Yeah, the movie does quite explicitly set up the "ticking time bomb" scenario with the girl having only limited oxygen. During the ransom drop, Scorpio threatens Harry with "dead girl", and then drives it home at the ransom drop site when he says "I've decided to let her die!" There is no way to be 100% sure the threat is real, but given the information the film gives us we have every reason to believe the threat is real, and so does Harry. We and Harry have perfect knowledge of Scorpio's plan and we know what he's capable of. So Harry's decision to do the torture makes sense in that light. Harry had to make a choice between doing the right thing (saving the girl) or going about it the legal way and risk her running out of oxygen if Scorpio isn't bluffing (he wasn't, sadly). So, in the fictional universe of the film and with the information Harry and the audience are given (we are shown both Harry and Scorpio's point of view, so we know what the "objective" truth is.
The only problem is out there in the "real world", we rarely have this access to perfect "objective" knowledge, which is why torture in the police force, or at Guantanamo Bay for that matter, often turns out to be problematic. We can't always rely on those doing the torturing to be as upright and honest as Harry is, that they are even torturing the right person, a "ticking time bomb" scenario actually exists, or how reliable information under torture even is in the first place. The movie can be given a pass because we know the answers to these questions. Are "ticking time bombs" manipulative plot devices? Sure they are, but they make for smashing good movies and great suspense.
This is why Harry throwing away his badge at the end is so powerful, and why I kind of wish there were no sequels. Why exactly he throws away his badge and what the implications of this act are is ambiguous and left up to the audience. Is he rejecting the system, or is he acknowledging that he can't entirely square his instinct for doing what is right and doing what is strictly legal... that there is sometimes a conflict between the two. The implication (though never stated outright in the film) is that Harry refused to lie in his police report. Again, in the "real world" we know cops (if they want to) have ways of torturing suspects without leaving a mark. It is also unlikely that Harry would be as blithely unaware of the potential consequences to the case due to his decision to torture in the DA's office the following morning. In the "real world" cops would know this would jeopardize the case. Do they chose to lie to protect the evidence? Tainted evidence means he could go free and do more killing. The silver lining of saving the girl was the reason, of course, but unfortunately, Harry's gamble doesn't pay off and the girl dies anyway. Due to the way in which the evidence is obtained, Scorpio is set free and endangers a whole school bus of children. So it was a calculated gamble nearly turned disastrous. It's rather an interesting ethical dilemma if you think of it.
P.S. Forensic science was a lot more primitive back then. I don't even know if Scorpio could prove he was actually tortured by Harry. Aside from fibers from Harry's show, there would probably would have been little evidence to back it up. A little clean up of the would and bye bye evidence. "Fatso" would likely have backed his partner up and a cop in the "real world" would lie in the police report if there was some greater good involved. But not our Harry... he's too honest!
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Yeah, the movie does quite explicitly set up the "ticking time bomb" scenario with the girl having only limited oxygen. During the ransom drop, Scorpio threatens Harry with "dead girl", and then drives it home at the ransom drop site when he says "I've decided to let her die!" There is no way to be 100% sure the threat is real, but given the information the film gives us we have every reason to believe the threat is real, and so does Harry. We and Harry have perfect knowledge of Scorpio's plan and we know what he's capable of. So Harry's decision to do the torture makes sense in that light.
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Absolutely. Look -- great movies(at least as enterrtainment, but maybe more) have great STORIES and situations. And you can believe that everybody's emotions were pushed as high as could be when Harry finally cornered Scorpio in that stadium. Scorpio had already killed people - he had just machine-gunned Harry's partner, he had tried to kill Harry, Harry knew he had EXACTLY the right guy -- and the "ticking time bomb" only made everything supremely NECESSARY.
I saw Dirty Harry first run with a crowd and then a few years later full house at a COLLEGE screening (more on that anon) and both times, the audience went NUTS when Harry stepped on Scorpio's leg(particularly after Scorpio with the upper hand had been so cruel and now with the lower hand, so measly-mouthed. "I have rights.")
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Harry had to make a choice between doing the right thing (saving the girl) or going about it the legal way and risk her running out of oxygen if Scorpio isn't bluffing (he wasn't, sadly). So, in the fictional universe of the film and with the information Harry and the audience are given (we are shown both Harry and Scorpio's point of view, so we know what the "objective" truth is.
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Well movies often give us the "objective" truth and a surety we don't have in real life. I jump to Hitchcock's Frenzy, where we CLEARLY know who the real killer is(we've seem him do the killing) , so we go nuts watching the police hound and hunt and catch the WRONG man. We KNOW the truth.
