#41: DIRTY HARRY (1971)

TW: Police brutality, child endangerment

THRILL SCALE 1-10

8

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes, once, about ten years ago

BEST SEQUENCE

When Scorpio hijacks a school bus full of kids and Harry jumps onto the roof of the bus from a bridge (a stunt that Clint Eastwood performed himself)

BEST LINE

"I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well to tell you the truth in all this 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 clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?"

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

89%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"As tough and taciturn as its no-nonsense hero, Dirty Harry delivers a deceptively layered message without sacrificing an ounce of its solid action impact."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"When a man calling himself "the Scorpio Killer" menaces San Francisco, tough-as-nails Police Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan is assigned to track down the crazed psychopath."

DIRECTOR

Don Siegel

MAIN CAST

Clint Eastwood, Andy Robinson, Reni Santoni, Harry Guardino, John Vernon

THOUGHTS

• "Dirty" Harry Callahan is the first character of his type that I can think of, a rogue cop vigilante who breaks the rules and takes the law into his own hands in order to ensure the bad guys don't get away with their nefarious plans. Now, for some it may be difficult to find the entertainment value in a story like this - in this day and age, when police violence is a serious concern for many, it may be hard to cheer on the cop who flouts authority and due process and decides to shoot whomever he believes needs shooting. However, it may also be interesting to learn that people have been saying this ever since the movie came out. When it was released, critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert were calling this movie fascist, and they were clearly grappling with the movie's entertainment value vs. the views that it seemed to be espousing
• Perhaps also worth pointing out, though, that while Clint Eastwood is and always has been a Hollywood right-winger, the director, Don Siegel, was not. While talking about Dirty Harry he acknowledged his liberal leanings and explained that in his view Harry was just as evil, in his own way, as the killer (and this is also the second movie by Don Siegel that I've reviewed, after the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
• And speaking of the movie's villain, the Scorpio killer is so completely, unrepentantly evil that we also want to see him taken down by any means necessary. Based on the real-life Zodiac Killer, I really liked Andy Robinson's portrayal of this maniac
• And that's about all I have to say about Dirty Harry! Influential as hell but it also holds up even as one of the earliest examples of the subgenre that it in part created. If you can get past the movie's ideology that you may or may not agree with, it definitely comes through with the action and the thrills

Up next: And with that, we reach the end of another block of movies from the AFI list, and it's back into the Readers' Choice films! As a reminder, these were movies that were voted for in the Mark Watches Movies Facebook group, and here are the next ten movies, in order:

Black Swan
City of God

Edge of Tomorrow

Let the Right One In

Parasite

Evil Dead II

Minority Report

The Dark Knight

Point Break

Shaun of the Dead

And so, coming up next, Black Swan from 2010