You Got To Work That Clint-orus: DIRTY HARRY

Why I Love Dirty Harry, or In Defense of the Journeyman Director.

The term “journeyman” carries with it an unfortunate directorial stigma. The “great” filmmakers of the world seem to earn that accolade through a show of creative force. Much like the way you can’t mistake a Picasso for anything else, world cinema favors those men (and women) who manage to turn their own name into a cinematic brand.

A film by Scorsese or Breillat or Lynch or Ray (both ones) or Bahrani or Spielberg or Maddin or Kurosawa or Leone or Truffaut or Kubrick cannot exist under any other such name; there’s an expectation, of content, of style, of tone, of mood, that emerges simply through the invocation of the name. “We’re going to see the new Scorsese,” you say, and that name carries a power more persuasive than any plot description can.

You’ll find no argument from me on that point. We remember the titans (of cinema), and deservedly so.

That said, the greats are in the minority. Only the most devout (and elitist) can thrive off the masters; their works are of rare vintage, and while they plan and create, the space between is filled with…

...well, with everything. Crap, gold, meh, blah. The works of the journeymen, those directors for whom the film comes at the expense of a personal touch. There’s a tendency to denigrate journeymen simply because of that impersonality, but I maintain that cinema would cease to be if not for their efforts. They keep the machine going.

Furthermore, their efforts gain stature over time. Look at any “Best of” List spanning from now to the beginning of cinema, and some of the great all-time movies come courtesy of people like Michael Curtiz and Howard Hawks and John Huston and Sydney Pollack and Victor Fleming and Robert Aldrich, people for whom the Story Is God, for whom every element comes in service of the film rather than for themselves. We remember the movie even if we forget the man behind it.

(Plus, not all filmmakers with a stamp deserve the “great” label. Michael Bay loads his films with his obsessions and interests, and I’m pretty sure calling him great is the best possible way to get yourself indicted for war crimes.)

My favorite of these journeymen is the late Don Siegel. It’s hard to connect one Siegel picture to another. He’s made some of the most famous crime dramas of all time, sure, but he’s also excelled in westerns. And war movies. And horror films. And comedies. About the only unifying thread is a relentless watchability. Everything happens on behalf of the machine, and as a result, most of his films are, by their very nature, propulsive, driving.

That’s not a result of a style, or tone, or theme; I know I’m watching a Siegel picture because I remember he directed it, not because of some flourish that cues me up. It’s an intangible...something.

His masterpiece, Dirty Harry, is the cleanest example of his work, and of journeyman filmmaking at its finest. It’s perfectly paced, funny when it needs to be, suspenseful when it needs to be, sad when it needs to be. There are no unnecessary scenes, no sidebar characters, and no bloated subplots. It is, in essence, as tightly modulated as the title character.

In that regard, it’s a character study, but as that study emerges through Harry Callahan’s actions rather than through pat psychological sermonizing—the film is Callahan’s investigation of the Scorpio Killer and nothing else—it feels much more inconsequential than it really is.

Don’t make the mistake of calling it slight. Dirty Harry remains one of the most deeply disturbing looks at police work ever made. Siegel is so canny is his handling of his subject. It’s Structure 101.

The first half keeps Scorpio (mostly) off-screen. It’s all Harry, and through his pursuit of Scorpio, we see why “Dirty” is such an apt choice of nomenclature. Harry is racist, sexist, and brutal. He’s the prototypical maverick cop, and we find that archetype so entertaining that we overlook (on first viewings) how disgusting he really is. Every police action he takes goes too far, his results not quite justifying his means.

Harry’s iconic “Did I fire six shots or only five” interrogation added a new catch phrase to the lexicon, but people forget the queasy punchline to the line. The downed gunman, clearly and completely incapacitated, asks how many bullets are left in the gun, and Harry shows him by sticking the barrel in his face and pulling the trigger.

I’ve argued with people who think this is less morally unsound than I do; they maintain Harry knows that the gun is empty and just wants to scare the perp. That may be the case, but it doesn’t make Harry’s choice of demonstration any less potently upsetting. We wonder, “God, are there more like him out there?” It throws Siegel’s opening shot, a memorial to police officers killed in the line of duty, into ironic relief.

And then Harry shoots Scorpio in the football stadium, and things change. Scorpio is the Boogeyman: evil, calculating, unstoppable. A great deal of his power comes from his hold over Harry’s department—they let him go because Harry’s excessive brutality flies straight in the face of Scorpio’s Miranda Rights, and throughout the entire second half of the film, Scorpio manipulates the law for his own gains.

During this part of the film, Siegel toys with our sympathies. He’s distanced us from Harry, and logic says we should feel something for the brutalized killer. But Scorpio is a monster, plotting the deaths of children, mutilating himself to harm Harry’s reputation. He needs to be stopped at any cost, right?

There’s the kicker. The violence in Harry that Siegel has seemingly criticized for fifty minutes becomes the only way to stop a(nother) madman in the film’s back end. Pauline Kael famously called Dirty Harry a “fascist masterpiece,” reading into it an endorsement of Harry’s Gestapo tactics, yet I think that’s an incredibly reductive take on a complex situation. Siegel is showing us a world where both cop and criminal are flawed. Harry may get Dirty to stop Scorpio, but that's less an endorsement of his brand of “justice” and more an indictment of a world that uses brutality to check brutality.

Nowhere does Siegel make that clearer than in the final shot. Harry has just killed Scorpio. He stares at the body, bleeding out in a quarry. And then he pulls out his badge, stares at it for a long time, and tosses it next to his prey, disgusted at what he has become, what has become of law and order. Roll credits. It’s a starkly powerful ending, made all the more impressive by Siegel’s blunt, straightforward direction. We can’t believe what he’s pulled off, the questions he’s made us ask, and in such a crisp and unobtrusive manner. If that disbelief means people write the film off as simple fascist exploitation, then so be it.

But that doesn’t mean those people are right.