Dirty Harry integrates three distinct strands: the hard-boiled tradition of Hemingway and Chandler, Gothic elements reminiscent of Poe, and a journalistic/social perspective on 1960s America’s law and order breakdown. These strands sometimes interweave and sometimes don’t, creating a film marked by confusions and tensions, yet maintaining a precarious coherence. The hard-boiled strand shapes the hero as a morally incorruptible, isolated figure confronting a corrupt world, adding narrative clarity and ironic tone. The Gothic strand defines the villain as a monstrous, sexually perverted figure preying on innocence, contributing to the film’s sensational incidents and menacing cityscape. The journalistic/social strand situates the narrative within a realistic portrayal of a society plagued by violence and obstructed law enforcement, lending the film ideological appeal and naturalistic quality. The film’s tension is built on the anticipation of violence, structured like a hunt, and punctuated by confrontations, notably between Harry and the Mayor, and Harry and the killer. This dual structure of hunt and confrontation reflects the conflicting demands of the film’s strands. Dirty Harry presents lawlessness as a mix of sexual disruption, violence, and racial tension, symbolized by a Jack the Ripper-like killer, while portraying the law as embodied by the ambivalent figure of Harry Callahan. Despite its reactionary overtones, the film’s appeal lies in its acknowledgment of violence’s pervasive presence in society, tapping into a shared sense of taboo violation and providing a compelling formal narrative driven by tension and false climaxes.
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Three strands can be discerned at work in Dirty Harry. The first emerges out of the work of writers like Ernest Hemingway, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: the so-called ‘hard-boiled’ school of writers. The second strand, the Gothic one, looks back to the sensational literary genres developed in the 19th century, especially the horror genre as epitomised by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The third, a journalistic/social conception, relates to a view of the state of American society in the 1960s as marked by the breakdown of law and order, a breakdown which is partially blamed on an unrealistic liberalism.
Having used the word strand it is tempting to develop the metaphor and talk about strands interweaving in the film. But this would be thoroughly misleading. Sometimes the strands interweave, sometimes they don’t. Any metaphor used to describe the way the strands work in the film should not be taken as simply implying unity. It would have to take account of the confusions and tensions within the film—which is not to say that the film is basically incoherent but that its coherence is a precarious one, resting on unstable foundations.
Schematically what the three strands contribute to the film can be described in the following way. The ‘hard-boiled’ strand contributes the basic concept of the hero as a character whose heroism is defined by his willingness to confront a world full of violence and moral corruption. To do this he has to be incorruptible and courageous. In displaying these qualities he marks himself off from most other men; he is therefore also characterised by an awareness of his own isolation. This strand makes two other contributions: it gives the narrative clarity and economy, and establishes a persistently ironic tone in the film based on the repression of sentiment (e.g. the recurrent joke in the face of horrific events ‘Welcome to Homicide’).
The Gothic strand contributes most decisively to the concept of the villain. He is presented as a monstrous, isolated figure, sexually perverted and sadistic, who preys upon youth and innocence. It also contributes something to the concept of the hero, in that in contradistinction to the villain his incorruptibility is partly marked by sexual abstinence. The basic material of the narrative, a series of sensational incidents which are designed to create a high degree of excitement, also belongs to this strand, as does the account of the city as a dislocated, menacing place.
The journalistic/social strand makes two major contributions. It provides the basic narrative situation, the police search for a random killer which is obstructed by the nature of the law. In doing this it gives the film an immediate and obvious ideological appeal. And it provides the film with its naturalistic quality, identifying the hero as a policeman and connecting the villain with young people and hippies and showing a certain social awareness, most evident in the presence of blacks and the general sense of racial division and tension.
Dirty Harry is organised formally on the basis of creating tension out of an anticipation of violence. The main narrative movement of the film is structured by this device. The drama opens with an act of violence, the shooting of a girl. An anticipation that the likely response to this shooting will be another act of violence is set up when Harry Callahan, a police inspector with a reputation for quick violence, is made responsible for the investigation. The general narrative interest of the film depends on both maintaining and delaying this anticipation of a reciprocal act of violence.
The tension is maintained at a consistent level throughout the film by organising many of the individual sequences in the same way as the overall narrative. The very first sequence of the film provides a simple example of this. A tension is set up as a man with a rifle slowly and carefully takes aim at a girl swimming in a pool before firing and killing her.. Other sequences are sophistications of this one. Some are simply repetitions in an extended form, like the killer’s first attempt to kill a ‘nigger’ which is interrupted by the police helicopter. Others like the mistaken following of a suspect to the home of his girl friend (Hot Mary), ‘play’ with the anticipation of violence by collapsing it into an anti-climactic humour. Even sequences marginal to the main narrative are organised in the same way; there is an obvious play with the anticipation of violence in the episode of the bank robbery by the black gang.
