Dirty Harry (1971)
Directed by Don Siegel
When a madman dubbed 'Scorpio' terrorizes San Francisco, hard-nosed cop, Harry Callahan – famous for his take-no-prisoners approach to law enforcement – is tasked with hunting down the psychopath.
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7 films that influenced Dirty Harry
What critics say influenced Dirty Harry
Or maybe viewers have always relished the sight of the good guys blowing away bad guys, which existed in films since "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903.
In all, director Don Siegel's ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers") "Dirty Harry" comes off as a taut, well-paced cop thriller with two solid adversaries in conflict.
Siegel's ambiguity wins out, as it had done with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (anti-Red?
Don Siegal ("The Lineup"/"Invasion of the Body Snatchers") directs this ambiguous reactionary fantasy crime thriller--that can be viewed in many different ways and not necessarily as a tribute to the fascist police methods attributed to the hero cop.
Don Siegel's superb little effort, with its matter-of-fact isolation of hero Kevin McCarthy (ironic, no?) from the smarmy complacency of a small town gone to hell—and way beyond—points the way to his gripping action films of the 60s and 70s (Madigan, Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry).
Harry answers with the refrain of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) the prototypical western anti-hero in John Ford's The Searchers.
Don Siegal ("The Lineup"/"Invasion of the Body Snatchers") directs this ambiguous reactionary fantasy crime thriller--that can be viewed in many different ways and not necessarily as a tribute to the fascist police methods attributed to the hero cop.
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Like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), it is also a wonderful film about that city and its variety.
McQueen's "Bullitt" is no Eastwood "Dirty Harry," Willis "Die Hard," or Gibson "Lethal Weapon."
Occasional echoes of "Coogan's Bluff" (1968), the first Eastwood-Siegel feature, are evident while a fast pace is maintained by Carl Pingitore's editing.
In fact, there's very little aesthetically to clearly differentiate it from 1971's Dirty Harry , the ur-action film of the 1970s.