In real life, we often don't. As I post this, a "non-murder case" in the courts is Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard as to who hurt who in that household. They are each painting each other as the villain and it is "he said/she said" and we will NEVER know the objective truth.
The movies give us that sense of certainty.
As cathartic as the stadium torture scene was to audiences, the scene at the DA's office was enraging. The actor playing the DA -- Josef Sommer -- would go on to decades of work as the "weasel you love to hate" on the basis of his role. This DA may indeed be RIGHT in some of the things he says to Harry, but he's so condescending, smarmy and superior in how he says it that the audience would kind of like Harry to torture HIM. The two scenes together -- stadium torture and DA disparagement -- formed the gut-clenching central argument for Dirty Harry.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
The only problem is out there in the "real world", we rarely have this access to perfect "objective" knowledge, which is why torture in the police force, or at Guantanamo Bay for that matter, often turns out to be problematic.
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The very word "torture" is very chilling -- we would never want to be on the RECEIVING end of that, would we? -- and our news is filled with tales of torture every day. Dirty Harry managed to massage the issue down to a totally acceptable case -- Scorpio in the stadium. But the real world is a different place.
That said, the news of decades about psycho killers has shown that THEY delight in torture, and the idea of a powerful cop getting us a little fictional payback is most satisfying.
Just a few days ago, I rather fast-forwarded my way through Sly Stallone's most recent "Rambo" movie (Last Blood) and I was rather astonished at what he did in it: in a lingering, ultra-violent, Friday-the-13th graphic way, Rambo disembowled and dismembered and decapitated each and every one of the Mexican cartel baddies who kidnapped and tortured and sexually abused his precious teenage granddaughter. This is "Dirty Harry" decades later and carried to its ultimate conclusion by a once-major movie star(whose face looks like Frankenstein in this movie, I might add.) None of the legal issues in Dirty Harry are even on the table in Rambo: Last Blood. Its just sheer revenge and torture, pretty much the whole second half of the movie. Dirty Harry looks like a Hays Code movie by comparison.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
We can't always rely on those doing the torturing to be as upright and honest as Harry is,
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...and we don't really want to know, do we?
Case in point: everybody who died on 9/11 died in the worst ways imaginable: throats slashed, trapped on planes of death, falling from great heights, burned to death, buried under rubble. There were NO quick pain-free, terror-free deaths that day.
So I suppose we're A-OK with torture being employed to avoid THAT outcome ever again. And evidently for over 20 years, torture has WORKED in that regard. But: evidently both the right people and, maybe, the wrong people, have been tortured.
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that they are even torturing the right person, a "ticking time bomb" scenario actually exists, or how reliable information under torture even is in the first place. The movie can be given a pass because we know the answers to these questions. Are "ticking time bombs" manipulative plot devices? Sure they are, but they make for smashing good movies and great suspense.
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All agreed, all true. A movie allows us to enjoy in fantasy a certainty that we don't get in real life.
And Harry does things OTHER than torture people in his Dirty Harry movies. He shoots them, he punches them out(punches them out UNTO DEATH in Magnum Force) he harpoons them(The Dead Pool), he puts bombs in their cars(Magnum Force again), he maneuvers them into death crashes(the motorcycle, Magnum Force AGAIN). The torture angle of Dirty Harry perhaps only really came up that one time ...and made Dirty Harry an "important" film.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
This is why Harry throwing away his badge at the end is so powerful, and why I kind of wish there were no sequels.
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NO movie should have a sequel. No "once in a lifetime story" with a perfect ending should be continued. There should be NO Dirty Harry 2. NO Psycho 2. NO Jaws 2. That hasn't stopped Hollywood, though, has it? Screenwriter William Goldman called sequels "whore movies" -- movies made only to exploit other movies, for money. I'm not sure they make me that angry, but most sequels don't come close to the originals. I don't even think Godfather II was all that necessary.
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Why exactly he throws away his badge and what the implications of this act are is ambiguous and left up to the audience.
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One TV reporter asked Clint Eastwood on air if his coming sequel Magnum Force "would open with Harry in scuba gear diving down to retrieve his badge from the bay." Eastwood laughed knowingly -- which, as I recall, made me feel like he was downplaying the historic greatness of the original Dirty Harry. I remember this whole interview bugged me at the time.
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Is he rejecting the system, or is he acknowledging that he can't entirely square his instinct for doing what is right and doing what is strictly legal... that there is sometimes a conflict between the two. The implication (though never stated outright in the film) is that Harry refused to lie in his police report.