This ‘anticipating of violence’ device is given another articulation in the film through the shaping of the narrative in terms of the metaphor of a ‘hunt’. Like an animal who is hunted, the killer is portrayed as something savage; apart from the killings, the tooth that he extracts from one of his victims with a pair of pliers and sends to the police as identification is emblematic of that savagery. As in a hunt bait is offered, traps are set—like the sequence when the catholic priest agrees to act as a target while Harry and Chico, his partner, wait on the rooftop. The killer’s home, a room in the bowels of a sports stadium, has the quality of a lair because of its isolation and detachment from the everyday world. In the same way that the blood from a wounded animal provides a lead for the hunter, the killer’s wound provides a lead to his lair. The narrative also has the temporal structure of a hunt; first, the search, then the location of the prey and finally the capture and/or kill.
Another way of creating tension in the film is through the use of ‘confrontation’ situations. The most obvious example of such a situation is provided by the relationship between Harry and the Mayor. In their meetings both men express hostility to each other and verbally jockey for the dominant position.
The relationship between Harry and Chico is another version of the same confrontation situation. Harry expresses immediate hostility to Chico but his early dominance of their relationship is decisively overturned when he makes a fool of himself on the dustbins outside of Hot Mary’s room (‘Now I know why they call you Dirty Harry’ Chico remarks). Unlike the relationship with the Mayor, from then on the two men establish a relationship of rough equality and acceptance. Again, marginal sequences are organised in a similar way; the conflict between Harry and the suicide being a clear example.
The confrontation device is not confined to local sequences. It rivals the hunt in organising the narrative. This rivalry can best be established by referring to the seeming fracture of the hunt organisation in the middle of the film. On the face of it the hunt effectively comes to an end when Harry captures the killer in the sports stadium. The film then seems to become a confrontation. The legal rebuff that Harry receives as a result of the way he captures the killer puts him on equal terms with the killer since he no longer has the support of the police apparatus. In fact, it is the killer who has the support of that apparatus (protecting him from illegal harassment) so it is possible to see the whole film as a confrontation between Harry and the killer with the shift of the police apparatus from one to the other as a mark of their changing positions of strength.
Should the ‘confrontation’ rather than the ‘hunt’ be regarded as the dominant way of organising the narrative? It seems impossible to answer this question conclusively. Throughout, the narrative seems to hesitate between the two. It has already been suggested that the end of the film is a confrontation. But it’s also possible to see it as maintaining the structure of a hunt, though the capture of the killer in the sports stadium is not a true ending in terms of a hunt, in that neither the final capture nor the killing of the prey occurs. The hunter has moved too early and as a consequence has to bide his time before he can make the decisive move again.
This hesitation between hunt and confrontation arises out of the demands of the different strands. The ‘hard boiled’ strand requires that if the hero is to be properly tested, the test must be a substantial one. A hunt necessarily has to be something like a confrontation between equal forces. The monstrosity of the villain that the Gothic strand demands means that he will be a powerful figure who has to be savagely hunted. This reinforces the hesitation between hunt and confrontation.
The situation is confused though by a conflict between the ‘hard boiled’ strand and the journalistic/social one. The journalistic/social strand is responsible for the identification of the villain as a hippy or at least related to hippy culture. Hippy culture is an expressive one (clothes, personal appearance, gesture) and expressive forms of behaviour are identified by the ‘hard boiled’ strand as feminine. Since this strand by and large accepts the conventional estimate of women as the weaker sex (masculinity is defined by such qualities as aggression, physical courage, stoicism) a man with feminine qualities is a dubious proposition as an antagonist. Because of this the confrontation structure is weakened in the film—compare Harry’s response to physical violence when he is assaulted by the killer in the park with the killer’s when he is assaulted by Harry in the sports field. As a result the hunt occasionally has sadistic overtones, produced when the hunter is clearly to be seen as more powerful than the hunted—the final shooting of the killer is a vivid example of this sadism.
On the face of it the ideological operation of the film is a simple one. The film situates itself within the journalistic/social strand’s account of the state of American society in the 1960s as marked by the breakdown of law and order. However, there is an important complication in the central dramatic situation which results from the partial use of the Gothic strand in constructing it.
The presentation of the central drama in terms of multiple killings, seemingly random but linked by their sexual/sadistic qualities, draws upon what might be called the Jack the Ripper legend within the Gothic strand. This legend demands a rather different villain from the journalistic/social one. The belief in the breakdown of law and order asks that the killer be seen as a representative figure whose activities are part of a general social trend. The Jack the Ripper legend asks for a killer who is unrepresentative, since the interest in such a figure depends on his being an unknown and unaccounted for presence.
