Everyone agreed the script still needed revisions. Clint asked Siegel if he would work with a writer on a revision of the Finks’ script with an eye to directing the film in the early summer of 1971. Siegel proposed Dean Riesner, but said he was not sure he was himself free to work on the project; his contract with Universal did not permit him to undertake outside assignments. Clint said he would speak to Lew Wasserman, and quickly secured Siegel’s release.
The first question director, writer and star addressed was locale. The Finks’ story had been set in New York, but Siegel, having done two policiers there recently, did not want to return so soon. Seattle seemed a fresh possibility, but one Sunday in December, Clint and Siegel both happened to catch the TV broadcast of the last football game the San Francisco 49ers played in antique Kezar Stadium, and it suggested the same idea to them: An abandoned stadium would be the perfect lair for their killer, an empty, floodlit football field the perfect arena for a violent confrontation between detective and prey. Siegel liked San Francisco; he had used it effectively in The Lineup, also a story about murderous stalkings, twelve years earlier. And so they visited San Francisco, where they were assured they would be able to shoot in the stadium before demolition began and convinced themselves they could offer a view of the city different from that of Bullitt, which had recently offered a highly picturesque vision of it. They looked no farther.
Riesner and Siegel worked on the script for six or seven weeks, making their largest contributions to its last third, excising an ending in which the psycho attempts to hijack an airplane, replacing it with a simpler and more powerful sequence in which he abducts a school bus full of terrified children. Clint recalls that in the first draft Harry was older and wearier, therefore warier with his tongue because he was closer to retirement. He says that for a time he considered aging himself somewhat for the part, but that idea disappeared as the new draft took shape.
This went smoothly enough, though Siegel (who “always needed an opponent,” as Clint later put it, “either the studio or a producer”) at one point threatened to quit when John Calley sent him a memo comparing scene by scene the Riesner and Fink scripts, to the advantage of the latter. Siegel claimed that it required Clint’s intervention to back the production chief off. It’s hard to determine now who is responsible for what in the final screenplay, on which all three writers shared credit, but Clint disputes the claim to authorship that John Milius, then early in his curious career as an unabashed macho-anarchist gun nut (and one of the few truly interesting modern Hollywood characters), has advanced. Milius wrote one of the drafts Kershner worked on (he insisted on part of his pay being a new Purdy shotgun and refused to start work until it was delivered) but Clint says that, at most, “we might have taken a few good items John had in there.”
Given a seven- or eight-week schedule that, as Clint says “seemed like an eternity” in comparison to the B-picture timetables he was used to, Siegel responded with a craftsmanship and conviction unusual even for him. This powered the film beyond its humble genre origins to blockbuster status, making it the largest and most immediate commercial success its star had so far experienced. That, in turn, had a transformative effect on Clint’s career, finally, indelibly incising his image on the moviegoing mind, and also making him instantly, iconographically, identifiable even to people who don’t go to the movies much.
For all its clarity, this image was at the time, and for many years thereafter, subject to radically contradictory readings, so much so that the conflict over its meaning became the central issue of Clint Eastwood’s public life. That he did not intend this to happen, that much of what was darkly inferred about Dirty Harry Callahan and the actor who played him was based on the shakiest of suppositions, not to mention certain overheated political metaphors of the moment, does not diminish the force of this controversy or the persistence of its afterlife.
In order to understand this phenomenon it is necessary to disentangle the several strands of which it is composed—the movie and the character Clint played in it as both were intended, how they were perceived by the huge audience that responded so hungrily to them and how they were understood by that influential minority of one, Pauline Kael, whose curious review of the film caused a sensation in politically fastidious circles at the time and continued for a long time to condition all subsequent responses to the film and, to a degree, Clint’s career.
