Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American action-thriller film produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first appearance as San Francisco Police Department Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan. The film drew upon the real-life case of the Zodiac Killer as the Callahan character seeks out a similar vicious psychopath.
Dirty Harry was a critical and commercial success and set the style for a whole genre of police films. It was followed by four sequels: Magnum Force in 1973, The Enforcer in 1976, Sudden Impact in 1983, and The Dead Pool in 1988.
In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant".
Plot
A psychopathic sniper, later referred to as "Scorpio", shoots a woman while she swims in a San Francisco skyscraper rooftop pool. He leaves behind a threatening letter demanding he be paid $100,000 or he will kill more people. The note is found by SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan, who is investigating the killing. The mayor teams up with the police to track down the killer; to stall for time, he agrees to Scorpio's demand over Callahan's objections. During his lunch break, Harry foils a bank robbery. He shoots one robber and the getaway driver dead, and holds another at gunpoint with his Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver, giving him an ultimatum:I know what you're thinking: 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' 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've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?
Despite surrendering, the robber insists on knowing, and Harry jovially pulls the trigger, revealing the gun is empty.
Harry is assigned a rookie partner, Chico Gonzalez, against his opposition to working with yet another inexperienced police officer. Meanwhile, Scorpio is spotted by a police helicopter while staking for potential victims, but he escapes. Harry and Chico ride the beat, and Harry is assaulted by a neighborhood watch gang after they mistake Harry for a peeping tom. Chico comes to Harry's aid. After assisting in preventing a suicide, Harry and Gonzalez learn that Scorpio has murdered a 10-year-old African-American boy. Based on Scorpio's letter, the police think his next victim will be a Catholic priest, and set a trap for him.
Scorpio eventually arrives, kills a police officer in a shootout, and flees. The next day, the police receive another letter in which Scorpio claims to have kidnapped a teenager named Ann Mary Deacon. He threatens to kill her if he is not given a ransom of $200,000. Harry is assigned to deliver the money, wearing a radio earpiece so Gonzalez can secretly follow him. Scorpio instructs Harry via payphones around the city. They meet at the Mount Davidson cross, where Scorpio beats Harry and admits he intends to kill him and let Ann Mary die. Gonzalez intervenes and gets shot in the chest. Harry manages to stab Scorpio in the leg, but he escapes.
Harry learns of Scorpio's hospital visit and a doctor reveals that the killer lives in a room at Kezar Stadium. Harry finds him there and chases him, shooting him in the leg. Harry tortures Scorpio into confessing where Ann Mary is being held, but the police find her dead. The district attorney reprimands Harry for his conduct, explaining that because Harry obtained his evidence against Scorpio illegally, all of it is inadmissible in court, and Scorpio is to be freed. An outraged Harry continues to shadow Scorpio on his own time. Scorpio pays a man $200 to beat him severely and frames Harry for it, forcing Harry to stop following him. Meanwhile, a hospitalized Gonzalez tells Harry of his intention to leave the SFPD and become a teacher instead.
Scorpio steals a pistol from a liquor store owner and hijacks a school bus. He contacts the police with another ransom demand that includes a flight out of the country. Harry waits for him, then jumps onto the roof of the bus from an overpass. Scorpio crashes the bus into a dirt mound and flees to a nearby quarry, where he takes a hostage before Harry wounds him. Harry aims his revolver and reprises his ultimatum about losing count of his shots. Scorpio reaches for his gun and Harry shoots. This time, the gun fires, killing Scorpio. Harry removes his police badge from his wallet, throws it into the water, and walks away.
Cast
Production
Development
The script, titled Dead Right, by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink, was originally about a hard-edged New York City police inspector, Harry Callahan, who is determined to stop Davis, a serial killer, even if he has to skirt the law and accepted standards of policing, blurring the distinction between criminal and cop, addressing the question of how far a free, democratic society can go to protect itself. The original draft ended with a police sniper, instead of Callahan, shooting the killer. Another earlier version of the story was set in Seattle, Washington. Four more drafts of the script were written.Although Dirty Harry is arguably Clint Eastwood's signature role, he was not a top contender for the part. The role of Harry Callahan was offered to John Wayne and Frank Sinatra, and later to Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, and Burt Lancaster. In his 1980 interview with Playboy, George C. Scott claimed that he was initially offered the role, but the script's violent nature led him to turn it down. When producer Jennings Lang initially could not find an actor to take the role of Callahan, he sold the film rights to ABC Television. Although ABC wanted to turn it into a TV movie, the amount of violence in the script was deemed excessive for television, so the rights were sold to Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. purchased the script with a view to casting Frank Sinatra in the lead. Sinatra was 55 at the time and since the character of Harry Callahan was originally written as a man in his mid-to-late 50s, Sinatra fit the character profile. Initially, Warner Bros. wanted either Sydney Pollack or Irvin Kershner to direct. Kershner was eventually hired when Sinatra was attached to the title role, but when Sinatra later left the film, Kershner did as well.
