Clint Eastwood initially rose in stardom in Westerns, first with the television series Rawhide and then with Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western trilogy in which he played the Man with No Name: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). By the early 1970s, he attempted to change his image, embracing more urban action-adventures and thrillers, like Play Misty for Me and, most notably, "Dirty" Harry Callahan, San Francisco detective in Don Siegel's 1971 film Dirty Harry.
"I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you how I felt when seeing Dirty Harry, and why I was so happy to be chosen to write the original novels based on his character (and why I was so unhappy that my fellow house-writers didn’t seem as caring)," offers author Ric Meyers. "The original Dirty Harry was kismet. The script bounced around Hollywood, reportedly passing through Frank Sinatra’s, and even Telly Savalas’, hands before falling into twenty fingers that secured its immortality. I dedicated my first Dirty Harry to those two men: 'To Harry’s very spirit: Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel.'
"Eastwood," he elaborates, "has gone on to cement his filmmaking legacy, but too many forget about Siegel, one of the great unsung, underrated directors in history. He and Clint, who was his protege, made Harry a symbol of a cop out for justice, not for law. A detective who sought to do what’s right, not what was expedient or politically correct. But he was also a man who cared. He wanted to do right, not win arguments. He was the hero I tried to fashion in the novels.
"They perfectly orchestrated the original film so well, so memorably, and so powerfully that the character carried over on a wave of hope, despite the lesser directors who took on his legacy — even Eastwood himself — turning Harry into a 'make my day' slogan-spouting cut-out who scraped the bottom of the axiom barrel so deeply that he finally came up with 'you take your life in your hands when you put your life into someone else’s hands.' Although each subsequent film sank a little bit more, it wasn't enough to keep me away from his movies. I went to each, hoping that a little of that Siegel magic was still on display — although it never was. Even so, there was Clint, squinting and muttering 'a man’s gotta know his limitations' as if he were apologizing to me personally for making Harry the lightweight cash cow he knew he was making him. It mattered a lot, but it didn’t matter at all. Hell, if Clint made one today, I’d still go to see it (just as I go to every James Bond and Marvel movie). To quote the last line of my first novel about him; 'They didn’t call him Dirty Harry for nothing.'"
Dirty Harry (1971)
Both Siegel and Eastwood are at the top of their game in this introduction for the character of Harry Callahan, a San Francisco detective whose rule-breaking, unorthodox approach goes up against a sniper named Scorpio (Andrew Robinson). It’s a commentary on the violence sweeping across America at the time, and very much a Western in modern garb, Clint’s six-shooter replaced by a .357 Magnum.
“At the end, there’s a big shootout and Harry throws his badge into the lake. I mean, that’s right out of High Noon with Gary Cooper taking his badge off and throwing it on the ground as a way of rejecting the authority that has not aided him when he needed them to,” says Marc Eliot, author of American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood. “In Dirty Harry, they let the psychotic criminal out on a technicality, and Harry is disgusted because his sense of justice is Old West justice.”
“Harry overlooks due process,” points out Joe Street, who wrote Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan and the Convervative Backlash, “and all the legal constraints that are placed on police work to take the law into his own hands. One of the frustrations that a lot of people, certainly Eastwood himself, felt about the way American law was progressing in the late ’60s and early ’70s, with the Miranda decision and things like that that were preventing police officers from doing that sort of thing. But Callahan isn't limited by that. He comes up with a quip, he blows somebody away and we remember the quip rather than the miscarriage of justice.”
Magnum Force (1973)
Harry’s back and so is Eastwood's Hang ‘Em High director Ted Post. This time Harry goes up against a team of vigilante cops whose idea of justice is to murder those who escape it from the courts. Among the actors playing the cops is pre-Starsky and Hutch star David Soul. Speaking of the appeal of the Dirty Harry character, Joe Street muses, “He does things that we can’t do. Not in the Superman way of leaping tall buildings, but he comes up with quips far quicker than you or I and when he’s really irritated with somebody, he can pull out his Magnum and blow them away. And that’s the thing that we’ve often imagined ourselves doing, but couldn’t ever do. So in that sense he’s kind of freed of the constraints that are placed around us by society and by ourselves. He’s a great escapist figure."
He continues, “It’s kind of interesting that in the first film Siegel saw Harry as a contribution to the discussion over violence in cinema at the time in the wake of The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde and films like that. The second film is sort of an overlong police procedural and it kind of reverses the polarity of the first film in ostensibly saying, ‘If you think Dirty Harry’s a Nazi, here’s some real Nazis we’ll juxtapose him with.'”
The Enforcer (1976)
It’s another Dirty Harry flick. Harry Callahan, who has teamed up with Inspector Kate Moore (Tyne Daly), is tasked with stopping a terrorist organization consisting of angry Vietnam veterans. Probably the worst in the series.
Sudden Impact (1983)
The fourth Dirty Harry film, with Harry conflicted in tracking down a woman (Sondra Locke), who is murdering the men responsible for raping her years earlier. A really strong entry in the series that gave us the immortal Clint line, “Go ahead. Make my day.” Comments Joe Street, “This is a really underrated movie. It gets bad press, I feel, because the two preceding Dirty Harry movies frankly weren’t very good. The people didn’t really respond very well to this. The ‘avenging angel’ in there some people said was some sort of ‘Dirty Harriet,’ which wasn’t quite right in itself. What was interesting to me is that it was the only one directed by Clint Eastwood and he brought back Bruce Surtees as the cinematographer. As a result, the cinematography and direction of it are actually really interesting. Much more so than the writing. It actually deserves comparisons to other movies of the time that he directed rather than the other Dirty Harry movies.”
The Dead Pool (1988)
And it all comes to an end here in the fifth and final Dirty Harry film. This time Harry is investigating the murders of celebrities and finds himself on the list. Just to demonstrate how things have changed during these five films, Harry started off dispatching bad guys with a .357 Magnum and concludes him using a harpoon gun.
Opines Marc Eliot, “I think he lost interest in the character. After a while when you’re doing these sequels, the rule is half the money, half as good. That tends to be true with exceptions. At the same time, when you have your own production company with payroll and all, sometimes you make a movie that pays the bills and you have a film you know will make money … Look at a film like the original Death Wish, which was mildly interesting. I never found it to be a very good movie, but again, mildly interesting. And then when you get to the 20th one or whatever, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. You know, how many wives does this guy have that can get killed? This is going to be a strange analogy, but with something like the Dirty Harry films, it’s like you take a shot of heroin. Then you need two shots to make up for the one shot and it goes on from there. That’s what happens with these films. Audiences want more, even though they think they’re getting it, but they’re getting the same stuff and the actor is losing interest.”