The Politics Of Dirty Harry

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly, Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman Director: James Fargo Year Of Release: 1977 Plot: After dealing with a robbery in a typically Dirty Harry way (driving his car through the window and shooting everybody), the no-nonsense policeman is in the doghouse and busted down to personnel. However when a new group called the People's Revolutionary Strike Force emerges, made up largely of disgruntled Vietnam vets, the terrorists end up killing Harry’s former partner. Soon the cop with the Magnum is back on the streets and vowing revenge, whilst dealing with having a new female partner.

The five Dirty Harry movies are kind of interesting not just because they’re a lot of fun, but also because they’re actually far more politically and socially aware than they’re generally given credit for.

The first of the films, made in 1971, is often credited with helping to start the move away from the western and towards the police procedural in movies. Afterwards everyone got in on the game with their own cop who wasn’t interested in the rules. By the 80s, it had become so ubiquitous that nobody even questioned it. So if Mel Gibson went around shooting all and sundry in Lethal Weapon, blowing up everything he could lay his hands on, nobody batted an eyelid about the ridiculously excessive use of force – it was just the way things were in the movies. However coming at the beginning of the move towards modern day cop movies, the Dirty Harry films are rather more interesting than that, and indeed their politics often led to some controversy.

For example, while the first Dirty Harry pic was widely praised and became a hit on its release, many found it morally repugnant, with Robert Ebert saying the film had a ‘fascist moral position’. It was seen by some as extremely right wing, and that it went beyond the idea that the justice system had tipped too far towards the criminals’ rights, and that the movie was promoting a system where police should have absolute power to do whatever they liked in order to deal with criminals, irrespective of civil rights or the idea of innocent until proven guilty. The film sparked a huge debate, ranging across victim’s rights, police brutality, the nature of law enforcement, and the balance between stopping crime and ensuring you don’t trample on the rights of innocent people.

Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel were actually quite surprised by the controversy, as while they did both want to make the film because they felt victim’s rights were being ignored, neither expected to be branded fascists and accused of promoting a society where justice should be delivered at the point of a gun. The key issue in the movie for Eastwood and Siegel was the idea that the cops knew exactly who the killer was, but because of his rights and various technicalities, they couldn’t bring him to justice. Harry stood as the man looking out for the victim, while the system seemed to be more interested in the criminal.

The character’s shoot first and ask questions later style wasn’t supposed to be suggesting that’s how cops should act, but was included to try and make the movie more exciting and bring Eastwood’s man-with-no-name western persona into the modern age. However it did result in an interesting character who came across as being from the wrong era, at odds with and not understanding the modern world, which they then played with across all five films.

In the case of the first Dirty Harry movie, the social issues largely revolved around the victim’s right versus the suspect’s, with Callahan not able to understand how a system can exist where the authorities can know exactly who a serial killer is, but they can’t lock him up. It’s undoubtedly an issue that’s worth addressing, but the controversy over the film probably stemmed from the fact it spent little time looking at things from the other side and the reasons why criminals have certain rights, which is partly to prevent the police from being able to harass innocent people just because they suspect them of a crime.

Dirty Harry is a far more political movie than many give it credit for, as while rather one sided, it actively engages in these social issues, and part of the reason it was so enthusiastically embraced by audiences at the time was because it spoke to their own disaffection with a society where it felt like the criminals were getting the upper hand and the police either couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it. In fact, if you watch Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver, they’re actually far closer in theme than you might suspect.

The Dirty Harry series’ interest in political and social issues continued through the sequels, sometimes falling into controversial arenas again. The second film, Magnum Force, directly deals with the controversy the first stirred up, featuring a group of vigilante cops who’ve formed a death squad, killing criminals rather than going to the trouble of building a case and sending them through the courts. At first they seem quite like Harry, with the film trying to say what separates him from pure vigilantism.

Magnum Force deals with the blurriness of the line between empowering the police to stop criminals and allowing them to engage in unregulated frontier justice. The film actually has difficulty defining where it thinks the line should be, instead highlighting the problem, particularly with the police being stuck in a system that’s as much about politics as justice. It also talks about how by necessity the police need to effectively police themselves, in order to prevent anarchy. The best summation of the film’s viewpoint comes from Harry when he says, “I hate the goddamn system, but until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I'll stick with it."

1976’s Sudden Impact returned to the idea of a frustrated society, by presenting a group of terrorists who are on the edge between being men frustrated by the world around them and seeking to shake things up, but who at the same time are more typical criminals after money. At the time the film was made there were huge arguments about rising crime and social decay, with some blaming the criminals and the ineffectiveness of the police, while others though it was more to do with a broken society as a whole creating a shunned underclass that turned to crime. The film actually deals with this in various ways, such as an argument between Harry and one of his superiors, where he questions whether the words ‘minority community’ is actually a euphemism for criminals demanding to be left alone, which may be racist but mirrors what many others were saying at the time.

The Enforcer also deals more with the idea of Harry being a man out of place in the modern world, genuinely questioning him and his way of doing things. In fact while we sympathise with him, the first part of the film where he’s busted down personnel for causing $15,000 worth of damage during a shoot-out does effectively suggest that however much we might like the idea of Dirty Harry style cops, in practice it would be anarchy and socially destructive. The really interesting thing however is how he’s then brought back, proposing the idea that while those in power may not want people like Harry who get the job done without worrying about the niceties, perhaps they need them whether they wanted to publicly admit it or not.

The Enforcer also deals with sexual equality, which was included in the film in response to earlier allegations that Harry Callahan and the film series was utterly misogynistic. Again, it doesn’t shy away from the complications and social issues that were being discussed at the time, such as positive discrimination, while also showing Harry softening and starting to change his mind once he’s actually forced to work with a woman as a partner.

Sudden Impact meanwhile gets more directly involved in victim’s rights, with a woman who sets out to kill the people who gang raped her and her sister a decade earlier. It’s almost like a case study into the frustrations of the system, with Harry at first angry about losing a case due to technicalities over the handling of evidence, even though the criminal is blatantly guilty. He then goes off to investigate a case where he discovers he is actually on the trail of a woman trying to find her own form of personal justice due to police failings, with the question being, what is he going to do about it (and the answer proving slightly controversial on the film’s release)? Rather than being against the system as he is in the other films, suddenly he becomes the system that’s against someone doing something he’d probably do himself, with the film asking whether there should be a point where taking justice into you own hands should be allowed.

I wish I could say the final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, also dealt with some interesting social and political ideas, but it doesn’t, unless you think making celebrity death lists is a pressing issue. Instead it did what most cop films did in the 1980s, which was to have a lot of action and people being shot, with little awareness or thought about the consequences or social ramifications. Nevertheless, whether you agree with what Harry stands for or not, there’s little doubt the five movies actually paint a far more interesting and controversial picture of society than they’re given credit for.

Although sometimes overly simplistic (not least that all the films tend to ignore the reasons why some of the things that frustrate Harry so much exist, which do actually make sense if you think about it), they’re very socially conscious movies, dealing with issues that were prevalent at the time they were made. You may think Dirty Harry is just about blowing criminals away and cool catchphrases, but the films are actually a lot more interesting than that, whether you agree with their politics or not.

TIM ISAAC

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