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Dirty Harry's America Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash
Joe Street
Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2018* Paperback.
xiv+265 p. ISBN 978-0813064710. $24.95
Reviewed by David Desser University of
Illinois
In 1971,
a police thriller telling the story of a cop who has been described as vicious,
obsessed and a little mad; one who harasses and brutalizes people; tireless, unlikable,
maniacal, racist and sadistic, was released to
great box-office success. One could easily understand thinking
immediately of Dirty Harry. But if further clarification indicated that “the
film subverts the tidy moral resolution demanded by genre convention,
reflecting a darker, more ambivalent worldview, simultaneously hearkening back
to the post-WWII high tide of film noir and resonant with Vietnam-era anxieties
and tensions,” Dirty Harry would clearly not be the right answer.
In fact, it is the Oscar-winning Best Picture The French
Connection. How is it that Gene Hackman’s foul-mouthed
and disagreeable “Popeye” Doyle has become a counterculture hero, yet Clint
Eastwood’s no-less “Dirty” Harry Callahan is regularly regaled as a right-wing
reflection? And if, as author Joe Street insists, box-office equals not just
popularity, but acceptance of a film’s ideals, then let us note that William
Friedkin’s gritty New York drama grossed over $51,000,000 compared to the nearly $36,000,000
of Don Siegel’s icy cool San Francisco-set Dirty Harry. Joe Street, a senior lecturer in American history at Northumbria
University, UK, is certainly right that films can, and often do, reflect the
culture in which they were produced and consumed. Such an approach has a long
history in film criticism. Much of this tradition can be called “popular”
criticism, offered to a general audience to make broad, often sweeping
statements of a political or social intervention. This is not to say such
approaches lack rigor and useful insight and have certainly often proven to be
themselves quite popular (e.g. Molly
Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape). Against this criticism is that of a
more academic or scholarly nature, one less willing to make sweeping statements
and more grounded in critical theory or scholarly methodology (e.g. Alan Nadel’s Demographic Angst).
And then there are works that fit somewhere between the two, scholarly works
that intend to offer broader, less provable hypotheses, but seem grounded in
some kind of “theory” or critical approach (e.g.
Susan Jeffords’ The Remasculinization of America). Joe Street’s book
belongs to this class. Yet there is a much smaller, more problematic strand of film analysis
that wants to insist that at least certain films at certain times do more than
reflect the culture – they influence it, shift it and create it in its own
image. A decrease in undershirt sales in 1934 due to Clark Gable’s lack of one
in the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night and the “Annie Hall” look in
the next comedic Academy-Award winning film in 1977. In between there was
fashion-icon Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s and the gamine-look as opposed to the
“mammary madness” provoked by the likes of Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and
Jayne Mansfield. These, however, seem minor in the larger scheme of things.
Here, too, though, Street’s book wants to find purchase. Street’s notion,
announced in the subtitle of the book, is that Dirty Harry – film and character
– represents “the conservative backlash” against “the excesses of the 1960s and
the implicit and explicit threat of anti-authoritarianism to traditional
American values” [4]. Beyond that, however, Street wants to insist that Dirty
Harry helped “create a new American mood even as it emerged from an older mood”
[ibid.] Yet one problem here is that
Street’s book is too insular. Dirty Harry and Eastwood’s career leading
up to it (the content of chapter 1) are never put in contrast and contradiction
to the left-liberal works that found at least cult and often box-office
success, much as I outlined above with the coincidental distribution and
contradiction between The French Connection and Dirty Harry.
(Friedkin’s film is never mentioned.) If Clint Eastwood and Harry Callahan are
a backlash, they certainly existed amongst numerous examples of its target. Easy
Rider, the ur-counterculture classic, was released in 1969, the year
Richard M. Nixon assumed the presidency of the US, running on a platform of
“law and order” and implicit racism—the anti-counterculture presidency. Yet Nixon’s
time in office witnessed the true flowering of counterculture cinema. I could
easily use up any word limit simply by listing films that belong to a
left-liberal or radical perspective. Zabriskie Point (Antonioni, 1970),
The Strawberry Statement (Hagmann, 1970), Medium Cool (Wexler, 1970), Getting
Straight (Rush, 1970); Harold & Maude (Ashby, 1971),
Robert Altman’s genre-busting and defying M*A*S*H
(1970), Brewster McCloud (1970) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971),
as well as the works of Arthur Penn, who helped inaugurate the Hollywood
Renaissance with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and who continued his assault
on film form and social shibboleths with Alice’s Restaurant (1969) and Little
Big Man (1970). Both box-office successes and lesser-known cult films of a
distinctly countercultural persuasion populate the year of Dirty Harry’s
release: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me; Billy Jack; Carnal
Knowledge; Drive, He Said; Johnny Got His Gun; The Last
Movie; The Last Picture Show; Little Murders; A Safe Place;
Shaft; Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song; Two Lane Blacktop; Zachariah. Instead,
the Eastwood film is read against the backdrop of the emerging
conservative politics of the period, its subject announced in the subtitle of
chapter 3: “San Francisco in the Nixon Era.” There is nothing wrong with
reading a film in a specific context, such as politics or the history and image
of San Francisco. In fact, Street does an excellent job of reminding us of the
hippie and counterculture movement whose roots lay in the City by the Bay. It’s
just that the insularity of the evidence is a bit troublesome. Street
is perfectly right to note the films produced in the wake of Dirty Harry
as owing everything to the success of the original—though whether they reflect
the waning of the counterculture, the backlash against it, or New Hollywood’s
reliance on genre, sequels and imitation is up for grabs. Nevertheless, the
four sequels to Don Siegel’s original (three more than The French Connection)
and the loathsome vigilante cycle, such as the “Death Wish” series (five
frightful films) can claim a sad patrimony from Harry. More interesting are the
many intertexts that Street’s thorough research has fascinatingly uncovered.
Twelve Dirty Harry novels were published by Warner Books (not counting
novelizations of the first four films); Street calls them “Dirty Harry’s Pulp
Fiction” and pulp they are, with lurid titles like Death on the Docks, The
Mexico Kill, City of Blood, Blood of the Strangers and The
Dealer of Death. Parodies of Dirty Harry Callahan also attest to its
cultural cachet. The hilariously over-the-top
TV series Sledge Hammer! (1986-1988; Street neglects the all-important
exclamation point in the show’s title) easily satirized Harry’s propensity for
violence and his disdain for all those “liberal creeps” from city hall or
Internal Affairs. Video games, fan fictions and Frank Miller’s ultra-violent
and stylish Sin City attest to a vibrant, if not always pleasant
afterlife for what began as an urban thriller from Hollywood professional Don
Siegel and rising star Clint Eastwood. The film did not necessarily hurt the
liberal Siegel’s career—he directed a few fine films thereafter, but the cancer
that eventually killed him at age 78 in 1991 already ended his career in the
early 1980s. Dirty Harry, however, launched Clint Eastwood’s career in a way
unprecedented both as a filmmaker and as a polarizing political figure. Some of
that can be gleaned from this well-researched and engagingly written volume of
popular cultural criticism. _ *Reprint of the 2016 hardcover
edition.
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