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"You've got to ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
"Dirty" Harry Callaghan, and the film about him, provoked a critical uproar in 1971 for its "fascist" message about the power of one, as it also elevated Clint Eastwood to superstar status through his most enduring screen persona. Callahan is a sardonic, hard-working San Francisco cop who can't finish his lunch without having to foil a bank robbery with his 44 Magnum, "the most powerful handgun in the world."
Directed in violent and efficient fashion by Don Siegel, with a propulsive score by Lalo Schifrin, Dirty Harry was the fourth Siegel-Eastwood collaboration after Coogan's Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and The Beguiled (1970). Critics at the time strongly objected to the heroic image of a cop's violations of a suspect's rights, forcing Siegel and Eastwood to deny that they were right-wing reactionaries. All the same, Dirty Harry proved to be highly popular and spawned four sequels: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).
The first movie begins with the most memorable speech from one of cinema's most memorable police officers, a role inextricably linked with Clint Eastwood - "I know what you're thinking, punk ..." . For fans of hard-boiled detective thrillers, the Dirty Harry films have it all. They have so much, in fact, that it would be easy to write them off as gritty-cop-movie cliché, were it not for the fact that Dirty Harry practically invented the genre. If you've seen it before, it probably started here.
Dirty Harry Callaghan is definitely not a politically correct character, and some have decried the movies about him as right-wing propaganda. To be sure, criminals' rights are not something that Callahan has much use for, and whiny lawyers are the enemy of honest cops in Harry's world.
Eastwood's portrayal of Harry Callaghan is a great example of how an actor can make a role his own; the part was originally offered to Frank Sinatra, then passed through the hands of John Wayne and Paul Newman, before Eastwood got hold of it. While the violence is a little strong for some viewers, and others might have trouble coming to terms with the end-justifies-the-means kind of cop he is, one thing canot be questioned - Dirty Harry is one of the most believable screen cops ever, and the five movies are up there with the best of their genre.
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