A Few Landmark Things About Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry is, alongside Star Wars, probably the most influential movie to come out of the 70's in terms of how the movies would be after that point.
I think it boils down to two key points:
ONE: The Western gunslinger becomes the Urban action hero cop. A lot of actors turned down Dirty Harry before Eastwood got the job: Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, among them. (And reputedly Bill Cosby, Walter Matthau and John Wayne, too.) Eastwood getting the role made the connection direct -- in a way that only John Wayne would have as well -- between the Western gunslinger and the Urban action cop. You only have to back up three years to Steve McQueen as Bullitt to see a San Francisco cop presented in a more realistic manner -- unwilling to fire his gun unless forced; remorseful after having to kill. But Harry "shot it out" on the street with bank robbers and with Scorpio at various locations(and, in the sequels, with even more abandon.) Eastwood made his name in the Western, but realized that the Western was a dying genre. He used Dirty Harry to re-configure the terrain for action, and everybody followed: Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Sly Stallone(Cobra) and of course, Arnold.
TWO: The Evil of the Villain. There had been bad guys before with a certain evil you just HAD to hate, but Scorpio took it up to 11. The relatively new R rating allowed it. The movie opens with Scorpio shooting a beautiful woman who is in a bathing suit, and later in the film, he rapes a 14 year old preteen and buries her alive and nude(after pulling out her tooth as evidence.) He kills a young black child. He hijacks a schoolbus with small children on board and terrorizes them(threatening to kill their parents.) NO screen bad guy had ever been this cruel, this vicious. One spends the whole movie CRAVING Scorpio's death, and what's great is that along the way to that death, he still gets messed up pretty bad: Harry sticks a switchblade in his thigh and he pays a black man to beat him up very badly(to blame Harry, but still -- such masochism.)
The collision course between a hero who shoots first and asks questions later and a villain of indescribable evil would set the template for many "R" rated cop pictures for decades to come. Dirty Harry made everything suddenly "elemental." Very little detective work. Very few trials. Just good versus evil, guns, knives and fists -- brutally and to the death.
But as with all truly good -- classic -- seminal movies, Dirty Harry is also a great movie. It is beautifully directed by Don Siegel with an eye towards San Francisco as a dangerous city of darkness, whether day or night. It is tightly scripted with such gems as the two "Do you feel lucky?" speeches and Harry's ruminations on how he could tell a man had intent to rape("When I see a naked man running after woman with a knife and a hard-on, I shoot the bastard."). It has that great long suspense sequence of Scorpio running Harry all over late night San Francisco with the ransom for the buried-alive girl (who dies anyway).
And Eastwood himself finally found himself a role in which he could express his inner rage and his outer cool in equal measure. Look at his pleasant wimpy guy in "Paint Your Wagon" of 1969 and see how Harry gave him cajones. (His Spaghetti Western guy, while a great shooter, was perhaps too mysterious and laconic to "register.")
As for the reputed "Fascist" law and order elements of Dirty Harry ("Then the law's crazy!!"), the deck may well have been rigged, but i could quote you ten cases in real life where killers got off or served light sentences for murder. The movie tapped into something real about justice, and made this fictional tale very timely and real -- and debateable.
Great movie. Changed a lot of things AT the movies. To this day.