Cinema Speculation

Dirty Harry

(1971)

Don Siegel started his career at Warner Bros. in the Montage Department working closely alongside great Warner directors such as Raoul Walsh, Anatole Litvak, and the man who was to become Don’s mentor, Michael Curtiz. Siegel shot and designed montages for Yankee Doodle Dandy, They Drive by Night, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and The Roaring Twenties, some of the most iconic and re-created montages ever made (Don told Peter Bogdanovich in his book, Who the Devil Made It, “The strangest things about the pictures I do: I bend over backwards not to do montages.” The exceptions are his excellent montages in Escape from Alcatraz). After graduating out of the Montage Department he started directing second unit for some of the biggest pictures on the Warner lot. Before director Byron Haskin made The War of the Worlds, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and The Naked Jungle he was Siegel’s boss in the Warner Bros. Special Effects Department.

In Stuart Kaminsky’s book, Don Siegel: Director, Haskin said, “We spent whole days doing things like having guys take punches, dropping masts on sailors, throwing people through roofs, cracking boats in half and sinking them.

“Most directors didn’t know and most still don’t know what to do with a fight or a piece of action.

“What this did for Don was orient him towards cinematic violence.”

From the very beginning of Siegel’s filmography he could shoot a fistfight, or a chase, or crosscut a shoot-out like damn few. There was no Hollywood director in the fifties better at shooting action than Don Siegel. What made his action sequences stand out was a combination of technique and tone. Coming from a montage background, in order to achieve the desired pace in the editing room, he filmed the action with a mind to be able to crosscut the shots. This wasn’t really the common practice of the day. A lot of action scenes were shot in big masters, where you’d watch two stuntmen (filling in for the stars) punch each other and break furniture for five minutes or until the stuntmen got tired.

Siegel told director Curtis Hanson (back when he went by the name Curtis Lee Hanson) in the 1968 issue of the film magazine Cinema, “I’m extremely conscious of editing when I’m shooting. Because I work with limited time, very short schedules, I plan everything as I think it’s going to be cut.” Then he added, “It doesn’t necessarily follow that because you’re a good editor, you’ll be a good director. But I do think that to be a good director you have to be a good editor.”

There was another aspect to Siegel’s action scenes that made them stand out from his contemporaries. Most other genre directors shot fistfights and shoot-outs, but when they did, it was action. When Siegel shot those same conventions, it was violence. The violent sequences in New Hollywood cinema like The French Connection, Busting, Dillinger, The Mechanic, Coffy, Straw Dogs, Point Blank, and Rolling Thunder were played out one and two decades earlier in Siegel pictures like The Duel at Silver Creek, Riot in Cell Block 11, Baby Face Nelson, Private Hell 36, The Lineup, Flaming Star, and The Killers.

Neville Brand, star of Riot in Cell Block 11 (and killer of many men in World War Two), said, “Don is like Peckinpah. They both dig violence and are two of the least violent guys I’ve ever met. It takes that type of guy to understand violence.”

When it came to directing violence you could call Don Siegel the Surgeon. But in his early days, shooting second unit on somebody else’s film or directing his own tightly budgeted short scheduled flicks, he would be better described as a combat surgeon.

But after he made Dirty Harry, he was the combat surgeon who goes on to become the dean of Harvard Medical School.

After years of crafting montages and shooting second unit action scenes for other directors, when Warner Bros. finally gave Siegel a chance to direct his own feature, it was with an extremely clever potboiler titled The Verdict (not to be confused with the Paul Newman/Sidney Lumet film with the same name). The film was a star vehicle for the audience-favorite odd couple Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. From any perspective the film is entertaining (it’s a really strong first film). But, coming from an auteurist perspective, it’s kind of amazing. Since the picture was obviously an assignment, it’s almost comical how it predates so many of the characteristics that Siegel would later become known for. Primarily, it’s a mystery plot that completely hinges on Siegel’s exciting narrative facility for audience misdirection. It’s a narrative device he employed often (The Duel at Silver Creek, Flaming Star, The Lineup), always to the betterment of the picture, reaching its apex with Charley Varrick. And audience misdirection is just as crucial to The Verdict as it would later be to Charley Varrick. But the even more amazing prototype to his later work would be the similarity of the picture’s lead protagonist, Sydney Greenstreet’s Superintendent Grodman of Scotland Yard, to both Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Francisco police force and Richard Widmark’s Detective Dan Madigan of the NYPD. At the film’s start, Greenstreet’s Grodman sends a man to the gallows for murder, only it’s discovered later that the man was actually innocent. The superintendent’s error wasn’t due to malice or faulty detective work, but because the man’s alibi couldn’t be corroborated until after the execution (like Madigan, it’s a mistake the lawman makes at the beginning of the picture that instigates the story to follow).

