There’s a clever edit very early on in Dirty Harry that cuts from the mayhem left behind by a mysterious shooter to the first appearance of the hard-nosed hero, Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood). For a moment you wonder if the film is going to be brave enough to equate one killer with another. But Dirty Harry functions, in the end, too much like a straw-man movie: the film invents an outlandish bogeyman—the depraved and maniacal Scorpio (Andrew Robinson)—and lets him literally get away with murder, all because Harry fails to follow proper procedure. What are we going to choose, Dirty Harry asks: Miranda rights or justice for the raped teenager whose naked body is pulled out of the sewer? The movie is both vile and risible. Any gestures toward subversion—like the edit mentioned above—are undone by gun fetishism and vigilante hero worship. (When Harry stands over his suspect, having just shot him while the man’s hands were raised, director Don Siegel employs a mythologizing shot that begins tightly on the two men and then soars operatically up into the sky. It’s a howl of despair that Harry’s personal brand of righteous justice is soon to be subjected to the pansy law of the land.) It is, of course, the Eastwood myth that Dirty Harry ultimately embellished. There’s no denying the galvanizing presence the actor brings to this shoot-first-ask-questions-later icon. (Something he literally does on a regular basis, save for this infamous exchange: “You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”) Steely, nonchalant, strolling through shoot-outs with a .44 Magnum in one hand and a hot dog in another, Eastwood acts as if he had studied John Wayne’s career and decided the man was a shameless showboat. It worked.
