Dirty Harry 1971

How ‘Dirty Harry’ Paved the Way for 50 Years of Complicated Movie Cops

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One thing that all the great, iconic, landmark Hollywood films of any era have in common is universality. As Clint Eastwood’s iconic serial killer thriller “Dirty Harry” turns 50 this week, the Don Siegel film’s rocky critical reception back in 1971 only temporarily obscured the pic’s primal pull and lasting (not “Sudden”) impact. Like “Casablanca” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” both powerfully relevant to World War II survivors, or “Grapes of Wrath,” which spoke to Depression era audiences, or “In the Heat of the Night” with its relevance to the Civil Rights revolution, “Harry” was the man of the Nixon/Law and Order moment, which we now see was much a bigger harbinger of tumultuous social change than just Tricky Dick and the transitory winds blown up by a single political figure.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a multitude of globally significant events and trends shaped the public’s tastes – and fears – both here and abroad.

Distrust of authority, a staple characteristic of the 60s youth culture, got revved up by seismic shocks such as 1968’s Chicago Democratic Convention catastrophe and 1970’s Kent State massacre here, and the Prague Spring crackdown and the Paris to Cannes and Beyond revolution Over There.

Fears of lawlessness were stoked by the newly victorious GOP during the 1968 election and the Nixon/Agnew presidential leadership team’s almost daily exploitation of those fears kept crime on page one for several years.

Vietnam put a kind of graphic violence that Americans had never seen, on an endless television loop.

Woodstock’s peaceful vibes were drowned in the blood of the Manson killings and the Altamont debacle. “I saw Satan laughing with delight” wasn’t just a casual observation in 1971, it was a lyric from an earworm hit song called “American Pie,” which was played on every station in the country.

Enter “Dirty Harry.” 50 years old and still remarkable for director Don Siegel’s virtuoso, operatic staging of its many memorable action sequences, driven by the film’s simple crime tale of a psycho serial killer and the unorthodox homicide detective on his trail in early ‘70s San Francisco, “Dirty Harry” is a landmark American policier not just because it kicks major action film ass, (and it still does) but because it so effectively tapped into the era’s anxieties and wound up completely transcending the cop film genre.

“Harry” spoke loudly and forcefully not just to Nixon and Agnew’s law and order conservative base, but to liberals and even hippies who responded to the film’s exhilarating joust between Good and Evil. “Easy Rider,” the breakout hit of 1969 culminates with some good ole boys shooting them some hippies. James Dickey’s 1970 novel “Deliverance” pits some regular guys against the backwoods cousins of those good ole boys and proceeds to graphically and violently turn those emblematic late ‘60s American tables.

By 1971, so many genies had escaped from so many bottles, that movie theaters already bursting with violent actioners thanks to newly liberal rules for violent content, became even bloodier as the filmmakers focused their cameras on socially relevant subjects that just happened to be relentlessly, often terrifyingly violent, and depraved.

In just that one year, 1971, half of the annual top 20 box office earners were crime movies of one stripe or another. Along with Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry,” you have: William Friedkin’s heroin trade epic, “The French Connection,” breakout indies via white Native American wannabe Tom Laughlin’s “Billy Jack” and black poet Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971), the most famous of the popular blaxploitation oeuvre, “Shaft.” Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” imagines gang crime in the future, while Alan J. Pakula’s “Klute” makes crime romantic; there’s a crime thriller without cops, Clint Eastwood’s “Play Misty for Me” and Daniel Mann’s “Willard” is a crime story where the criminals are literally, as in James Cagney’s famous epithet, “dirty rats.”

But if “Dirty Harry” simply gave voice to the fears of the era, or simply entertained by virtue of Clint Eastwood’s timeless star quality and Siegel’s total cinema mastery, it wouldn’t have endured as one of the landmark American crime films of the last century. For better or worse, it changed the course of American genre filmmaking and the culture in general. “Dirty Harry’s” key phrase, “Do I feel lucky?” fueled a million bad standup comic impersonations of the baddest of all bad cops.

And the idea that cops needed to be as twisted and bloodthirsty as the villains they’re chasing won’t be foreign to anyone who’s seen any of the Batman films, whether directed by Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher or Christopher Nolan. But back in simpler times, such as the pre comic book and fantasy film franchise dominated era of the ‘70s, superheroes were no match for real life crimefighting heroes who excelled at and/or reveled in stomping lawbreaking creeps wherever they’re found.