Grodman is forced to resign his position in disgrace and watch a despised underling assume the mantle of superintendent of Scotland Yard. Yet a new murder occurs of the impossible-to-accomplish-locked-room type that allows the former top cop to prove both his mental superiority to his inferior former colleagues and, in a poetic touch, bring the original, real murderer of the earlier crime to justice. However, like Eastwood’s Harry Callahan and Richard Widmark’s Dan Madigan, to accomplish this Greenstreet’s Grodman eschews all recognized legal procedure to follow his own self-declared brand of justice. The film’s similarity to the director’s most popular success is so uncanny it’s surprising that Siegel never mentions it in his autobiography (instead he berates The Verdict as “dull.” It does have a stagey, studio look, maybe why Siegel hated it).

But the rogue law enforcement officer, at odds with their superiors, who operates independently to get their man and enforce their own self-determined version of justice, is practically the quintessential Siegel protagonist. Not only Dirty Harry, Madigan, and The Verdict’s Grodman, but Eastwood’s Coogan in Coogan’s Bluff, Michael Parks’ Vinny McKay in Stranger on the Run, as well as David Niven’s comical Scotland Yard Inspector in Rough Cut (even in Siegel’s two espionage films, The Black Windmill and Telefon, his protagonists, secret agents working for MI6, the KGB, and the CIA, all end up going rogue inside their own agencies). Even his criminals go rogue. Mickey Rooney’s Baby Face Nelson stands in direct contrast to Leo Gordon’s Dillinger, and both Walter Matthau’s Charley Varrick and Burt Reynolds’ cat burglar in Rough Cut execute secret schemes under the noses of their partners (Andy Robinson and Lesley-Anne Down, respectively). Michael Parks’ sheriff in Stranger on the Run is at odds with his deputies, Steve McQueen’s soldier in Hell Is for Heroes is at odds with his company, and Elvis’ half-breed Indian Pacer in Flaming Star is at odds with the white community of his father, his mother’s tribe, and finally even the father and brother who love him. This iconoclasm seems to resemble Don Siegel’s relationship with his producers and the studio heads he worked for.

Bogdanovich asked him was he consciously attracted to that kind of antisocial character.

Siegel told him, “I think I AM that Character. Certainly I am at the studios!”

That’s what McQueen got wrong in the actor’s initial assessment of the director as a “company man” or “studio hack.” He might have done the assignments the bosses wanted—that was his job—but he didn’t do them the way the bosses wanted. Like his cop characters, Siegel did them his way. He usually did what he thought was right, oftentimes at odds with the producers and under the noses of his studio bosses. And if his (slightly self-aggrandizing) autobiography is to be believed, he was quick to sarcastically point out how stupid or impractical the ideas of the people he worked for were—like Harry Callahan.

If Siegel did have a stylistic edge over his action filmmaking elders (Hawks, Ford, Walsh, Curtiz, Gordon Douglas) or his contemporaries (Aldrich, Karlson, Witney, Jack Arnold, J. Lee Thompson), it came from his penchant for shocking explosions of brutal violence inside his films, often when the viewer least expects it. No other filmmaker in Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema accumulated more scenes of cinematic brutality throughout their filmography than Siegel.