The movie is not complex structurally; it simply recounts a duel to the death between a psychopathic serial killer, who calls himself Scorpio and chooses his victims at random, and Clint’s professionally disaffected yet increasingly obsessive Harry Callahan. Caught between them are the police and municipal hierarchies, who are inclined to pay Scorpio the ransom he demands to cease his depredations and equally inclined to ignore Callahan’s instincts, which tell him that this is a criminal who cannot be bought off. Eventually we will see that hunter and prey are virtually doubles, with only the thinnest margin of sanity separating them.
The film’s first act is largely devoted to establishing Callahan’s character, situating him in his milieu and enlisting our sympathy for him. In this passage Scorpio is seen as no more than an increasingly menacing shadow, albeit a perversely intelligent one. Callahan, on the other hand, is richly drawn as a kind of classic American knothead-hothead, ever at odds with conventional wisdom, for that matter conventional good manners, yet cunning and dedicated and therefore invaluable to the powers he serves. He is very funny in his brutally frank way, and very busy. This opening act, essentially a succession of short, punched-up confrontations, both verbal and physical, intersperses scenes showing Harry in rebellious confrontation with his bosses with action sequences in which he foils an attempted bank robbery and an attempted suicide, engages in a spectacular rooftop gun battle with Scorpio and gets himself comically mistaken for a Peeping Tom. The idea, of course, is to show the hectic pressures of a cop’s working life and to establish the fact that in the heat of the action a policeman does not always have the luxury of consulting the rule book.
In the second act the mood darkens, and the tension ratchets up. For now Scorpio announces that he has abducted a fourteen-year-old girl and buried her alive, with an air supply sufficient to sustain her for only five hours. He will provide information about her whereabouts in exchange for $200,000. From his messages it is clear that he has raped and tortured the girl. Harry is charged with delivering the ransom, Scorpio engages him in a long, cruel chase, in the course of which Harry’s partner is almost killed, and Harry and Scorpio at last confront—and wound—one another. The latter escapes, but Harry tracks him to his Kezar Stadium hideout and in the center of its floodlit gridiron beats out of him information about where he has hidden his victim. She is, however, dead when the police arrive.
The film’s last act begins with Harry being reprimanded for his failure to respect Scorpio’s civil rights and learning that the criminal has been released from custody because of this failure. Harry’s argument that a girl’s life was at stake and that there was no time for legal niceties is contemptuously dismissed. Now, astonishingly, Scorpio hires another criminal to beat him up, painfully manufacturing evidence for the charge of police brutality he brings against Harry.
Thereafter, still seeking a payoff from the city, Scorpio proceeds to the school-bus hijacking, offering to exchange the lives of its passengers for money and safe conduct out of the country. Harry, again against orders, drops off an overpass onto the roof of the careening vehicle, which comes to a crashing halt at a gravel pit. There, at last, he corners and kills Scorpio, and throws away his badge in what turned out to be—considering the four sequels that were to come—not quite the definitive gesture of disgust it seemed to be at the time.
This outline reveals the essence of the film’s appeal to its basic, action-oriented audience, with even Kael forced to concede that it was “a stunningly well-made genre piece.” As such it could not be said to encourage—putting this point as ironically as possible—
a nuanced contemplation of the legal issue it raises.
One must also say that nothing in the movie can fairly be construed as “fascist”—the word Kael so sensationally used to characterize it. On the contrary, it is clear that the filmmakers, knowing they were taking a strong position on a controversial issue, were at pains to limit their argument, to make certain nothing in the film could be read as an endorsement of racism or any other kind of reactionary thuggery. It is not too much to say that Dirty Harry is a movie about extenuating circumstances, an exploration of all the factors—political, sociological, psychological—that bring Callahan to the particular, and very possibly defensible, dirtiness that so exercised Kael and those who have followed her.