John Milius was asked to work on the script when Sinatra and Kershner were attached. Milius claimed he was requested to write the screenplay for Sinatra in three weeks. Terrence Malick wrote a draft of the film in which the shooter was a vigilante who killed wealthy criminals who had escaped justice.
Details about the film were first released in film industry trade papers in April. After Sinatra left the project, the producers started to consider younger actors for the role. Burt Lancaster turned down the lead role because he strongly disagreed with the violent, end-justifies-the-means moral of the story. He believed the role and plot contradicted his belief in collective responsibility for criminal and social justice and the protection of individual rights. Marlon Brando was considered for the role, but was never formally approached. Both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman turned down the role. McQueen refused to make another "cop movie" after Bullitt. Believing the character was too "right-wing" for him, Newman suggested that the film would be a good vehicle for Eastwood.
The screenplay was initially brought to Eastwood's attention around 1969 by Jennings Lang. Warner Bros. offered him the part while his directorial debut film Play Misty for Me was still in post production. On December 17, 1970, a Warner Bros. studio press release announced that Clint Eastwood would star in, and produce the film through his company, Malpaso.
Eastwood was given a number of scripts, but he ultimately reverted to the original as the best vehicle for him. In a 2008 MTV interview, Eastwood said "So I said, 'I'll do it,' but since they had initially talked to me, there had been all these rewrites. I said, 'I'm only interested in the original script'." Looking back on the 1971 Don Siegel film, he remembered " everything. They had Marine snipers coming on in the end. And I said, 'No. This is losing the point of the whole story, of the guy chasing the killer down. It's becoming an extravaganza that's losing its character.' They said, 'OK, do what you want.' So, we went and made it."
Scorpio was loosely based on the real-life Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer who had committed five murders in the San Francisco Bay Area several years earlier. Elements of Gary Steven Krist were also worked into the characterization, since Scorpio, like Krist, kidnaps a young girl and buries her alive while demanding ransom. In a later novelization of the film, Scorpio was referred to as "Charles Davis", a former mental patient from Springfield, Massachusetts, who murdered his grandparents as a teenager. There are significant differences between the book and the film. Among the differences are: Scorpio's point of viewin the book, he uses astrology to make decisions, Harry working on a murder case involving a mugger before he is assigned to Scorpio, the omission of the suicide jumper, and Harry throwing away his badge at the end.
Audie Murphy was initially considered to play Scorpio, but he died in a plane crash before his decision on the offer could be made. When Kershner and Sinatra were still attached to the project, James Caan was under consideration for the role of Scorpio. The part eventually went to a relatively unknown actor, Andy Robinson. Eastwood had seen Robinson in a play called Subject to Fits and recommended him for the role of Scorpio; his unkempt appearance fit the bill for a psychologically unbalanced hippie. Siegel told Robinson that he cast him in the role of the Scorpio killer because he wanted someone "with a face like a choirboy". Robinson's portrayal was so memorable that after the film was released he was reported to have received several death threats and was forced to get an unlisted telephone number. In real life, Robinson is a pacifist who deplores the use of firearms. Early in principal photography on the film, Robinson would reportedly flinch in discomfort every time he was required to use a gun. As a result, Siegel was forced to halt production briefly and sent Robinson for brief training in order to learn how to fire a gun convincingly.
Milius says his main contribution to the film was "a lot of guns. And the attitude of Dirty Harry, being a cop who was ruthless. I think it's fairly obvious if you look at the rest of my work what parts are mine. The cop being the same as the killer except he has a badge. And being lonely... I wanted it to be like Stray Dog; I was thinking in terms of Kurosawa's detective films." He added:
In my script version, there's just more outrageous Milius crap where I had the killer in the bus with a flamethrower. I tried to make the guy as outrageous as possible. I had him get a police photographer to take a picture of him with all the kids lined up at the school – he kidnaps them at the school, actually – and they showed the picture to the other police after he's made his demands; he wants a 747 to take him away to a country where he'll be free of police harassment , terrible things like this. And the children all end up like a graduation picture, and the teacher is saying, "What is that object under Andy Robinson?" and a cop says, "That's a claymore mine." Teacher asks, "What's a claymore mine?" And we hear the voice of Harry say, "If he sets it off, they're all spaghetti." Chief says, "That's enough, Harry." Everybody said, "That's too much, John; we can't have Milius doing this kind of stuff." I wanted the guy to be just totally outrageous all the time, and he is. I think Siegel restrained it enough.
Screenwriter John Milius owns one of the actual Model 29s used in principal photography in Dirty Harry and Magnum Force., it is on loan to the National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Virginia, and is in the Hollywood Guns display in the William B. Ruger Gallery.