I felt a little sad after watching Dirty Harry. It wasn’t my first time, of course. I’ve seen the movie several times before. But it was the first time I did so with an eye to writing a review, which made me have to evaluate it in context. And that made me kind of sad.
Buy Dirty Harry 4K UHDNot because of the content of the movie. Dirty Harry is an inventive and interesting examination of the politics and realities of policing in the ’70s.
Dirty Harry is Harry Callahan. Performed with precise indifference by Clint Eastwood, Harry is the lead investigator on an apparently random murder that, because of a note left at the scene, promises to be something more involved. The note says the next victim will be a Catholic priest or a… n-word. The character reading it wouldn’t say it aloud, either.
The note is signed “Scorpio,” and the parallel with the contemporary Zodiac case is clear. The Zodiac killer murdered apparently randomly and sent letters to newspapers. Scorpio is less organized, and he has Clint Eastwood to deal with. After a couple of sniper assaults, Scorpio claims he has a girl buried somewhere, and if the cops want to catch up with him, they need to jump through his hoops.
Callahan tries, but when he’s cheek to cheek with Scorpio, he stabs the s.o.b. in the leg. Scorpio squeals like a stuck pig. There’s violence in the film, but most of it is clinical, and distant. The only times we get the reaction from the victim of violence, it’s Scorpio. He squeals when he’s stabbed, and when Harry pushes on the wound later, his scream is accompanied by an ecstatic helicopter shot. I think that’s part of the film’s message: that sympathy for evil men can erode consideration for their victims.
But the most striking thing I found, when watching the film, was how visceral the filmmaking is. It’s mostly on location. It’s all in ’70s San Francisco, which looks gorgeous. And that’s the element that made me sad: how real and vital the film feels, compared to so much contemporary productions I see which have ten times the budget and the crew, but feel like cartoons.
Dirty Harry is largely about how reality and the public view of reality do not mesh – how reputation and reality do not connect. Harry Callahan has a reputation as a nasty racist. But despite some trash talking, he trusts his new partner, Gonzalez, implicitly. He’s more irritated that he’s a college boy than that he’s Mexican. Harry never questions his competence or ability or puts him through some stupid hazing.
The problem is, they’re up against an enemy of deep malevolence and evil. And one who knows how to use the system to his benefit. When Scorpio, played by Andy Robinson, realizes Callahan is following him around town, he hires a thug to beat him up. He claims it was Callahan, so the police call him off… even though his next act is to hijack a school bus.
Beyond the politics, Dirty Harry is just a pretty cool cop story. A rough guy in a rough world does what he can to make things better. He can screw up but he’s on Scorpio’s trail. The system keeps him from finding justice.
This new 4K transfer from an 8k scan of the original negative looks great, considering the source material. This film was largely shot on location, in settings that can be reasonably called “adverse,” so there’s an inherent softness to much of the material. After all, real cameras and real lights in real places have real limitations.
And the movie has a reality to it that is hard to deny. When it was first released, Dirty Harry was sometimes called a “fascist” film, a judgment that to me seems absurd. Anarchic seems more apt: the film depicts a world where the rules made to keep people safe only put them in danger. But beyond politics, or just the good storytelling, Dirty Harry is (as all aging films end up) a fascinating time capsule. When it was released, it was cartoonish ultra-violence. Now, when so many movies are actually cartoons, it looks like a documentary.
Dirty Harry has been released on 4K UHD by Warner Brothers. The release is a 4K disc, and a digital code. Extras include a commentary by critic Richard Shickel.
Video extras include two new featurettes: “Generations and Dirty Harry” (6 min), an appreciation of the film from multiple critics, and “Lensing Justice: The Cinematography of Dirty Harry” (8 min), a similar featurette about the film’s cinematography. Legacy video extras include “American Masters Career Retrospective – Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows” (87 min); “Clint Eastwood: The Man from Malposo” (58 min); “Clint Eastwood – A Cinematic Legacy: Fighting for Justice” (18 min); Interview Gallery: various interviews about the film; “Dirty Harry‘s Way” (7 min); “Dirty Harry: The Original” (30 min).