Begin at the beginning, with the brilliantly efficient sequence that establishes Harry’s character—the only one, incidentally, that was shot on the back lot. Callahan is discovered at a lunch counter, ordering a hot dog. His dialogue with the counterman makes it clear that he is a regular customer for both lunch and dinner, which also suggests that Harry does not have much of a life outside his job. That he is excellent at that job becomes obvious in a matter of seconds. Something going on at a bank across the street alerts him. He orders the counterman to call a police number and report a suspected robbery in progress, then ambles out into the street, still chewing on his hot dog (an homage, perhaps to the great Cagney scene in White Heat in which he continues to gnaw a chicken leg while blasting away a prisoner he has sequestered in the trunk of a car).
Now a getaway car careens up the street, and Harry draws and fires, nailing its driver. Harry also exchanges shots with another criminal, each of them suffering minor wounds. But his opponent, a black man, is knocked to the sidewalk in front of the bank. Harry strolls over to him, his enormous gun—the soon-to-be-immortal .44 Magnum—casually in hand. The criminal’s gun is on the sidewalk within lurching reach, if he has the nerve to go for it. There is a silent exchange of glances that also contains an exchange of complete, almost brotherly, understanding between two violent men. Then, in an up-angle, comes the most famous, and probably the most important, speech Clint Eastwood ever uttered on film: “Ah, ah, I know what you’re thinkin’—did he fire six shots or only five?” he says, speaking in his softest, most reasonable tone. “Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” He pauses, offering a sweet, almost boyish, smile: “Well do you, punk?”
The criminal, who is not a young man, and has a rather resigned air about him, looks again at his gun, at Harry, then subsides. Harry grins, grabs the other man’s weapon and turns away as sirens announce the arrival of more cops. But the criminal, his bond with Harry established, speaks again: “I gots to know.” Harry allows himself another understanding half smile, levels his gun at the perp—there is a close-up of a sweating face, alarmed eyes—and we hear a trigger click on an empty chamber.
This was for Clint, and for the picture, the transformative moment. His career undoubtedly would have continued successfully enough without it, and the movie would have done well enough without it. But this vivid passage, so rich in telling detail, cleanly, clearly summarized what Clint had been trying to say with his screen character in his previous films. And it summarized this specific character before we were entirely certain of his name. Suddenly, we knew them both—“Clint Eastwood” and “Dirty Harry Callahan”—and liked them both, liked them because however preternatural the cunning and bravery they projected, they seemed to operate out of pissed-off premises we shared, but with a coolness and humor under pressure we could only wish for. In these few moments a star established his superstardom.
Think a little bit more about this sequence. Start with Harry’s costume, notably his battered sports jacket with the leather patches on its sleeves. This is not a jacket that has seen better days; it has never had any better days. It is just something he picked up off some inexpensive peg. Consider, too, his amble into deadly action. It’s not reluctant, but it’s not eager, either. He’s a man reporting for overtime, which he could do without, but has long since learned is inescapable. Think, too, about his nonstandard weapon. It’s like a tool a workman has bought for himself, having learned the equipment supplied by the company (and chosen by bean counters) is not always adequate to the exigencies of fieldwork. He may even know it’s kind of silly looking—this hard-on of a gun—but he doesn’t give any more of a damn about that than he does about the rest of his attire.
It is also important to take into account Harry’s attitude toward his antagonist (Albert Popwell). Yes, he’s a black man and a criminal. But Harry accepts that quite neutrally. If blacks compose a significant element of the modern urban underclass, it stands to reason that they must compose a significant element of the criminal class, too. That’s just the way things are. He treats the man as a fellow professional—well, all right, a fellow craftsman, since neither cop nor crook (nor, come to think of it, actor) is an occupation calling for board certification. They are jobs you pretty much learn by doing. Finally, consider Harry’s feigned confusion about the number of shots he has fired, and his deadpan response to the bank robber’s question on that point. It’s a guy joke, a reference to hundreds of movies everyone has shared, in which the question of how many bullets may or may not remain in a gun has been cornily crucial to the drama. It is also a kind of test—if you pass it with coolly flying colors, you’re a member of the great masculine club, color and job classification transcended.
