Clint Eastwood (51 page)

Thereafter, still seeking a payoff from the city, Scorpio proceeds to the school-bus hijacking, offering to exchange the lives of its passengers for money and safe conduct out of the country. Harry, again against orders, drops off an overpass onto the roof of the careening vehicle, which
comes to a crashing halt at a gravel pit. There, at last, he corners and kills Scorpio, and throws away his badge in what turned out to be—considering the four sequels that were to come—not quite the definitive gesture of disgust it seemed to be at the time.

This outline reveals the essence of the film’s appeal to its basic, action-oriented audience, with even Kael forced to concede that it was “
a stunningly well-made genre piece.” As such it could not be said to encourage—putting this point as ironically as possible—a nuanced contemplation of the legal issue it raises.

One must also say that nothing in the movie can fairly be construed as “fascist”—the word Kael so sensationally used to characterize it. On the contrary, it is clear that the filmmakers, knowing they were taking a strong position on a controversial issue, were at pains to limit their argument, to make certain nothing in the film could be read as an endorsement of racism or any other kind of reactionary thuggery. It is not too much to say that
Dirty Harry
is a movie about extenuating circumstances, an exploration of all the factors—political, sociological, psychological—that bring Callahan to the particular, and very possibly defensible, dirtiness that so exercised Kael and those who have followed her.

Begin at the beginning, with the brilliantly efficient sequence that establishes Harry’s character—the only one, incidentally, that was shot on the back lot. Callahan is discovered at a lunch counter, ordering a hot dog. His dialogue with the counterman makes it clear that he is a regular customer for both lunch and dinner, which also suggests that Harry does not have much of a life outside his job. That he is excellent at that job becomes obvious in a matter of seconds. Something going on at a bank across the street alerts him. He orders the counterman to call a police number and report a suspected robbery in progress, then ambles out into the street, still chewing on his hot dog (an homage, perhaps to the great Cagney scene in
White Heat
in which he continues to gnaw a chicken leg while blasting away a prisoner he has sequestered in the trunk of a car).

Now a getaway car careens up the street, and Harry draws and fires, nailing its driver. Harry also exchanges shots with another criminal, each of them suffering minor wounds. But his opponent, a black man, is knocked to the sidewalk in front of the bank. Harry strolls over to him, his enormous gun—the soon-to-be-immortal .44 Magnum—casually in hand. The criminal’s gun is on the sidewalk within lurching reach, if
he has the nerve to go for it. There is a silent exchange of glances that also contains an exchange of complete, almost brotherly, understanding between two violent men. Then, in an up-angle, comes the most famous, and probably the most important, speech Clint Eastwood ever uttered on film: “Ah, ah, I know what you’re thinkin’—did he fire six shots or only five?” he says, speaking in his softest, most reasonable tone. “Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” He pauses, offering a sweet, almost boyish, smile: “Well do you, punk?”

The criminal, who is not a young man, and has a rather resigned air about him, looks again at his gun, at Harry, then subsides. Harry grins, grabs the other man’s weapon and turns away as sirens announce the arrival of more cops. But the criminal, his bond with Harry established, speaks again: “I gots to know.” Harry allows himself another understanding half smile, levels his gun at the perp—there is a close-up of a sweating face, alarmed eyes—and we hear a trigger click on an empty chamber.

This was for Clint, and for the picture,
the
transformative moment. His career undoubtedly would have continued successfully enough without it, and the movie would have done well enough without it. But this vivid passage, so rich in telling detail, cleanly, clearly summarized what Clint had been trying to say with his screen character in his previous films. And it summarized this specific character before we were entirely certain of his name. Suddenly, we knew them both—“Clint Eastwood” and “Dirty Harry Callahan”—and liked them both, liked them because however preternatural the cunning and bravery they projected, they seemed to operate out of pissed-off premises we shared, but with a coolness and humor under pressure we could only wish for. In these few moments a star established his superstardom.

Think a little bit more about this sequence. Start with Harry’s costume, notably his battered sports jacket with the leather patches on its sleeves. This is not a jacket that has seen better days; it has never
had
any better days. It is just something he picked up off some inexpensive peg. Consider, too, his amble into deadly action. It’s not reluctant, but it’s not eager, either. He’s a man reporting for overtime, which he could do without, but has long since learned is inescapable. Think, too, about his nonstandard weapon. It’s like a tool a workman has bought for himself, having learned the equipment supplied by the company (and chosen by bean counters) is not always adequate to the exigencies of fieldwork. He
may even know it’s kind of silly looking—this hard-on of a gun—but he doesn’t give any more of a damn about that than he does about the rest of his attire.

It is also important to take into account Harry’s attitude toward his antagonist (Albert Popwell). Yes, he’s a black man and a criminal. But Harry accepts that quite neutrally. If blacks compose a significant element of the modern urban underclass, it stands to reason that they must compose a significant element of the criminal class, too. That’s just the way things are. He treats the man as a fellow professional—well, all right, a fellow craftsman, since neither cop nor crook (nor, come to think of it, actor) is an occupation calling for board certification. They are jobs you pretty much learn by doing. Finally, consider Harry’s feigned confusion about the number of shots he has fired, and his deadpan response to the bank robber’s question on that point. It’s a guy joke, a reference to hundreds of movies everyone has shared, in which the question of how many bullets may or may not remain in a gun has been cornily crucial to the drama. It is also a kind of test—if you pass it with coolly flying colors, you’re a member of the great masculine club, color and job classification transcended.

