It has to be one of the most iconic scenes in all of American cinema. There are those of us, all, no doubt, of a certain age, who can pretty much recite Harry’s monologue from memory. I know what you’re thinkin’. You’re thinkin’ did he fire six, or only five? Tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself, but being as this is a .44 Magnum, and would blow your head clean off, what you have to ask yourself is “Do I feel lucky?” Well…do ya, punk?
The punk did not. But he “gots to know”. So Harry obliges by pointing the long barrel of what was then the world’s most devastating sidearm right between the guy’s eyes, and squeezes the trigger. Click. Harry just smiles. Well whaddaya know. Did he know for sure, despite what he said to the perp, that the revolver was empty? We really can’t say. Probably. But maybe not. Maybe he was only, you know, pretty sure, in which case what are we supposed to think about Inspector Harry Callaghan? What if he’d blown the guy’s brains out? Do we like this plainly effective and manifestly unflappable cop, or does he scare us?
The way Harry keeps chewing on his mouthful of hotdog while he saunters across the street, all calm and apparently almost bored as he proceeds to shove a stick into the spokes of a bank robbery in progress, was one of those little touches that contributed mightily to the creation of a tough-guy movie archetype we’ve seen over and over ever since.
These days we tend to think of the Dirty Harry films as right wing macho self-parodies, an attitude born of both Clint Eastwood’s latter day political opinions and the declining quality of the stream of subsequent sequels, which really did devolve into something akin to unwitting satire. The original, though, was wholly different. Filmed in a style that mixed cinéma vérité with film noir, and based loosely on the contemporary serial murders of the infamous Zodiac Kiiller, the first Dirty Harry was the real deal, full of grit, moral ambiguity, and sickening violence, while posing genuinely difficult questions about the ability of civil society to both follow its own rules and deal effectively with a ruthless human predator who grants no quarter, and exploits our own scruples to defeat us. The scene in which Harry literally tortures the psychopath, trying to extract the location of a kidnap victim that the bastard has buried alive in a box with the air running out (also based on a real event) isn’t just sickening, it’s supposed to be. We in the audience aren’t meant to have moral clarity about what Harry’s doing. It’s wrong and ugly, sure, and the scene is scripted and shot to impress upon us just how wrong and ugly it truly is, but it’s also the only way to save the buried victim. How far should anybody go in that case? What rights must still be respected, and whose rights matter more – doesn’t the victim’s right to live weigh most heavily in the balance?
It’s not supposed to be an easy question, and our feelings are further muddled after the coerced confession gives them what they need to find and excavate the victim, only to discover that the poor girl is already dead, and probably was well before Harry put the screws to the killer who refers to himself as “Scorpio”. The torture thus achieved nothing, which makes it seem, viscerally if not logically, all the more sordid; but then, just to make sure we liberals keep bouncing from pillar to post, Scorpio’s confession is of course excluded (damn straight, it’s fruit of the poison tree), the police have to kick him loose (not great, but that’s what happens when the cops go rogue), and the killer gets right back down to business, finally kidnapping a whole school bus full of kids, intending, it’s safe to assume, to murder the lot (ummmm, on second thought, maybe it might be OK sometimes to do things Harry’s way?).
The brief twilight shot of them pulling the young woman’s nude, lifeless body out of the hole where Scorpio buried her isn’t something you soon forget.
Harry puts an end to Scorpio, of course, but in the final scene, having freed the traumatized school children, he pulls out his detective’s badge, the hard-won symbol of a career’s worth of hard work and tough times out there cleaning up the mean streets of 1970s San Francisco, and throws it into a muddy pond. It’s perhaps less a defiant gesture of disgust with the system than a statement that he just doesn’t have the strength to do this shit any longer. It might be righteous to toss out the rule book and play things down and dirty when innocent lives are at stake, Harry certainly thinks so, but there’s a cost. You pay it every time with bits of your soul.
From where I sit, it’s obviously for the best, looking at the big picture, if there are red lines which those in authority can never cross, not ever, no discretion, but it’s a position that needs to thoroughly articulated and defended, especially in the sort of hard cases portrayed in the film. Dirty Harry, despite its reputation, isn’t really telling us what to think. It merely insists that there aren’t any pat answers, and forces us to confront a discomfiting question: what would you do if it came down to choosing between the civil rights of a murderous psychopath and the survival of a terrified girl buried somewhere in a box?
the needlefish 