Think now about Raymond Chandler’s famous “Down these mean streets” description of his private eye. Almost every phrase in it applies to Harry Callahan as well as it did to Philip Marlowe: He is “neither tarnished nor afraid.… He is a relatively poor man or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man.…”
Something Norman Mailer once said of Clint’s idol, James Cagney, also applies. He observed that tough as he was, “you always had the feeling this was a very decent guy,” which, he added, was not only a sweet and sentimental thought, but a necessity for audience appeal: “There is nothing more depressing than finding a guy as tough as nails and as mean as dirt.”
In other words, this lowlife transaction encourages us to connect Dirty Harry with his hard, sardonic forebears in modern crime fiction—the Hammett-Chandler-Burnett-Thompson school. At the same time we can now see a connection with what was to come—the cheekiness of the Elmore Leonard–Carl Hiassen manner, perhaps even a hint of that cheap-seats postmodernism, with its emphasis on the fatal potential of mischance, that the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino would one day exploit (much to Clint Eastwood’s pleasure, it might be added).
One is free, of course, to take or leave cultural allusions of this kind. But about one thing we can be very clear: This passage entirely absolves Harry of the suspicion of racism—no matter what his opinion of Miranda and Escobedo. Moreover, and more important in the scheme of the film, it separates Harry’s normal mode of operation—his nonchalant manner of handling what he regards as routine police work—from the obsessive passion he will bring to the Scorpio case.
The movie continues to stress these points. Siegel, in his autobiography, says he was not certain audiences would read the first scene correctly, so he and Riesner devised two short sequences that make Harry’s racial attitudes utterly unambiguous. In one of them, Harry is in a hospital emergency room having the bank robber’s shotgun pellets removed from his leg. The doctor attending him is a black man, and their affectionately barbed dialogue reveals that they grew up in the same neighborhood and are old pals. In another scene his new Hispanic partner, Chico Gonzales (Reni Santoni), asks another detective why Harry is called Dirty Ha
rry. “One thing about Harry, he plays no favorites. Harry hates everybody—Limies, Micks, Hebes, fat Dagos, Niggers, Hunkies, Chinks.” “What about Mexicans?” the young cop asks. “Especially Spics,” says Harry, who’s been listening to this exchange. He then gives a big wink to the other detective. His only expressed prejudice is against “college boys” (which Gonzales also is). But competence is the antidote for that, and Chico soon wins his regard.
Harry, in his way, is like the marines—he needs a few good men, one of whom, in Santoni’s reserved, appraising performance, Gonzales quickly proves to be. He can’t afford to pass one up for stupid reasons. His motives are not entirely professional. Having no life outside his work—his wife, we later learn, is dead, the victim of a hit-and-run driver; his apartment is glumly functional, a place to sleep, change clothes, knock back a brew—he needs some rough, authentic human contact. So the pair gets into trouble together and helps each other get out of it. They banter a little, exchange guarded confidences, stay well short of intimate revelation. It may be pretty standard action-movie stuff, the old pro and the rookie developing mutual respect through mutual reliance, but it helps to humanize Harry in our eyes.
Their first joint venture is, visually, the film’s most stunning passage—the rooftop stakeout that turns into a shoot-out with Scorpio, their exchange of rifle shots shattering and short-circuiting electric signs, creating an explosive, spectacular and dangerous light show, in the noisy, blinding confusion of which their quarry escapes. This was, for the movie’s actors and technicians, its most dangerous scene. Siegel and Bruce Surtees pondered it carefully, slowing their usual pace to a point where Clint emerged from his trailer in full grumble. Trying to hurry things along, he yelled at a special-effects man. Surtees, normally also a low-key operative, got snappish at this intervention—it was, he said, the most complicated sequence he’d ever tried to photograph and he didn’t need any additional pressure. As politely as possible, Siegel ordered his star back to his trailer and returned to work. He was startled, a moment or two later, to receive a kiss on the back of his head. It was from a chastened Clint, and it was meant as both apology and endorsement of everyone’s efforts.
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