The scathing review that annoyed Clint Eastwood: “I knew she was full of shit”
When Clint Eastwood broke into Hollywood, he soon established himself as the quintessential leading man – handsome but tough, a complicated hero. After appearing in the Dollars trilogy, the actor became a star, soon leading him to more acting projects and a long and award-winning directorial career.
Eastwood usurped John Wayne as the newest cowboy in town, but his vision of America was much more bleak and less stereotypically patriotic; after all, his big break came from a string of films from an Italian director, Sergio Leone. Still, both Eastwood and Wayne opposed left-wing politics, with their beliefs often making themselves apparent in their movie choices.
In 1971, Eastwood starred in Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegal, which forever altered the course of cop movies. Eastwood played the misanthropic Harry Callahan, who treats everyone with disdain; when he’s partnered up with a rookie cop called Chico Gonzalez, he expresses (using a slur) his hatred for Mexican people. Clearly, he sees his type – white, straight American man – as the ideal, and everyone else is so clearly beneath him.
Some people believe Harry is a blunt yet complex man who you can’t help but root for, regardless of some of his behaviour being overtly racist and homophobic. Even a YouTube video featuring the scene in which Harry meets Chico features comments from users missing the days when movies could be ‘politically correct’, and people weren’t ‘cancelled’; evidently, some viewers are much more tolerant of Harry than others. For Pauline Kael, a leading film critic who wrote for the New Yorker for several decades, the film was simply “fascist.”
She began her review by highlighting her distrust in the police, writing, “I grew up in San Francisco, and one of the soundest pieces of folk wisdom my mother gave me was ‘If you’re ever in trouble, don’t go to the cops,’” adding, “Even as children, San Franciscans were deeply aware of the corruption of the police—something totally ignored in this movie.”
Kael admits that Dirty Harry is well-made, but she finds herself at odds with the message of the movie. “When you’re making a picture with Clint Eastwood, you naturally want things to be simple, and the basic contest between good and evil is as simple as you can get. It makes this genre piece more archetypal than most movies, more primitive and dreamlike; fascist medievalism has a fairy-tale appeal,” she wrote.
“On the way out, a pink-cheeked little girl was saying ‘That was a good picture’ to her father. Of course; the dragon had been slain. Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced,” Kael concluded, adding that it is a “deeply immoral movie.”
Eastwood responded to her criticism in an interview with Robert Ward, explaining that he really didn’t care, but clearly, his feathers were ruffled. “People liked to throw around the term ‘fascist.’ It didn’t bother me because I knew she was full of shit the whole time. She was writing to be controversial because people expect it of her, that’s how she made her name. If Harry came out now, Kael would be onto something else. But the public liked the picture, and they realized it was just about a guy who was tired of the bureaucratic crap.”
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Clint Eastwood Newsletter
All the latest stories about Clint Eastwood from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.