Henry Hathaway rolls an old lady down the stairs. Fritz Lang throws hot coffee in a woman’s face. Critics have chronicled these individual instances of screen violence for decades. Yet Siegel’s filmography contains sequence after sequence—incident after incident—of this type of screen brutality. I could write out a laundry list of incidents, but that would only diminish their power. They need to be experienced in context.

Even after Sam Peckinpah rocked the world and the industry with his powder keg The Wild Bunch, Siegel didn’t abdicate his throne.

Peckinpah’s violence is more explicit (i.e., bloody) then Siegel’s ever was or would be (though the wet red blood hit in the back of the female pool swimmer at the beginning of Dirty Harry, once seen, is never forgotten).

Siegel’s violence was more about brutality then explicit bloodshed (I know I’m overusing the word brutal, but you try and describe Don Siegel’s stock-in-trade without overusing the word).

Dirty Harry was Siegel and Eastwood’s fourth collaboration and the film both men would be most known for. It was with Dirty Harry that Eastwood would establish himself outside of cowboy pictures and dethrone John Wayne as America’s number one action star (remarkably Wayne was still going pretty strong into 1970). Dirty Harry would make Siegel, along with Sam Peckinpah, Hollywood’s premier director of action cinema, and its most expert practitioner of cinematic violence. Along with The French Connection, Dirty Harry would facilitate the move from westerns to cop films that took place in that decade both on screen and television. And it would become the most imitated action film of the next two decades, as well as being the first real official entry into the popular subgenre of serial killer movies.

It was also Siegel’s most political film since his earlier masterpiece, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With Body Snatchers, the liberal-leaning Siegel was able to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand, it can be read as a subtextual attack on McCarthyism (its most popular reading). But on the other hand, the film also plays into the Red Nightmare paranoia of the fifties. The Pod People’s society seems like a socialist utopia that these hysterical humans (Americans) are blindly reacting against.* In many of Siegel’s stories working for producers and studio executives he didn’t respect, the director referred to them as Pod People. Even referring once to Elvis’ obedience to Col. Tom Parker as a “pod person.”

But in the seventies cop thriller, the subtextual attack is of a much different political bent. Dirty Harry tells the story of the quintessential Siegel protagonist taken to its logical extreme. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is the baddest-ass cop on the San Francisco police force. In a different era he’d be portrayed as a by-the-book type. Except in the era and location the movie takes place (San Francisco in the early seventies), in Callahan’s opinion, the book has been rewritten in favor of the scum.

Society is screaming police brutality.

The public is siding with the crooks.

And the gutless police brass, local government, and the courts are cowed into compliance with an increasingly permissive social order that favors lawbreakers over law enforcement.

Now this point of view would not be shared by some kid sitting in jail for three years for carrying a bag of weed. But it is Harry’s point of view. The genius of the film is it takes that transgressive character and pits him up against a fictionalized version of San Francisco’s real-life “Zodiac Killer” (this fictionalized version, “Scorpio,” is a calculated mastermind as well as being batshit crazy).

And in the process, the film creates the first cops-after-a-serial-killer thriller. Most cops in seventies action movies were busy busting dope rings or Mafia Mister Bigs. But from the eighties to today, cops after serial killers is the main occupation of the movie police. Cruising, 10 to Midnight, Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, Seven (and every other David Fincher film) are the children of Siegel’s Dirty Harry.

As in most seminal films, there are prototypes. In the case of Dirty Harry the most obvious example is 1969’s Pendulum, with George Peppard playing a violent rule-breaking cop hell-bent on bringing down overacting sicko Robert F. Lyons.

The soon-to-be Warner Bros. legacy title started life at Universal, where Jennings Lang offered Dirty Harry to Paul Newman (probably sometime soon after Harper). Newman turned it down. According to Lang, “[Newman said he] thought it was too tough a role, that he couldn’t play that type of character.” Universal sold the script by Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink to Warner Bros., where it was going to be made with Frank Sinatra playing Harry and directed by Irv Kirshner. Then Sinatra sprained his wrist, seriously limiting his ability to wield Callahan’s .44 Magnum. Warner offered it to Eastwood, who agreed on the condition that he could bring Don Siegel over from Universal to direct. Siegel came on and brought over not only his cinematographer (Bruce Surtees) and his editor (Carl Pingitore), but also more importantly his go-to screenwriter, Dean Riesner. It was Riesner’s rewrite that turned the script into the Dirty Harry movie we know and love. Because it was Riesner’s rewrite that turned the killer from a lone sniper to a surrogate for the Zodiac Killer (later John Milius would do one of the more famous dialogue polishes in Hollywood history when he added the “I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five?” speech).

