Good Cop/Bad Cop, Part 3

Dirty Harry Vs John Shaft.

In many ways, Dirty Harry is a remake of Don Siegel’s earlier cop movies. Besides
re-presenting Clint Eastwood in the title role, the film features the same stifling authority figures and savage, no-good criminals that appeared in Madigan and Coogan’s Bluff.

What’s so interesting about Dirty Harry are the contradictions apparent in the title character. Like his forerunners, Harry Callahan is a brute, liable to blow away bank robbers and torture murder subjects. He also doesn’t give a shit about the higher-ups. When questioned about his decision to shoot a rapist, Harry replies, “When I see a woman being chased by a naked man with a butcher’s knife and a hard-on, I figure he ain’t out collecting for the Red Cross.”

Beneath the brutality, there’s another layer to Callahan. A widower (his wife was murdered), Harry is neither the racist or the misogynist critics often believe him to be (check out the scene with the black doctor). He is, instead, the prototype of what we have now come to know as the dysfunctional cop.