Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
The man himself...Clint Eastwood
Directed By:
Don Siegel
In Hollywood, you don't need to be smart. Gone In Sixty Seconds racked up over a hundred million dollars at the Box Office because it has nice cars in it and Angelina Jolie. As long as you've got something that attracts the crowds, you'll get green lighted by a fat produced with too much money. In 1971, Don Siegel had to find a selling point to his shoddy police drama. He did. He brought him a young and promising actor, fresh off a series of iconic Western movie who transformed the movie into another iconic drama, Dirty Harry.
Inspector Harry Callahan (Eastwood) is the resident tough guy of San Francisco Police Department. He hates everybody and has his own perception of justice (And...talks with his jaw clenched...presumably from rage and sexual tension). In other words, he's just Clint Eastwood playing a guy who kicks asses and takes names (business as usual). When an individual who refers to himself as Scorpio (Andrew Robinson), starts killing people from rooftops for no valid reason, he stepped on the turf of San Francisco's most unforgiving cop, Dirthay Harray! Then starts a ruthless battle between a demented killer with unyielding drive (and absolutely no point) and the grim reaper of SFPD.
Dirty Harry is a shoddy police drama. Leaving more room for Clint Eastwood to maneuver might have made it the greatest thing ever, but Don Siegel keeps shoving his character into a monotonous storyline instead of letting Eastwood to what he's best at in movies, killing people. Scorpio is obviously inspired from the Zodiac Killer, an true wackjob who terrorized California in the seventies and never was caught. Dirty Harry tries to address the issue in a cathartic way and reassure people that cops in California are stone cold and badass killers, which works, if you consider Eastwood's magnificent job, but it's Scorpio who comes down as a one dimensional, non-human psycho. A smarter, more cold blooded killer would have transfigured this movie, but Harry's just chasing a token bad guy on his lucky day.
That said, Clint Eastwood's interpretation of Harry Callahan is nothing short of sublime. The minimalistic approach and the classy suit works in defining a bad ass. Harry Callahan doesn't yell: "I'm a bad ass" , like the muscle pumping, shirt ripping and artificial action heroes we got since 1995. He's merely a misanthropic asshole with chip on his shoulder. That makes all the charm of the character, seeing him trying to operate as a professional at SAVING people, where he's clearly more competent at hurting them. There's this guilty-conscience struggle in Harry, of trying to do the right thing by the most vile and destructive way possible. Eastwood turns the "Go the the victim, I'll get the bad guy" routine into a fine art. The office scenes where he tries to justify his behavior to his bosses never fail to make me swoon with delight.
No, you don't need much to pull it off in Hollywood. With a single great actor, you can turn almost anything into a timeless work of art. Dirty Harry is a drama that depends on the acting of Clint Eastwood. It's as much of a movie as it is a character study in bad ass police officers. I can only applause the achievement of making a great movie with so little.
SCORE: 82%