Before the script took that interesting turn, in fact while Siegel was reading it after he’d been offered the job, he had a truly intriguing casting idea. He was on an airplane, and it just so happened so was Audie Murphy. Siegel had earlier directed two pictures starring Murphy (The Duel at Silver Creek and The Gun Runners), and the two men were happy to see each other again. And as they talked and got reacquainted, it suddenly came to the director, “My god, I’m looking for a killer and here’s the killer of all time, a war hero who killed over 250 people. He was a killer though he didn’t look like it. I thought it might be interesting. He had never really played a killer.” The executives at Universal weren’t convinced Murphy could handle the acting demands (though Siegel, apparently, was). But Murphy perished in a plane crash before the idea could be fully explored. And then Siegel and Riesner started to rethink the role. Frankly, the idea of Dirty Harry without Andy Robinson is even more unthinkable than Dirty Harry without Eastwood. Nevertheless, the Audie Murphy idea is still incredibly intriguing.

The skill Siegel demonstrates in Dirty Harry is remarkable. In a filmography studded with diamonds (Riot in Cell Block 11, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Baby Face Nelson, Flaming Star, Hound-Dog Man, Coogan’s Bluff, Escape from Alcatraz) Dirty Harry is unquestionably the best of his career. It belongs on a list of other audience-enthralling films of the seventies like Jaws, Carrie, Annie Hall, and The Exorcist that in retrospect seem like perfect films. Siegel’s technique, along with all of his strengths, blend together in complete harmony. The director’s handling of the film’s hero and villain. His career-constant affinity for location photography. The director’s ability to shock audiences with brutality (the naked corpse of the fourteen-year-old victim removed from its hole, Scorpio paying to get his face bashed in, that first bloody bullet hit of the woman in the swimming pool, Scorpio smacking the terrified child on the bus), and also thrill with crowd-pleasing action set pieces (hot dog eating Harry firing his Magnum at the bank robbers, the phone-booth-to-phone-booth ransom drop, the school bus climax). The Siegel humor that punctuates, what is in essence a grisly thriller. It’s the humor and Eastwood’s flair when it came to delivering Harry’s quips that went a long way in both getting the audience on Harry’s side, and as even Pauline Kael had to admit, “turning the audience on” (the other great serial killer films put the audience through a wringer. But in 1971 packed auditoriums loved Dirty Harry because it was fun). It also included Siegel’s biggest flaw, his penchant for labored symbolism such as the broken peace sign belt buckle that Scorpio sports around his trousers.

But what made Dirty Harry a political film wasn’t just its cinematic flirtation with what Roger Ebert described as “a fascist moral position.” It was the way Siegel so skillfully tailored the film for its intended audience: frustrated older Americans who by 1971—when they looked out their car door windows, and read their daily newspapers, and watched the evening news—didn’t recognize their country anymore.

One of the most memorable tag lines for a modern movie at that time was the one that sold Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. “A man went looking for America, and he couldn’t find it anywhere.”

A great line, but it wasn’t true. If you responded to Hopper’s Billy the Kid or Fonda’s Captain America rather than the ugly rednecks in the cafe, you didn’t have to seek out representation. It was all over music, movies, TV, and magazines.

On the other hand, the generation that fought World War Two in the forties and bought homes in the suburbs in the fifties were the ones who went looking for their America and “couldn’t find it anywhere.”

What Richard Nixon called the “silent majority” were frightened. Frightened of an America they didn’t recognize and a society they couldn’t understand.

Youth culture had taken over pop culture.

If you were under thirty-five, that was a good thing.

But if you were older, maybe not.

Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive.

