HOME / dvd extras: Deleted scenes, commentary, and more.

Mirandize ThisWas Dirty Harry a right-wing fantasy of swift justice—or a cautionary tale about vigilantism?

By Mark HarrisPosted Monday, June 30, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Out-and-out stupidity soon became a series hallmark. Siegel wasn't a great director (and he certainly wasn't the actor's director that Eastwood needed back then), but he had a craftsmanly sense of visual storytelling; his impenetrably inky night scenes and his use of the lurching verticality of San Francisco as a sniper's dream terrain are still effective. Siegel was also economical: "If you shake a movie," he once said, "ten minutes will fall out."

If only someone had shaken the 124-minute Magnum Force (1973) two or three times. Milius, who co-wrote the script with Michael Cimino, says the movie was intended as an "answer" to the charge that Harry was fascist; here, his enemies would be real fascists, a jackbooted gang of motorcycle policemen that moonlights as a death squad, killing criminals who they say would be behind bars "if the courts worked properly." When Harry first encounters these guys on the firing range, he's downright giddy at their marksmanship. "When I get back on homicide, I hope you boys'll come see me," he says, as flirtatious as Mae West. (When another cop comments that the close-knit pack seems almost "queer for each other," Harry replies, "If the rest of you could shoot like them I wouldn't care if the whole damn department was queer.")

But when Harry finds out what they're up to, he's … concerned. "When police start becoming their own executioners, where's it gonna end?" he muses, expressing some fear that police might kill people for minor offenses. Apparently, it's not the principle that's flawed—only its potential misapplication. The evil cop's response: "Either you're for us or you're against us." (Congratulations to George W. Bush for being the only politician ever to lift the villain's line from a Dirty Harry movie. Perhaps Harry's oft-repeated mantra from this film—"A man's got to know his limitations"—wasn't as appealing.)

As early as 1972, Eastwood and Co. already knew that Harry's image needed cleaning up; the sequel offers no reprise of the original's not-quite-serious statement that "Harry hates everybody—limeys, micks, hebes, fat dagos, niggers, honkies, chinks." Thus, Magnum Force teams Harry with a black officer—temporarily, of course, since Harry's partners tend to meet their makers in the line of duty before the closing credits. In The Enforcer (1976), he's forced to pair with a woman—"Lady fuzz!" a bad guy calls her—played by a pre-Cagney & Lacey Tyne Daly with every shred of dignity she can muster while performing chase scenes in knee-length suede boots and carrying a huge purse. The Enforcer draws its boogeyman inspiration everywhere, from the Manson family to the SLA, inventing the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force" and, better still, a black-power group called "Uhuru" run by one "Big Ed Mustapha." There's little ideology on display, however, just a silly climax involving an exotic new weapon called a "taser gun" which seems to have been fashioned by Warner's props department out of a shoe box and a can of silver paint. By now, Harry is almost a teddy bear; he approvingly tells Daly, "Whoever draws you as a partner could do a hell of a lot worse," just before she takes a slug to save his life and, possibly, her future acting career.

Historically, Harry has come out to play only for Republican presidents; he went into mothballs during the Carter administration, and probably should have stayed there. The last two Dirty Harry movies feel like studio horse-trades that bought Eastwood freedom to pursue the more ambitious, nuanced path he was already clearing for himself as an actor and director. He stepped behind the camera for 1983's bloody, brutish Sudden Impact, in which Harry acquired a farting bulldog as a sidekick while pursuing, not unsympathetically, a woman who is picking off the men who raped her. But it's memorable chiefly for handing Ronald Reagan a re-election-campaign present with "Go ahead—make my day" (a line that actually originated in the exploitation movie Vice Squad a year earlier).

As for The Dead Pool (1988), in which Harry investigates a series of murders surrounding the production of a horror movie, the "before they were stars" casting is a happy accident; the supporting players include Liam Neeson, Patricia Clarkson, and "James" Carrey as a heroin-addicted pre-Goth rock star who lip-syncs "Welcome to the Jungle." But the script is little more than an especially gory episode of "Murder, She Wrote." The streak of political taglines also ended with this tin-eared enterprise—unless John McCain decides to deploy "You forgot your fortune cookie—it says you're shit outta luck" during a debate.

Share this article on Digg
Share this article on Buzz

Eastwood recently scotched rumors that he'd be blowing the dust off Harry for one final escapade, saying the character would simply be too old to remain remotely credible as a police officer. (Now he worries about credibility?) More to the point, though, the man who incarnated him is, at this point, simply too smart to try to rehabilitate a cop who was a relic the day he was conceived. "It was fun for a while," says Eastwood in a typically laconic 2001 interview on the DVD. But, he adds, "[S]ometimes it's best to leave a good thing alone." Perhaps wisely, he doesn't elaborate on exactly what the good part was.

Print This ArticlePRINTEmail to a FriendE-MAILShare This ArticleRECOMMEND...Get Slate RSS FeedsRSS
Mark Harris is an Entertainment Weekly columnist and the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
Still of Dirty Harry on Slate's home page courtesy of Warner Brother Classics.
What did you think of this article?
Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
Everyday life in Mumbai.TODAY'S PICTURES: Everyday life in Mumbai.
Cartoonists' take on George W. Bush.TODAY'S CARTOONS: Cartoonists' take on George W. Bush.
Nobody on Line 1. TODAY'S DOONESBURY: Nobody on Line 1.
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Closet Centrist
Gerson | With his cabinet picks, Obama disappoints the ideologues.
Marcus: Was Summers Right?Topic A: A Confirmation Battle?
PLUS » Milbank: Do You Smell Something?