Well you just gotta ask yourself one question: Why am I watching “Dirty Harry?”
Truth be told, my roommate picked it by chance and I was instantly sucked in.
It follows the beat of a number of renegade cop movies, but it follows many of the beats, cliches and tropes that it created. Harry Callahan’s dialogue is just too badass to just be relegated to standard genre fare, and Clint Eastwood so embodies the role that you really do feel lucky watching him work. “Dirty Harry” certainly wouldn’t be as interesting without Clint, and you couldn’t have a franchise without him.
But suffice it to say, there are enough strong elements throughout “Dirty Harry” that help it stand up on its own. It gives a good indicator of how much differently, and arguably better, they made movies at the peak of the American New Wave in the early ’70s.
Director Don Siegel, who had directed B-movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” long before this, so easily composes his movie with all the little cute signifiers that made up the big ’70s blockbusters. The movie’s liberal use of full frontal female nudity is a bit striking for a movie that would be marketed to a mass audience of teenagers today. It’s not overwhelmingly gory but isn’t afraid to show it when it counts.
There’s also a distinct difference in the way the film is paced and photographed. My guess is the average shot length of “Dirty Harry” would be significantly longer than any renegade cop movie from the 21st century, and quite possibly longer than any of its sequels. Each chase, including a particularly long one that sees Harry running through tunnels and bus stations to answer pay phones and another that ends with a swooping helicopter shot over a football stadium, are purely cinematic in their pacing and suspense. No music, no dialogue and careful sound mixing all make the scenes as engaging as they are.
What’s more, the main villain Scorpio is the kind of classic psychopath that’s perfect for a simple film like this. We don’t get much backstory or complexity to the guy, but we get a good sense of his sadism and his creepy craft when we see him target a black boy in a flamboyant purple poncho. His hatred goes unsaid, but the camera reveals it to us elegantly.
In fact, Harry is more the complex figure than Scorpio is. We catch him doing a peeping tom act more than once, and we learn he’s just as racist and cruel as the man he’s chasing.
It’s a kind of complexity we don’t usually see in the many movies “Dirty Harry” inspired. I had seen the film before but didn’t remember it and didn’t expect to be as pleasantly surprised as I was. I guess you could say it just went ahead and made my day.