Go ahead. Make our decade.
Movies mirror the culture, whether they set out to or not, and for years critics have glimpsed the dysfunction of the ’70s in the era’s downbeat films.
The political paranoia and dirty tricks of the Nixon White House? Reflected in “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor.” The bloodbath of Vietnam, and chaos at home? Repurposed for absurdist Westerns like “Little Big Man,” or nihilist horrors like “Last House on the Left.”
But there was another way to view those 10 turbulent years — as a time when villains had more rights than victims, when the majority of Americans were not just silent, but silenced.
Just ask “Dirty Harry.”
The films were meant to be popular entertainments, and they extended fitfully into the ’80s. But they were very much films of — and against — the ’70s. And a new boxed set shows just how clearly they spoke.
Like many Hollywood classics, 1971’s “Dirty Harry” started out as a completely different film.
The first drafts of the script, titled “Dead Right,” were set in Manhattan; Frank Sinatra had been cast as the hard-headed cop. But then Sinatra, who had badly hurt his hand during a fight scene in “The Manchurian Candidate,” had a flare-up and bowed out; Warner Bros. had to scramble.
At one point or another, nearly everyone — Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Paul Newman — was considered. Finally the studio went to Western icon Clint Eastwood who, eager to get out of the saddle, agreed. He just had two suggestions: use Don Siegel, the director on the movie he’d just finished, “The Beguiled,” and switch the action to the San Francisco Bay Area, the actor’s longtime home.
The changes changed everything.
Start with the choice of director. Siegel was a no-nonsense Hollywood veteran — he’d done the montages for “Casablanca” — but he specialized in anti-heroes, and relished ambiguity. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” his 1956 classic, worked as a parable of left-wing subversion or of right-wing conformity; “The Beguiled” toyed with audience sympathies.
Eastwood was complicated, too. Although he had voted for Nixon, he wore his hair long, played jazz piano and sported jeans and open-necked shirts. The actor may not have liked everything about the times, but he was clearly of them; his presence made the movie vital in a way an older star couldn’t have.
And then, finally, there was the setting. The movie could have worked in New York; it had all the big parks and urban streets the script demanded. But San Francisco, with its curving roads and voluptuous hills, had a feminine feel; it was also seen as the bleeding heart of political permissiveness and “alternative lifestyles.” It was precisely the contrast, and challenge, a man like Inspector Harry Callahan needed.
“Dirty Harry” had found his battleground. And the decade had found a new kind of hero.
The first “Dirty Harry” movie set the template — a vicious murderer, an ancillary robbery or two, a minority partner (always in danger of not making it to the credits), constant criticism from Harry’s superiors and a final shoot-out. Yet it also set a high standard.
For one thing, Siegel was simply a better director than the hacks who followed. (Eastwood oversaw the fourth installment, “Sudden Impact,” but his filmmaking skills were still workman-like.) Siegel’s scenes are, as you’d expect of a former editor, smartly cut; the photography is inventive. (Nothing in the sequels matches Siegel’s helicopter shot of Harry standing over the murderer in the stadium, the camera fleeing backwards in horror.)
For another, in 1971 the entire concept was still startling. Certainly there were prototypes for Harry, many of them from the Westerns Eastwood adored — like “Shane,” Harry was a loner who did the dirty jobs that needed doing, like the marshal in “High Noon,” he did them without the community’s support. (The final shot of “Dirty Harry” — Harry tossing away his badge — is a direct nod to the Gary Cooper film.)
But Harry’s closer to John Wayne’s solitary, sadistic, racist Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers.” (He even repeats Edwards “That’ll be the day” line.) Asked by his new, Hispanic partner if it’s true he “hates everybody,” Harry coolly answers, “Especially spics.” It’s done with a just-kidding wink at an older white cop, but it helped position Harry as the liberals’ worst nightmare: Archie Bunker with a badge.
There were other signs, too — like the peace-symbol belt buckle worn by the killer — and critics took the bait. In an influential essay, the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael — like Eastwood, a Bay Area product — slammed the film’s “fascist medievalism.” Today, Eastwood downplays it — “It was the style in those days to characterize people,” he says. But with lines like “There’s nothing wrong with shooting, as long as the right people get shot,” the charge stuck.
It didn’t hurt the film. It might even have helped. (”Most of the films that were coming out at the time,” Eastwood later told Playboy magazine, “were extremely anti-cop.”) Yet it must have stung, because the sequel, “Magnum Force,” turned the assumptions of the first movie on their ear.
In the new film, released in 1973, Harry was still prone to shoot first and ask no questions later. But the movie gave him a few humanizing edges — a cramped apartment, an occasional lover (who, at Eastwood’s insistence, was cast with an Asian actress). And, politically, it reversed things.
The villain wasn’t some hippie serial killer, but a squad of war vets who executed transgressors.
The script — as written by the crypto-conservative Michael Cimino and John Milius — was confused at best. Asked to join the death squad, Harry sneers “I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me,” but actually they’ve judged him perfectly. Harry said he wanted “the right people” shot; the chief difference was that, this time, Harry wasn’t the one doing the choosing. That was enough to make him, reluctantly, stand up for “the system.”
The fascist charge now supposedly answered, the next sequel, 1976’s “The Enforcer,” restored Harry to his rightful place as the last angry outsider. As the film begins, he’s working personnel; chief among his duties is to meet a new quota for female hires. This affirmative action is pushed, predictably, by a humorless feminist with pulled-back hair; Harry, just as predictably, witheringly refers to her throughout as “Mrs.”
“The Enforcer” was a hit, but sequels soon posed a problem; how could the series continue if Harry Callahan had won?
Stripped of its purpose, the series struggled on. In 1983’s “Sudden Impact,” Harry went up against another vigilante, this time a rape survivor. Recognizing a kindred spirit, he lets her go. In “The Dead Pool,” made five years later, Harry chases a serial killer but his real antagonists are a tabloid female journalist and a horror-movie director. It marked an increased cultural conservatism in the series as well as fatal signs of cannibalism — an exploitation film criticizing exploitation. It was the last time Eastwood would play the part.
Eastwood is not a man given to public apologies, or regrets. But Kael’s charges clearly hurt (or “The Dead Pool” wouldn’t have made a point of making one of the victims a middle-aged female film critic). And the specter of vigilantism must have haunted him, too. If it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have shown the toll it takes on Bill Munny in “Unforgiven.” Or shown the horror of taking the law into your own hands in “Mystic River.” Or dwelt on the lingering trauma of real-life violence in “Flags of Our Fathers.”
Dirty Harry may be gone. But Clint Eastwood lives with him still. And so do we.
