The Dirty Harry series provoked, peeved, and transformed cop movies
http://www.avclub.com/article/dirty-harry-series-provoked-peeved-and-transformed-236103
By Noel Murrayshare
May 5, 2016 12:00 AM
With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
“We couldn’t make this movie today” is a common refrain for veteran filmmakers, repeated like a mantra in commentary tracks and featurettes on DVDs and Blu-rays. It’s half boast and half dodge, meant to explain why the artists in questions haven’t produced any masterpieces lately. And most of the time, it’s complete *beep* Hollywood studios may be less interested in certain kinds of stories here in the 2010s, but if the next Francis Ford Coppola showed up tomorrow, ready to make The Conversation? That picture would happen, someway, somehow—even if it was on the cheap, and under the shingle of some independent company. Art projects, character pieces, offbeat genre exercises… they all still find their way onto a screen.
The Dirty Harry series, though? We live in an age where, if a movie character uses the wrong pronoun, someone will bang out 1200 words about how the film is “problematic.” It’s hard to imagine these films getting a green-light from anyone in 2016. The five hard-boiled detective sagas that Clint Eastwood starred in between 1971 and 1988 are filled with racist and sexist stereotypes, and they openly sneer at soft-headed liberals for aiding and abetting society’s scum. Dirty Harry and its sequels are violent, condescending, and morally questionable. They’re also some of the best cop movies ever made.
Even if they weren’t terrifically entertaining, the Dirty Harrys would be essential viewing, because they explain where about 70 percent of the post-1971 guns-and-goons Hollywood action movies came from. Watching the first Dirty Harry for the first time today is like reading Marvel’s early ’60s Spider-Man comics, or listening to the first Van Halen album. So many of the fundamental genre codes and conventions are there, ready to be followed like a blueprint.
In the case of Dirty Harry, it’s astonishing how many movies and TV shows have copied key elements from that film: the loose cannon police detective, the crotchety superior officers, the cackling sleazeball criminals, the catchphrases, and more. At a time when “the New Hollywood” was bringing a new level of realism and maturity to the screen, Dirty Harry took advantage of the elevated tolerance for adult content to deliver a giddy adolescent fantasy. Roger Ebert would later describe the fourth film in the series, Sudden Impact, as “a Dirty Harry movie with only the good parts left in,” but really, that was all the Dirty Harry movies. They were like Bullitt with just the car chases, or The French Connection with just the tough-talking interrogations.