To many Americans it was a mosaic that scared the shit out of them.

This was the audience that Dirty Harry was made for.

To frustrated Americans, Harry Callahan represented a solution to the shocking violence that they were suddenly forced to adjust to. Eastwood’s rogue cop in Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson’s vigilante Paul Kersey in Death Wish stood in a showdown stance on one side of the cultural divide. While Tom Laughlin’s hippie-loving barefoot face-womping Billy Jack and Richard Roundtree’s super-bad, super-chic black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks John Shaft stood on the other.

There’s been a lot of speculation over the years whether or not Harry Callahan is a racist character or Dirty Harry is a racist film, or both. In Charles Higham’s book Celebrity Circus, the author interviewed both Eastwood and Siegel on the set of Dirty Harry. Siegel described Eastwood’s character as “a racist son of a bitch . . . who blames everything on the blacks and the Hispanics.” Well, the character Siegel’s describing is not the character in the movie he made. In the film, Harry may be politically incorrect, but he’s not “a racist son of a bitch.”

The film would be better—or at least more serious—if he was. But then it would be Taxi Driver. Which, even more than the Cobra clones to follow, is the real bastard stepchild of Dirty Harry and Death Wish. But it’s doubtful if Dirty Harry could ever work as potently as it does if it dared challenge its genre to that degree. The artistry of Siegel’s picture is in its creative, provocative effectiveness. Harry’s a great character, Scorpio’s a great character, the story really works (it’s a movie you really can watch a dozen times), but it’s the sleek execution of a genre master that makes it sing. If Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is one of the greatest movies ever made, because one of the most talented filmmakers who ever lived, when he was young, got his hands on the right material, knew what he had, and killed himself to deliver the best version of that movie he could, then Dirty Harry is its opposite number, from a salty dog genre master, with twenty-seven films under his belt at that point—in his fourth collaboration with his greatest star partner—delivering the goods so beautifully it becomes a powerhouse work of art.

If Dirty Harry were a boxer it would be Mike Tyson in his knockout prime.

I challenge you to program a double feature of practically any of the great films from the seventies and put them against a double feature with Siegel’s picture.

Dirty Harry will wipe them off the screen and knock them the fuck out!

Boom!

But as opposed to all the Dirty Harry wannabes (and that includes all the Dirty Harry sequels) there remains a disturbing quality to Siegel’s creation. Both the film and the character of Callahan.

While Dirty Harry isn’t a racist film, or quite the fascist film its critics at the time claimed, it is reactionary.

Aggressively reactionary.

And it promotes a reactionary view, sometimes as subtext and sometimes as text. Because the audience the film sought to excite held a view of the rapidly changing society around them that was bordering on future shock.

Dirty Harry gave voice to their fears, told them they were right to feel that way, and gave them a .44 caliber hero who would fight for them. This element would disappear from the Harry sequels. Because while this element was why it connected so well with its audience, it’s also what put the film in the crosshairs of social commentators.

It’s this reactionary element the very violent Ted Post–directed sequel Magnum Force not only avoided, but tried to reverse.

The entire premise of the movie, Harry uncovering a black leather-jacketed death squad of killer motorcycle cops executing criminals that the courts can’t, seems to be a rather rare Hollywood occurrence. The counterpoint argument sequel.

I know what we should do. Let’s downplay everything about the first movie that really struck a nerve, and make both the film, and Harry himself, preach against that type of thinking.

Death Wish ended up being the movie audiences wanted Magnum Force to be (a much better movie with the same premise as Magnum Force was an ABC Movie of the Week, The Death Squad, with Robert Forster, Melvyn Douglas, and Claude Akins).

