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers, The Beguiled, Escape from Alcatraz, <\/em>and Charley Varrick<\/em>), in that its focus is on the on the mortal struggle of an individual against an antagonistic system that would do him in. The individual is by no means always the victor in these films, but he is in Dirty Harry<\/em>, which makes it more of a libertarian, rather than authoritarian, fantasy\u2014even if, in this case, said individual betrays many personal authoritarian qualities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, it does a disservice to both Seigel and Eastwood\u2019s work to act as though they present the character of Harry in a totally uncritical light. To do so, one has to willfully ignore how often Seigel shoots Eastwood to look like a raving lunatic and hulking ogre. This takes some work, for while today Eastwood\u2019s grim and weathered visage is synonymous with the ideal of conservative masculinity, in 1971 he still cut a suave, even hip figure. He wouldn\u2019t have been anyone\u2019s first choice to embody Silent Majority rage, and indeed, the role of Harry Callahan was initially offered to more notably outspoken conservatives John Wayne and Frank Sinatra (liberals Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman were also approached to star, but they both turned it down because they disagreed with the script\u2019s politics, although it was Newman who recommended Eastwood for the part).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film ends in a similar manner to the leftist western classic High Noon<\/em>, with Harry, utterly disillusioned with the institution of law enforcement, tossing aside his badge in disgust. A morally complex ending for a morally complex\u2014if still clearly conservative\u2014film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this did not wash with liberal critics, or, for that matter, most audience members, the majority of whom were happy to cheer for Harry with no compunction, or else condemn him for standing against their personal values. Today, such divisive animus would likely be embraced by the film\u2019s makers in order to play directly to a conservative audience, but at the time, the criticism\u2014and particularly Kael\u2019s remarks\u2014got to Eastwood. Over the years<\/a>, he\u2019d write and speak openly about how much umbrage he took with her review, at one point defending himself (and Seigel) in an open letter in the Village Voice,<\/em> in which he wrote: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTry a change of pace and do a film about concern for the victim instead of the accused and POW!, Kael screams \u2018fascism,\u2019 somebody else screams \u2018Hitler,\u2019 and several other publications have Don Siegel and myself to the right of Atilla the Hun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n More interesting than Eastwood\u2019s personal arguments is how his gripes informed the sequel to Dirty Harry<\/em>. Released just two years later, Magnum Force<\/em> saw Seigel step away from the director\u2019s chair and replaced by Ted Frost, while uber-conservative New Hollywood maverick John Milius (who worked on a draft of the original Dirty Harry<\/em> script) and future New Hollywood maverick-turned-sacrificial lamb Michael Cimino took on scripting duties at separate points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film goes out of its way to show how not<\/em> fascist Harry is by pitting him against actual<\/em> fascist cops. Picking up shortly after the events of the first film\u2014Harry\u2019s still a cop, his retirement at the end of the first movie never addressed\u2014the bad guys this time are a squad of motorcycle deputies who carry out extrajudicial assassinations against members of San Francisco\u2019s criminal underworld. They are a homegrown death squad modeled after those active in South American dirty wars of the time (who, it should be noted, often had the moral, fiduciary, and even military backing of the American government). Harry, who throughout the first movie angrily butted up against the systemic protections afforded to suspected criminals, now finds himself having to defend that same system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea of rogue cops even more extreme than Dirty Harry originally came from none other than Terrence Malik, who, like Milius, worked on an early draft of the first film\u2019s script. Still, as it plays out over the course of Magnum Force<\/em>, it feels entirely of a piece with Milius\u2019s larger body of work, which continually shows off a more complex shading of, and ironic sense of humor about, his outr\u00e9 politics (he\u2019s often described himself as a \u201cZen anarchist\u201d) than his detractors care to acknowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Politics aside, Milius would end up disavowing the film, claiming he had nothing to do with the over-the-top climax or the awkward scenes of Harry hooking up with his sexy Chinese-American neighbor, which were included at the behest of Eastwood, who\u2019d received lots of fan letters from women demanding a glimpse into the character\u2019s love life (the mixed-race coupling was no doubt also intended to further defend the character from charges of racism).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, lest one assume that the filmmakers had some grand political epiphany in the face of the first film\u2019s reception, the movie muddles its message\u2014which none of the critics, least of all Kael, bought anyway\u2014by becoming a kind-of reverse Manchurian Candidate<\/em> when it reveals the archvillain of the central plot to be Hal Holbrook\u2019s left-leaning bureaucrat, who prior to the twist has spent the entire film castigating Harry for using excessive force and espousing the virtues of due process. It\u2019s an insidious message, in that it holds that even when rightwing fascists perpetrate violent atrocities, it\u2019s the liberal who\u2019s at fault. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If the first Dirty Harry<\/em> was a response to the turbulence of the radical cultural changes of \u201860s, Magnum Force<\/em> can be read as reckoning with the failed promise of the Nixon era in the wake of the Watergate scandal. But America is nothing if not fickle, so by the time the next entry in the franchise came out, the political tide had turned once again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/DirtyHarry2-1024x576.jpg\")
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