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Lying in the police report seems a bit "small" a reason for the badge throw -- it seems rather that this entire adventure has proven his bosses to be too bureaucratic and cowardly to serve them anymore. On the other hand, without Harry on the case, would have Scorpio been identified nearly so early? A hero like Harry should remain available to us.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
I mentioned that college screening of Dirty Harry that I attended, around 1975, up thread. Packed auditorium.
The movie opens with a camera scan of a board with dead SF police officers before getting right down to business: Scorpio's sniper kill of a beautiful young woman in a bathing suit swimming in a rooftop pool.
On the dying, bloodied woman gasping and sinking dead into the pool water, there is a CUT (with an exciting punch of Lalo Schifrin music) to Dirty Harry coming through a door to investigate this murder, with the words "CLINT EASTWOOD" over the man himself.
And I mean that college audience CHEERED, WHOOPED, APPLAUDED, and HOLLERED. Clint Eastwood was the man in 1975. Dirty Harry was, too. And this was at a college, which in the 70's had a fair amount of liberal student body. No matter. My point is: Dirty Harry wasn't all that controversial a movie, OR a character. He had backing. He was a fantasy figure of great power.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Again, in the "real world" we know cops (if they want to) have ways of torturing suspects without leaving a mark. It is also unlikely that Harry would be as blithely unaware of the potential consequences to the case due to his decision to torture in the DA's office the following morning. In the "real world" cops would know this would jeopardize the case.
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Yes..the movie plays up Harry in the DA's office as a bit too naïve about the consequences of his torturing Scorpio. He takes pride in the capture of the killer ("Well, I had a little luck") and looks shocked when accused of all that wrongdoing.
But the DA's scene was rigged in a special way. WE in the audience are so very happy that Harry caught that bastard, and stabbed him, AND tortured him. And we only feel MORE justified when we see that naked young girl pulled out of a hole, dead. We wish that Harry could go beat up Scorpio some more AFTER that.
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Do they chose to lie to protect the evidence? Tainted evidence means he could go free and do more killing. The silver lining of saving the girl was the reason, of course, but unfortunately, Harry's gamble doesn't pay off and the girl dies anyway.
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That aggravating moment:
DA: She was, in fact, already dead. (Smarmy.)
Harry: But I didn't know that! (Eastwood's sense of frustrated outrage in this movie is good, Nicolas Cage called it a great performance that inspired his own work.)
Indeed, the DA scene is important in another way. It happens in daylight, in the bureaucratic safety of the DA's office where he can be all high and mighty, WE have been out all night in the darkness with Harry trying to save a life and stop a madman.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Due to the way in which the evidence is obtained, Scorpio is set free and endangers a whole school bus of children. So it was a calculated gamble nearly turned disastrous. It's rather an interesting ethical dilemma if you think of it.
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Well, sure -- Harry's actions under this analysis ALLOWED Scorpio to get free to commit an even more potentially horrendous crime. But honestly, the cops and the DA HAD Scorpio, they had reason to tail him and do all the things Harry does.
Again, real life district attorneys in 1971 newspaper articles said that, in real life, the DA would never let a killer with the evidence against Scorpio go free. There would be other ways to hold him.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
P.S. Forensic science was a lot more primitive back then. I don't even know if Scorpio could prove he was actually tortured by Harry. Aside from fibers from Harry's show, there would probably would have been little evidence to back it up. A little clean up of the would and bye bye evidence.
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Yet another good point about the reality of the scene. On the other hand, I do believe that Scorpio was running unarmed when Harry shot him -- does yelling "Halt!" at an unamred suspect justify shooting the suspect if they keep running. I dunno.
But the business up at the cross was self-defense. Scorpio was trying to kill the partner and intending to kill Harry when Harry stabbed him in the thigh(with a weapon not quite police regular, yes?)
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"Fatso" would likely have backed his partner up and a cop in the "real world" would lie in the police report if there was some greater good involved. But not our Harry... he's too honest!
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That's right...Harry is a very principled man. Audiences KNEW that. His detractors did not.
And if that principled stance got him in trouble, so be it.
I might put this elsewhere too, but I'm here to tell folks that Dirty Harry's plot was a bit of a shocker in 1971. Many of us (young folk) went expecting another Bullitt(1968, only three years earlier) -- SF cop, Lalo Schifrin score, maybe some Mafia baddies and some shootouts and probably a car chase.
But there was NO car chase. No Mafia. Bullitt is low key and non-committal versus Dirty Harry, which actually plays like an ultra-violent HORROR movie and pulled the audience deep into the raging emotion of hating the most evil villain imaginable. Dirty Harry was an entirely more "raw" experience than the "cool" and analytical Bullitt.
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