The cornucopia of Callahan clones that came out after Siegel’s success would ape the hard-ass do-things-his-own-way rule-book-be-damned no-mercy-for-the-wicked posture of Eastwood’s creation. But these other films bent over backwards not to touch that type of real-world nerve. The object of ire of these other hard-asses was usually generic movie bad guys, syndicate Mr. Biggs (Allen Garfield in Busting, Jack Kruschen in Freebie and the Bean, Vittorio Gassman in Sharky’s Machine), or else so outlandishly unreal that the only level they can exist on is that of a comic book. The motorcycle-riding cult army in Cobra looks and acts more like a post-apocalyptic gang of marauders in an Italian Mad Max rip-off. The one significant exception to this rule is Charles Bronson’s contribution, J. Lee Thompson’s 10 to Midnight, which like Dirty Harry has a real-life inspired serial killer at its center. Gene Davis’ killer is a surrogate for nursing student murderer Richard Speck, and the intensely violent and sickening restaging of those murders is pretty strong stuff.

But normally the formula is as by-rote as a Jaws or Alien rip-off. The characterization of the Dirty Harry dude is the same, his quips sound similar, his harassed screaming boss looks, sounds, and dresses the same, and the hammy bad actors who play the villainous creeps in actual Dirty Harry movies like The Enforcer and Sudden Impact aren’t any different from the crap actors in straight to video junk usually starring ex-football players like John Matuszak or Brian Bosworth.

Where the others aimed for generalities, Siegel’s film was specific about its reactionary vision.

Nowhere is this point illustrated more clearly than in what has become one of the film’s most remembered set pieces. The famous scene where Callahan foils a bank robbery in progress with his big-ass .44 Magnum, while continuing to chew a hot dog.

What makes that scene political is the casting of three black men to play the bank robbers. If the robbers had been played by three white actors the scene wouldn’t have had a political context. Harry would just be a cop who came across a bank robbery and stopped it. Just like Superman has done in about a thousand issues of his comic book. If the robbers had been white they would have been viewed (more or less) as professional criminals (Willie Sutton, Richard Stark’s Parker, Jim Thompson’s Doc McCoy). Since we’ve had professional criminals robbing banks since we’ve had banks, nothing in the scene would have been indicative of societal change. But let’s try on some other racial or ethnic groups for size. Could the bank robbers be Asian? Well, yes, of course they could be. But unless the bank was in San Francisco’s Chinatown, it would seem odd. The viewer would notice it and think to themselves, Why are they Asian? In fact they’d expect it to become a plot point later (“It’s the Teddy Wong Gang, Harry. A Chinese street gang started robbing banks in Chinatown, now they broke out and are robbing banks all over the city.”). Same thing if they were Hispanic. Yeah, you could explain to the audience how the Latin Kings have started robbing banks all over San Francisco, but it would require some sort of explanation. The reason it would play odd is because the nightly news isn’t full of stories of Latin or Asian bank robbery crews looting banks across America. But then neither is bank robbery a crime associated with black Americans.

That is except for—at that particular time—one subsection of Black America: militant black revolutionaries who robbed banks to buy weapons. And just one look at the robbers in Dirty Harry and you can tell they got their wardrobe in the Black Panther section of the Warner Bros. costume department. For many older white Americans, angry black militants scared them more than the Manson “Family,” the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler combined. The hippies disgusted them. Because the hippies were their children, and they were disgusted with their children. Hippies burning the American flag in protest of the Vietnam War made them livid with anger. But black militants scared the fuck out of them. The anger, the rhetoric, the agenda, the uniform, the posing for pictures with automatic weapons, their hatred of the police, the dismissal of white America (white folks can never comprehend a situation where they can’t be forgiven for past transgressions).

Yet, there was Harry Callahan.

He wasn’t scared.

Not only was he not scared, as he approached a shotgun wielding stand-in for a Black Panther, he couldn’t even be bothered to stop chewing his hot dog. He shoots down three black men during the robbery without an iota of fear (he doesn’t even seek cover), and even faces one down with an empty weapon, complete with smart-mouthed cracker cop talk meant to antagonize (“Do you feel lucky? Well . . . do you, punk?” With the word “punk,” [at least] replacing the word “boy”).

These qualities give Siegel’s film a dubious morality and a faintly disturbing undercurrent, as opposed to “superhero Harry,” which is what he would become in the shoddy sequels.

Siegel’s Harry Callahan is both a troubled and troubling character.