Dirty Harry deals with these different demands by seemingly opting for the Jack the Ripper legend. The killer remains anonymous and isolated for the first part of the film. Even when he becomes a known figure after his premature capture he is given no name and has no real social existence. But at another level of the film he is given a representative quality. Through a number of what might be termed chains of association he is joined with other figures and events in the film.
Two such chains can be immediately distinguished, one giving the killer a representative quality through sexual associations, and the other through violent crime associations. The links in the chain of sexual association are: the first and third killings where the victims are attractive young girls; the killer’s beating up by the black man, which has sado-masochistic overtones; the killer’s visit to the strip bar. These links have to be put together with a number of other links in the same chain which, while they do not directly involve the killer, strengthen the general picture of sexual disruption, a disruption that centres on the killer. They are: the approach to Harry by the young homosexual in the park; the scene observed by Harry when the nude girl greets her guests; Harry’s fiasco when he is mistaken for a peeper on Hot Mary; Harry’s shooting of the rapist that the Mayor reminds him of.
The links in the chain of violent crime are: the three killings; the killer’s theft from the liquor store (which also brings in the fourteen other robberies that the store has been subjected to); the bank robbery that Harry thwarts; the attempted robbery of Harry by the four hoods in the tunnel when he is taking the ransom to the killer. As with the sexual chain the crimes are of different kinds but put together they form a picture of pervasive violent crime.
These two chains are linked by their common source in the killer, who as a sex murderer combines both in his activities. So the break down in law and order comes to be defined in terms of violent sexual crime. In this way the legend of Jack the Ripper is deployed for the purposes of the breakdown of law and order.
Two further characteristics of the breakdown of law and order as it is portrayed in the film need mentioning. These characteristics are formed by two other chains of association, one of young people and one of black people. These chains have a slightly different position in the film from the previous two in that they cut across the division between law and crime.
The links in the chain of black people are: the black homosexual who is one of the killer’s intended victims but who is saved when the police helicopter spots the killer; the black boy who is murdered; the black gang who rob the bank; the black beating-up specialist; the black doctor who attends to Harry after his fight with the killer. In that it crosses the division between law and crime this chain can be seen as a neutral one, part of an accurate description of the racial composition of urban society in the United States. But if account is taken of the weight of the different links, the neutrality disappears.
The black doctor is completely incidental. The murdered boy (and his grieving mother) have a more substantial role in that the sequence when his body is discovered is a key one in establishing the menace of the killer. Against this one substantial sequence has to be put the high excitement of the bank robbery and the symbolic resonance of the direct and sadistically violent confrontation between white and black with which the sequence ends. The same symbolic resonance attaches to the beating-up scene where a dimension of sexual perversity is added to the violence between white and black. Apart from the dramatic weight of these scenes, they are also caught up in the chains of sex and violent crime. In the face of this the apparent neutrality of the black chain disappears and the chain becomes one of the defining characteristics of the breakdown of law and order.
Similar issues are raised by the place of the youth chain in the film. The links in this chain are: the youth of all the killer’s victims; the hippy girl and the guests she greets; the hoods who try to rob Harry; the homosexual who approaches Harry in the park; and the killer himself. These links are more evenly distributed between law and crime i n that none of them obviously has more weight than the others. The role of this chain in the film is correspondingly split. The pathos created by the youth of the killer’s victims attaches the chain to the law. The youth of the killer himself attaches the chain to crime. This attachment to crime is made stronger in two ways. The killer’s age and general appearance (denims and work shirts, wind cheaters, long hair) relate him to the young hoods who try to rob Harry in the tunnel. His use of a belt with a nuclear disarmament symbol relates him to the hippies. Both of these relations are added to by being implicated in the sexuality and violence chains.
Dirty Harry’s ideological operation therefore seems a familiar one. Social phenomena of different and contradictory kinds are brought together and presented as if they were a unity. So the film portrays lawlessness as a compound of sexual disruption, violence, skin colour and age, a compound which can be symbolised by a killer in the Jack the Ripper tradition.
The character of this ideological operation seems to be confirmed by the account of the law that is offered in the film. Like lawlessness, the law is symbolised through a dominant figure, Harry Callahan. Callahan is given a representative force by his position as a policeman.
The police force is characterised as predominantly white, middle class/ professional, and male. This seems to make the film’s position even more decisively reactionary. Law as a white, middle class/professional male world confronts lawlessness, a world, which if it is not so clearly defined as the one it opposes, is shaded black and young (though it is also predominantly male). However, certain qualifications must be introduced before any final conclusions are reached about the film’s reactionary position.
