Dirty Harry (1971)
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American neo-noir action thriller film produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first outing as San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan. The film drew upon the real-life case of the Zodiac Killer as the Callahan character seeks out a similar vicious psychopath. Dirty Harry was a critical and commercial success and set the style for a whole genre of police films. It was followed by four sequels: Magnum Force in 1973, The Enforcer in 1976, Sudden Impact in 1983, and The Dead Pool in 1988. In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.”RELATED:
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Plot.
A psychopathic sniper, later referred to as “Scorpio”, shoots a woman while she swims in a rooftop pool. He leaves behind a threatening letter demanding he be paid $100,000 or he will kill more people. The note is found by SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan. The mayor teams up with the police to track down the killer, although to stall for time, he agrees to Scorpio’s demand over Callahan’s objections. During his lunch break, Harry foils a bank robbery. He shoots one robber dead, and holds another at gunpoint with his Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver, bluffing him to surrender with an ultimatum: I know what you’re thinking: ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ 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’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?
Harry is assigned a rookie partner, Chico Gonzalez, against his opposition to working with another inexperienced police officer. Meanwhile, Scorpio is spotted by a police helicopter near Saints Peter and Paul Church as he is staking out potential victims, but escapes. Harry and Gonzalez are unsuccessful in finding him, and Harry is beaten after being mistaken for a peeping tom.
After assisting in preventing a suicide, Harry and Gonzalez learn that Scorpio has murdered a 10-year-old African-American boy.
Based on his letter, the police think that Scorpio’s next victim will be a Catholic priest, and set a trap for him. Scorpio eventually arrives, kills a police officer in the shootout that follows, and flees.
The next day, the police receive another letter in which Scorpio claims to have kidnapped a teenager named Ann Mary Deacon. He threatens to kill her if he is not given a ransom of $200,000. Harry is assigned to deliver the money, wearing a radio earpiece so Gonzalez can secretly follow him. Scorpio instructs Harry via payphones to run around the city. They meet at the Mount Davidson cross, where Scorpio beats Harry and admits he intends to kill him and let Ann Mary die.
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Development.
The script, titled Dead Right, by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink, was originally about a hard-edged New York City police inspector, Harry Callahan, who is determined to stop Travis, a serial killer, even if he has to skirt the law and accepted standards of policing, blurring the distinction between criminal and cop, to address the question as to how far a free, democratic society can go to protect itself. The original draft ended with a police sniper, instead of Callahan, shooting Scorpio. Another earlier version of the story was set in Seattle, Washington. Four more drafts of the script were written. Although Dirty Harry is arguably Clint Eastwood’s signature role, he was not a top contender for the part.
The role of Harry Callahan was offered to John Wayne and Frank Sinatra, and later to Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, and Burt Lancaster. In his 1980 interview with Playboy, George C. Scott claimed that he was initially offered the role, but the script’s violent nature led him to turn it down. When producer Jennings Lang initially could not find an actor to take the role of Callahan, he sold the film rights to ABC Television. Although ABC wanted to turn it into a television film, the amount of violence in the script was deemed excessive for television, so the rights were sold to Warner Bros.