Review of Dirty Harry (1971) by Alvin Y — 23 Jul 2012

Dirty Harry, Great Movies.

*Dirty Harry* is one of the most influential and controversial cop films ever made. It is a canny mix of the simple and the sophisticated. The characters Harry Callahan, and Scorpio, are vivid, hyperbolic cartoons. They gain meaning not through psychological depth and nuance but through their interaction with the movie's intricate, richly articulated environments.

Magnificently exploiting San Francisco locations, director Don Siegel gets a high-low motif in the first shots, zooming back to reveal a woman swimming in a pool on a roof while a sniper kills her from the top of another building. From them on, the film soars and plunges in a roller-coaster contours to delineate a multileveled metropolis where a precarious city of helicopters, hilltops, rooftops, glass towers, fog perches over a primitive underworld of burrows, tunnels, alleys, and quarries. No mere backdrop to the action, this formidable labyrinth molds and tests the characters as they twist and fight their way through it. This is vividly depicted in a tour de force sequence in which Scorpio runs Harry from one end of town to another as part of an evasive scheme to receive money.

So *Dirty Harry* is truly one of the finest and grandest pure filmmaking of the 70s. It rivals *French Connection* in the same year it was released even though that won the best picture award. DH may have inspired as well some cop films with vigilante storyline that even fails because of ripping off. As you also know, it spawns 4 more sequels, which I thought were also good but not as great as this original *Dirty Harry* . Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan will never be forgotten in the history of Hollywood cinema, and of course they do feel lucky right punk? Or maybe, make his day, eh? Some memorable quotes from these Dirty Harry movies, I'm also talking about the other 4 movies. It's nice probably to have a 6th Dirty Harry movie if Eastwood can still shoot, kill, chase, hunt for more, but he's too old now for this kind of role, so that's it!