These qualifications mainly centre around Harry’s relationship to the police force and the consequences this has for the place of the law in the film. Harry has an ambivalent relationship to the force. At the day to day level of its operations he is at one with it in terms of male camaraderie (his relationships with Chico and his immediate superior Bressler) and in terms of its bureaucratic, administrative services (his use of police records and laboratory facilities). He is at odds with it at the more abstract level where the law asserts the general values that distinguish it from lawlessness and anarchy.
The law’s justification as a defence of ordered society is undermined by the presentation of the Mayor. As a politician, the Mayor is, of course, situated at a crucial point where law and society meet. He is presented as a wheeler- dealer, mainly concerned with avoiding trouble—it is these qualities that Harry underlines in his meetings with him. Similarly the District Attorney, when he tells Harry that he is violating the killer’s legal rights, should be asserting the law’s recognition of ambiguity and uncertainty. But his assertion of the law to Harry is so aggressive that law is made to appear an unrealistic hindrance to action.
In this suspicion of the general value of the law, Dirty Harry reveals the scepticism present in the ‘hard boiled’ strand towards all general values and its validation of personal, immediately tangible and local situations. As Hemingway puts it in A Farewell To Arms: ‘Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete name of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates’. This attitude emerged out of the experience of the First World War. Dirty Harry distantly echoes the attitude but in a situation which gives it rather different political implications.
The place of the law in the film is further qualified by the similarities that exist between Harry and the killer. Like the killer, Harry is a loner (where does Harry live ?); like him Harry is a violent man whose violence has sadistic overtones (his treatment of the black bank robber is repeated in his treatment of the killer at the end of the film). In a large measure Harry embodies the same kind of isolated savagery as the killer does.
Harry’s relationship with Chico is the only part of the film that offers the basis for a clear distinction to be made between Harry and the killer. The relationship, moving from initial hostility to affectionate friendship, is the one decisive break in Harry’s isolation. And Chico represents other values than those of police professionalism. As a married man and a graduate he suggests a social existence that is generally missing from the film. His marriage is foregrounded in the conversation between Harry and Chico’s wife after they have been to visit Chico in hospital which high-lights Harry’s sexual isolation. But the force this relationship has in the film is made marginal by the way Chico and his wife are removed from the action to disappear into a kind of no-man’s land.
How limited this break in Harry’s isolation is emerges at the end of the film when, with the final gesture of throwing away his badge, Harry accepts the general logic of his stance, which is complete isolation.
Is it possible for somebody who finds many of Dirty Harry’s ideological attitudes unsympathetic to like and respond to it in any way? Any answer to this must be speculative but would necessarily begin by referring to the instability and ambiguousness of the ideology that the film expresses. To identify it simply as expressing a ‘hardhat’ position would be to ignore important elements of the film. Dirty Harry does not only offer an objectionable position that has to be rejected. It offers a number of meanings that lead in different ideological directions.
These meanings are not completely unrelated to each other. They have something in common that makes it possible for people with different ideologies to have some common experience when viewing it. All three strands that make up the film acknowledge the social existence of violence and aggression. In doing so they touch on a sensitive point in modern industrial society. These societies have rejected, formally at least, violence and aggression but their actual workings are decisively marked by them (economic life, war, crime, sport etc.) An important part of the appeal of Dirty Harry seems to be its open acknowledgement of this contradiction; there is a sense in which the film seems to be violating a taboo in its insistence on the pervasiveness of violence. This sense of violation is encapsulated in the early scene in the Mayor’s office when the killer’s first ransom note is projected on a screen. The contrast is between the aggressive crudity of the note and the lush decor and orderliness of the Mayor’s office, a contrast underlined by the Mayor’s inability to read the end of the note which uses the objectionably crude word ‘nigger’.
The interest of a film like Dirty Harry is not exclusively ideological. There is another level of interest provided by the formal characteristics of the film and the problems these set up. (There may well be a relationship between this level and the ideological but that relationship is not easy to discern.) The most striking formal characteristic of the film is the control over the movement of the narrative. The basic formal strategy of the film has already been described. That strategy depends on the orchestration of tension. By keeping the narrative situation simple and its development clear, tension is maintained at a high level throughout. But this sets up the danger of limited interest and monotony. The danger is avoided by the use of a series of false climaxes (the main ones being the pursuit of the killer which turns into the Peeping Tom fiasco at Hot Mary’s and the seeming capture of the killer in the baseball stadium).
So a basic pattern of urgently expecting the capture of the killer while at the same time regularly delaying it is set up. Perhaps the film’s most obvious failure is the effect of the District Attorney sequences in this pattern. The contrast between the clumsiness of this as a false climax and the deftness of the Peeping Tom sequences is striking. This failure comes from giving an ideological solution to a problem that demands a formal one.
Alan Lovell
Alan Lovell, Don Siegel: American Cinema. BFI Series. British Film Institute, 1975
