Dirty Harry
The controversy and cultural impact surrounding Don Siegel’s 1971 film is well documented. We all know about Pauline Kael’s quote and about the critical backlash against the film’s pro-gun, pro-vigilante point of view; however, what sometimes gets missed in all of that is the simple fact that Dirty Harry is a seminal and important film. One of the best films of the ‘70s, Dirty Harry is essentially an exploitation movie financed by a big time studio with its biggest star in the lead role. It looks like an exploitation movie, it sounds like an exploitation movie (the music is one of the most memorable things about the film), and it plays like an exploitation movie. What Siegel and Eastwood and screenwriters Harry Julian and R.M. Fink have done is not just create an iconic character that spouts memorable lines (although, Dirty Harry spawned many sequels and bad knockoffs) as he points his .44 Magnum at bad guys, they created a time capsule film that speaks to the chaos and the rapidly changing America of the ‘60s; however, what makes the film still relevant today is in the fact that the filmmakers ultimately made a film that is eerily prescient for today’s America.