The Dirty Harry Revolution

Since Dirty Harry was first released in 1971 it has become an unarguable classic.  The cop portrayed by film icon Clint Eastwood is essentially the complete personification of many of the era’s societal feelings that were present to the public in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Harry Callahan is an inspector with the San Francisco Police Department who values results over procedure.  He is the man who the good guys have problems relating to and the criminals are terrified of.  Does any of this sound familiar to you?  I’m sure it does because this template has been copied, homaged, twisted, and used as inspiration to a number of films since it was first released.  At the time, I’m not exactly sure if Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood had any idea of how much participation they would have in molding the action film genre.   

Before 1971, there weren’t a whole lot of cop centric films.  You did have quite a number of amazing private eye films become giant successes, but that was a whole different ballgame.  The private eyes were often of questionable moral fortitude.  They never had to swear an oath to protect and to serve and more often than not, they didn’t do a whole lot of either.  They succeeded because they were edgy and because they were essentially a good guy lost in a sea of grey.  They were allowed to bash the heads of mob bosses, create extortion schemes, and of course provide their services to the highest bidder.  The police in these films were not bad per se, but they had obvious societal restrictions where as they couldn’t cross lines that took them over the threshold of respectability.  In essence, they were uninteresting figures that were designed to be pillars of good in society and in film.  I think it’s very safe to say that these cops that had these societal restrictions rules were uninteresting and more often than not, it was the gangster films that thrived because they were filled with complex, tragic, and interesting characters.  Dirty Harry came along and blew that all out of the water. 

Harry Callahan was a cop who got results.  He crossed lines that he wasn’t supposed to cross so that he could bring justice to people that would have normally snuck through the red tape.  When push came to shove to Dirty Harry, he shoved back and through his tough guy methods and antics, he was a success.  After the film was released, there was an extremely interesting cross section of critics.  The liberals said that Dirty Harry was a Gestapo picture who essentially glorified and detailed all the benefits of a paramilitary state.  The more conservative bunch saw Dirty Harry as a thug who couldn’t follow procedure.  It seemed like no one in this situation can win, except for the fans that wanted to see a great story with colorful and enigmatic characters.  These characters went on to be copied and duplicate far beyond the point of parody. 

In 1974 the film Death Wish was released which didn’t hold many similarities to Dirty Harry except for one large element.  The Main character of Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) was a father whose house was violated.  After the police were completely useless, Paul took it to cleaning up the streets himself capping “bad guys” left and right without any kind of police consent.  He wasn’t a cop in any sense of the word; he instead chose to be a vigilante against a system that let atrocities happen to his family.  Paul did what he thought was right with a total disregard for authority.  This concept was thusly repeated in a myriad of films, the one I want to openly discuss here is Die Hard.

When Die Hard came out in 1988, it was in the midst of a generation of completely over the top action movies.  Die Hard took the genre and brought it back to reality by taking officer John McClane and putting him in the middle of a terrorist plot 3000 miles away from home.  Everything about his was contradictory to the action heroes of the time.  Bruce Willis was starting to go bald, he didn’t have a cartoon like physique, and most of all he was completely unprepared for the situation unfolding in front of him.  John McClane had to deal with a dozen terrorists with his Beretta, a few clips of ammo, and no shoes.  The similarities to Dirty Harry are a bit more subtle here, but still exist.  When the police finally arrive to the scene of the kidnapping (after they didn’t believe McClane in the first place) their ineptitude is legendary.  They send swat teams in that get easily defeated, they bring in an APC that German thugs blow to bits, and then they accidentally mistake McClane for a terrorist.  John is forced into a situation where making sure everyone survives is his priority and he quickly comes to the realization that he is alone. 

John McClane has a lot of Dirty Harry in him.  He is a hard nosed cop who is put into a situation where he needs to get results or he will be dead.  McClane didn’t necessarily choose his own path, but he did thrive in a situation where he was his own boss.  Staying alive and on top of the situation meant more to him than following code or procedure and in the end, results were produced.  Again this does admittedly seem to be less inspired by Dirty Harry than Death Wish, but we also have to ask the question “Would either of those movies even exist if Dirty Harry wasn’t successful?”

Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying in this piece.  I’m not saying that Death Wish or Die Hard were terrible movies or that they ripped off Dirty Harry, what I’m saying is that Dirty Harry was an important film because of the inspiration it provided to a generation of writers and filmmakers.  It was no longer about creating clear lines in the sand between police and criminals.  The story and the characters were more important than anything else and their actions and motivations were now officially called into question.  More realistic elements that people were facing everyday were called presented to the viewer.  Was it sometimes ok to break the law?  Should we always blindly listen to our leaders?  Should we sit by and let bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it?  In 1971, we had already seen the horrors Vietnam on the nightly news so it seemed pretty ridiculous to keep having stories where the good guy never crossed a line to get things accomplished.  Through Dirty Harry, reality gained a bit more ground in cinema and in the end, the audience was the party that got the most benefit.