Well, that makes him a classic Siegelini-hero (the director’s self-mocking name for his auteur persona). The director has always confronted the audience with lead characters you’re drawn to despite on-screen evidence of their troubling nature, and deeds. Lead protagonists he makes it difficult to root for, but, ultimately, you root for them nonetheless. Which goes to prove what I’ve always believed, “It takes a magnificent filmmaker to thoroughly corrupt an audience.” Greenstreet’s Grodman in The Verdict, McQueen’s Reese in Hell Is for Heroes, Elvis’ Pacer in Flaming Star, Widmark’s Madigan, Matthau’s Charley Varrick, the two crooked cops (Steve Cochran and Howard Duff) in Private Hell 36, the convicts in Riot in Cell Block 11 (what, are you rooting for the warden?), John Cassavetes’ violent street punk in Crime in the Streets. Eli Wallach and Robert Keith’s two killers in The Lineup are by far more involving than the colorless cops from the TV series, same with Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager’s sunglasses-wearing hit men in The Killers, who are far more compelling than John Cassavetes’ milquetoast race car–driving Johnny North. In Stranger on the Run you may feel sorry for Henry Fonda’s innocent patsy, but it’s the story of Michael Parks’ compromised lawman Vinny McKay that grips you. Whichever side you take in The Beguiled, Eastwood’s manipulative, conniving wounded soldier or the murdering, conspiring, vindictive ladies, you’re tainted. Even when Siegel bends over backwards to present a character as loathsome, like he does with the brutish, vulgar gambler Rip Torn in the director’s final film, Jinxed!, how can you not be on his side during his all-or-nothing takedown of the blackjack table (were we actually supposed to be on the side of the casino?).

And sure enough, once Rip Torn exits the picture, he takes any viewer’s interest with him.

The New York Times, Pauline Kael, and Roger Ebert all labeled Dirty Harry as fascist. And implied (to the point of self-parody) that the film is somewhat politically dangerous, if not outright irresponsible in what they claim is its perpetration of a social fraud (while Ebert claimed the film had a “fascist moral position” he attributed it to the times and not moral bankruptcy on the filmmakers’ part). While Eastwood would be irked about this for years, none of this came as a surprise to Siegel. In Peter Bogdanovich’s book Who the Devil Made It, he recalls seeing an industry screening of Dirty Harry and Siegel worrying that all his liberal friends would disown him. But Don, as an old genre filmmaker, was apolitical. His job was to thrill audiences by any means necessary. And if he could do that by bringing into question America’s criminal justice system or a suspect’s Miranda rights, fair enough. If pressed for a defense, I’m sure old Don would just crinkle his eyes, smile, and point at the grosses.

But in Siegel’s Dirty Harry, almost comically, the skill of the filmmaking was so evident that it was impossible for even the movie’s harshest critics to deny. Kael even went so far as to write, “It would be stupid to deny that Dirty Harry is a stunningly well-made genre piece, and it certainly turns an audience on.” Then in a later piece wrote, “There’s an aesthetic pleasure one gets from highly developed technique; certain action sequences make you feel exhilarated just because they’re so cleverly done—even if, as in the case of Siegel’s Dirty Harry, you’re disgusted by the picture.”

Even Siegel’s friend Sam Peckinpah expressed the same opinion as Pauline: “I loved Dirty Harry, even though I was appalled by it. A terrible piece of trash that Don Siegel really made something out of. Hated what it was saying, but the day I saw it the audience was cheering.”

The point of the film’s detractors was crystal clear. It was Dirty Harry’s embrace of a fascist ideology, not its quality, that was in question. But this so-called fascist element to the film was overstated by the critics of the daily newspapers and weekly magazines. Fifty years later, Siegel’s film stands as a towering achievement of genre filmmaking. The audiences that have thrilled to the movie these last five decades haven’t been reactionary. Nor have they had to embrace a “fascist moral position” in order to enjoy it.

Because frankly, it’s the critics’ response to it in its day that strikes one as reactionary.

Does anything in the movie that Harry does depict outright fascism? No.

