100 MOVIES IN A YEAR: #19 Dirty Harry

Politically, Dirty Harry is an absolute god damned nightmare of a movie. An intensely fascist portrayal of the police as SAVIORS and criminals as VIOLENT SCUM, where the idea of a man with an enormous gun being sanctioned to blow away anyone he deems a criminal is championed as a moral necessity, otherwise us weak and ineffectual citizens would be overrun by the criminal class. Instead of portraying the more honest and uncomfortable reality, that all citizens are also capable of being criminals, we are separated from those that break the law, so that we can easily look down on them and take pleasure in their callous murder.
Dirty Harry also rules, and is an insanely entertaining film that doesn’t shy away form how unseemly it is; it’s no secret that my stance on entertainment is that if you’re going to go low, go low. Dirty Harry has child murder, executions in broad daylight, and a villain who is kind of based on the Zodiac killer, a serial murderer who was still active when the movie came out. It’s all in incredibly bad taste, and it stars Hollywood’s most respectable and talented right wing ding dong, Clint Eastwood, in what is his singularly defining role. I’ve read that Paul Newman gave him the script, because it made Newman incredibly uncomfortable on a moral level. Paul Newman would’ve been terrible in this role; he would’ve brought empathy, and sadness, and a basic level of humanity that would temper the brazenly monstrous qualities that the character demands. Eastwood doesn’t do that; he is either mad, or happy because his rage has helped him kill someone he deemed worthy of death. What a great movie.