Think now about Raymond Chandler’s famous “Down these mean streets” description of his private eye. Almost every phrase in it applies to Harry Callahan as well as it did to Philip Marlowe: He is “
neither tarnished nor afraid.… He is a relatively poor man or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man.…”

Something Norman Mailer once said of Clint’s idol, James Cagney, also applies. He observed that tough as he was, “
you always had the feeling this was a very decent guy,” which, he added, was not only a sweet and sentimental thought, but a necessity for audience appeal: “There is nothing more depressing than finding a guy as tough as nails and as mean as dirt.”

In other words, this lowlife transaction encourages us to connect Dirty Harry with his hard, sardonic forebears in modern crime fiction—the Hammett-Chandler-Burnett-Thompson school. At the same time we can now see a connection with what was to come—the cheekiness of the Elmore Leonard–Carl Hiassen manner, perhaps even a hint of that cheap-seats postmodernism, with its emphasis on the fatal potential of mischance, that the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino would one day exploit (much to Clint Eastwood’s pleasure, it might be added).

One is free, of course, to take or leave cultural allusions of this kind. But about one thing we can be very clear: This passage entirely absolves Harry of the suspicion of racism—no matter what his opinion of
Miranda
and
Escobedo
. Moreover, and more important in the scheme of the film, it separates Harry’s normal mode of operation—his nonchalant manner of handling what he regards as routine police work—from the obsessive passion he will bring to the Scorpio case.

The movie continues to stress these points. Siegel, in his autobiography, says he was not certain audiences would read the first scene correctly, so he and Riesner devised two short sequences that make Harry’s racial attitudes utterly unambiguous. In one of them, Harry is in a hospital emergency room having the bank robber’s shotgun pellets removed from his leg. The doctor attending him is a black man, and their affectionately barbed dialogue reveals that they grew up in the same neighborhood and are old pals. In another scene his new Hispanic partner, Chico Gonzales (Reni Santoni), asks another detective why Harry is called Dirty Harry. “One thing about Harry, he plays no favorites. Harry hates everybody—Limies, Micks, Hebes, fat Dagos, Niggers, Hunkies, Chinks.” “What about Mexicans?” the young cop asks. “Especially Spics,” says Harry, who’s been listening to this exchange. He then gives a big wink to the other detective. His only expressed prejudice is against “college boys” (which Gonzales also is). But competence is the antidote for that, and Chico soon wins his regard.

Harry, in his way, is like the marines—he needs a few good men, one of whom, in Santoni’s reserved, appraising performance, Gonzales quickly proves to be. He can’t afford to pass one up for stupid reasons. His motives are not entirely professional. Having no life outside his work—his wife, we later learn, is dead, the victim of a hit-and-run driver; his apartment is glumly functional, a place to sleep, change clothes, knock back a brew—he needs some rough, authentic human contact. So the pair gets into trouble together and helps each other get out of it. They banter a little, exchange guarded confidences, stay well short of intimate revelation. It may be pretty standard action-movie stuff, the old pro and the rookie developing mutual respect through mutual reliance, but it helps to humanize Harry in our eyes.

Their first joint venture is, visually, the film’s most stunning passage—the rooftop stakeout that turns into a shoot-out with Scorpio, their exchange of rifle shots shattering and short-circuiting electric signs, creating an explosive, spectacular and dangerous light show, in the noisy, blinding confusion of which their quarry escapes. This was, for the movie’s actors and technicians, its most dangerous scene. Siegel and Bruce Surtees pondered it carefully, slowing their usual pace to a point
where Clint emerged from his trailer in full grumble. Trying to hurry things along, he yelled at a special-effects man. Surtees, normally also a low-key operative, got snappish at this intervention—it was, he said, the most complicated sequence he’d ever tried to photograph and he didn’t need any additional pressure. As politely as possible, Siegel ordered his star back to his trailer and returned to work. He was startled, a moment or two later, to receive a kiss on the back of his head. It was from a chastened Clint, and it was meant as both apology and endorsement of everyone’s efforts.

The movie is very shrewd in its alternation of these big-action passages with smaller, comically tinged contentions. For example, we find Harry and Chico a couple of nights later cruising the North Beach strip joints trying to spot their man amid the sexual lowlifes. Sure enough, they see a shadowy figure who looks to them like Scorpio. Harry pursues this figure up an alley while Gonzales circles around to head him off. The suspect enters a building, and as Harry peers through a window, he is mistaken for a Peeping Tom and surrounded by angry, threatening citizens, from whom Chico glibly extricates him.

Whereupon they are plunged into a more perilous situation, the suicide scene, where with cops, firemen and gawking bystanders milling impotently about, Harry is hoisted by a crane to try to talk a jumper out of hurling himself from a sixth-floor balcony. The sequence has nothing to do with the film’s main line, everything to do with establishing the thankless peril of the policeman’s lot. And like the rooftop firefight, it is a riveting bit of filmmaking.

Clint directed it. Siegel was down with the flu and couldn’t work, but he might have ceded the piece to his star anyway. There was no room for him to work with the actors on that narrow balcony and, as important, Clint was in the grip of an inspiration. “I’ve seen a suicide sequence on the news,” he said to Siegel, “the same sequence we want to do, and it was just great. They put up nets and stuff under some guy who was threatening to jump and the guy ended up jumping and the shots were great, it was really exciting.” It was also unfancy, raw and realistic. And, he thought, inexpensive to imitate. “If these guys can do it on the news,” he said, “if they can catch it in ten minutes or something like that, why the hell does it take a movie company six days?”