When he fires on the black bank robbers in the hot dog scene, they were running from a bank, alarm blaring, and jumping into a speeding car with both money and pump action shotguns in their hands.

Even all of his efforts towards Scorpio don’t strike anybody as excessive today. He keeps him under surveillance when he’s not supposed to? They know he’s Scorpio! It’s not a question. He’s the fucking guy! Kael’s strongest jab at the movie is her calling horseshit on the ridiculous Josef Sommer scene, where they know Scorpio’s killed all these people and they refuse to let Callahan keep him under surveillance. This scene is guilty of presenting the liberal argument as dumbfoundingly absurd. But it’s the scene itself that plays as dumbfoundingly absurd. The only sequence that truly qualifies as fascist is when Callahan tortures Scorpio to find the whereabouts of the kidnapped fourteen-year-old girl.

Really, would Billy Jack do any less?

One of the big reasons Dirty Harry fails to outrage anymore is Siegel’s film had another agenda that the critics chose to ignore but the public got right away. As much as Dirty Harry is a white western fantasy played out against a modern-day San Francisco backdrop, it is also a plea for New Laws for New Crimes.

The serial killer phenom to be exact.

And one of the reasons Dirty Harry ages well is when it comes to catching and stopping Scorpio, what the film preaches is pretty much what society ended up doing in regard to that type of crime. At the same time, our familiarity with the genre—a genre that this film officially started—dates it in terms of the techniques of the investigation. It would appear that Callahan and his (rookie) partner Gonzales are the only two investigators on the case of a madman who’s terrorizing the entire city.

When you watch it today you can’t help but ask yourself, Where’s the task force? Where’s the FBI? Where’s Will Graham? Where’s the BAU? Without these societal advantages we now employ against this type of crime, nothing Harry does seems unjustified. Since 1971 we’ve become so adjusted to a world that includes serial killers in it, we can have a television series like Criminal Minds that presented for three hundred twenty-three episodes a new deranged serial killer every week for fifteen years.

But back in 1971 both Andy Robinson’s bravura performance and his character’s methods were from a new-to-movies villain. There had never been a movie fiend quite like Scorpio before, or a performance quite like Robinson’s. It’s why, after Dirty Harry, Eastwood’s career was assured, but Robinson’s was nipped in the bud (until fifteen years later, when an older Robinson shows up in Hellraiser). I’m here to testify, as unfair and unjust as it may have been, whenever Andy showed up in a movie, all I saw was Scorpio. Andy Robinson scared viewers in a way no movie monster ever had or ever would again (we would never again be as innocent as we were when we first witnessed Scorpio sow his sick oats). And forty years of movie serial killers haven’t diminished Robinson’s performance one iota (it’s the single best performance ever in a Don Siegel picture).

I remember sitting in the cinema at age nine, feeling the exact same thing the adults around me were feeling. Terrifying disbelief that Scorpio could be so sick and depraved. In Pauline Kael’s review in the New Yorker she never refers to the character or the actor by name. Nor does she write one word regarding his performance. Instead she refers to the film’s antagonist by a plethora of sarcastic bogeyman names (“hippie maniac,” “the many-sided evil one,” “super-evil dragon”).

Her point was, in order for the audience to be on Harry’s side, the filmmakers needed to contrive a bogeyman of such evil dimensions that anything Harry does seems justified.

Well, despite the Boston Strangler, Richard Speck, the Manson “Family,” and of course Zodiac, we may once have looked at Scorpio’s sickness with disbelief.

But we don’t anymore.

We know exactly how sick and evil people can be.

Many real-life individuals have demonstrated Scorpio’s depravity as anything but a fantasy. Yes, Ms. Kael was right about the filmmakers’ motives. They did create a “super-evil dragon” for Harry’s .44 caliber Siegfried to slay. What she was wrong about was writing off Robinson’s character as just a monster in a monster movie.

In Dirty Harry Siegel, Riesner, and especially Robinson gave us a forward-looking glance at what would replace the monsters of old in the collective nightmare of a society to come. During its initial engagement, every audience member of Dirty Harry entered the cinema with an innocent view. An innocence we would soon lose.