Why Clint Eastwood will always defend his most controversial character: “I was not afraid of it”
Many stars of similar standing to Clint Eastwood would refuse to take on a part they knew had been unsuccessfully offered to several of their peers, but the actor was confident enough in the script and content to put his professional pride to one side and sign on for what instantly became an iconic role.
John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, and George C Scott are just some of the established Hollywood mainstays who declined the chance to headline Dirty Harry, with several of them dissuaded by the controversial and potentially inflammatory content.
Eastwood, however, has no such reservations. If anything, it was the perfect movie for him to star in at the perfect time in his career. The star was seeking to move away from the western genre that had made him a star in favour of being taken seriously as a performer and filmmaker, with 1971 a defining moment.
Not only was it the year his directorial debut Play Misty for Me and Dirty Harry were released, but the latter was his third film with Don Siegel to be released within the space of 16 months, so he was working with an auteur he was eminently familiar and very comfortable with, which would have helped smooth over any trepidation on his part.
No-nonsense cop Harry Callahan operated in the grey area of the law, using his own form of self-defined justice to apprehend a killer by any means necessary. Criticised for glorifying vigilantism, celebrating police brutality, doing damage to the reputation of law enforcement agencies by making a rule-breaker the hero, and accusations of right-wing ideologies earned the movie plenty of scorn.
Eastwood always denied there was a political agenda at play, and even if there was, he paid no heed. “I was told when I first got the script that other actors had liked it but had reservations about the political elements of it,” he said. “But even at that age, I was not afraid of it.”
The leading man didn’t see it as a hard-boiled thriller but as a “fantasy” that existed in a heightened Hollywood reality, which made it easier for him to embrace and accept the more antiheroic aspects of Harry. He even called it “sort of a victims’ rights movie” for how justice was done eventually, even if Dirty Harry being implicated in several real-life crimes hardly dampened the flames of contention.
With Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch laying down a new barometer for onscreen violence just two years previously and the dawn of the 1970s instigating a seismic shift in America, Dirty Harry became emblematic of that dramatic shift for better or worse.
It was a massive hit and an instant classic, but at the same time, there were plenty of vocal detractors out there who openly blasted Siegel and Eastwood for making a right-wing revenge fantasy that could greatly impact the minds of impressionable audiences.
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