Home \ Signature Roles \ Dirty Harry (1971) — Clint Eastwood
CLINT EASTWOOD · 1971 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Harry Callahan is a San Francisco police inspector hunting the Scorpio killer, a sniper terrorizing the city, and he does it by breaking every rule his superiors hold dear.
Harry Callahan is a San Francisco police inspector hunting the Scorpio killer, a sniper terrorizing the city, and he does it by breaking every rule his superiors hold dear. Clint Eastwood plays Harry as a man of few words and absolute certainty: the .44 Magnum, the squint, and the question — whether a punk feels lucky — that became one of the most quoted lines in film history.
The film was a sensation and a controversy. Critics debated whether it was fascist, audiences made it a hit, and Eastwood, who had played amoral gunfighters in Italy, now brought that moral ambiguity home to an American city. Four sequels followed, but the original remains the definitive statement: a thriller about a man who believes the law protects the wrong people, played by an actor who never quite tells you whether he agrees.