While Peter Yates’ “Bullitt” (1968) established the cool, hip, tough, relentless cop before “Harry,” “Bullitt” never aspired to transcend the limitations of the cop movie and it doesn’t rise to the mythical level of “Harry’s” surreal urban landscapes and it’s no match for “Harry’s” powerful, archetypal war which is less cop vs killer and more knight vs dragon.
In the hands of Don Siegel, Kezar Stadium in the nighttime fog is a kind of Wagnerian valley where spirits collide. And when Harry finally blasts Scorpio under the suddenly noon day bright field lights, Siegel delivers maybe the greatest zoom cut in the history of movies. From Harry’s POV, we look down into Scorpio’s contorted, anguished face as he screams in pain and begs for mercy.Then, in less than a heartbeat, the camera is now skybound and flying away from the pathetic, sobbing psycho killer laid out on a hundred yards of green football field. It’s as someone, a bird perhaps, has seen too much and must flee. Or perhaps they’re fleeing because they know they’ve revealed too much.There are at least a dozen such moments or set pieces in “Harry,” all expertly edited and paced so shrewdly that the cat and mouse simplicity of the story never slows down long enough for the viewer to analyze it. “Harry” bursts with almost too many unforgettable moments, too much transgressive behavior such as the sequence where Scorpio almost romantically engages with the guy he’s paying to beat him to a pulp. The midnight rendezvous, where Scorpio mercilessly drags Harry across myriad San Francisco paths, parks, and landmarks, finally concludes with a potent reminder of God’s absence in the story at hand.

“Harry” slides in nicely beside several other kinetically poetic genre film masterpieces composed by Siegel. There’s the black and white poem of ‘50s paranoia, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers;” the elegiac yet darkly, ironic ode to both the end of the West and the end of the Wayne, “The Shootist;” his swampy and steamy Civil War chamber study, “Beguiled;” and Siegel’s Bay Area (again) paean to prisons and Warner Bros. movies about them, “Escape from Alcatraz.”

So even though “Billy Jack” sold more tickets than “Harry,” the earnest and often-hamfisted Counterculture meets Beaucoup Beatdowns indie hit was hard to replicate, and few did, save Laughlin who also cleaned up with “The Trial of Billy Jack.”

Andy Robinson is Scorpio

But following “Harry” in the next few years of the ‘70s, cops like “Harry,” i.e. with vigilante justice on the brain and/or vigilantes who think they’re cops, start showing up everywhere. There’s Michael Winner’s “Death Wish” (1974) which posits that just about any Tom, Dick or Dirty Harry, even an architect named Paul, can help clean up the streets; Phil Karlson’s “Walking Tall” (1973) turns the urbane, natty Harry into the flannel wearing red state local gendarme Buford Pusser; Jonathan Kaplan’s “White Line Fever” (1975) asserts that even a simple truckdriver can clear house on deadly crooks but may not live to brag about it; Ivan Passer’s wry, ironic “Law and Disorder” (1974) turns a wonderfully jaundiced and Czech eye on much of the tough on crime crowd’s own vigilante tomfoolery.

Now, here we are, in another moment where crime is (said to be) getting the upper hand. Smashing and grabbing is smashing and grabbing headlines, homicide rates in the big cities haven’t been this high since Reagan was president and crack was new. Retailers are boarding up their windows and again the GOP is pounding home the point, this time to a Democratic Administration clearly on the defensive.

Is this the moment for another “Harry?” In my view, there will only be one, just as there will only be that one strange moment when the hippie dream crashed into several dark realities and Americans still believed a tall guy with a big gun was going to blow away all the badness in the world.

Does “Harry” still work as a great movie, as a piece of film art, as an engrossing genre entertainment? I would suggest if you’ve never seen it, or if it’s been a decade or five since your last viewing, that you might take a chance on “Harry.”

But that leads to this obvious question you’ve got to ask yourself: “Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”

The Pinnacle of ‘High Sierra’ 1941

Humphrey Bogart as Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh’s gangster moviePHOTO: 

CRITERION COLLECTION

By Kristin M. JonesOct. 9, 2021 WALL ST JOURNAL

A notorious desperado, Roy Earle ( Humphrey Bogart ), is released from prison, and the first thing he wants to do is take a walk in a park. Asked if he is feeling all right, he says, “I will be, just as soon as I make sure that grass is still green and trees are still growing.” Bogart’s Earle breathes in the free air and becomes a character to remember.

The tale is “High Sierra” (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh [above], a gangster movie with a melancholy undertow that is one of many unforgettable films in various genres Walsh made during his long, prolific, often-underappreciated career. 

Made for Warner Bros. and adapted from a novel by W.R. Burnett, who wrote the screenplay with John Huston, “High Sierra” has the fluid storytelling, visual beauty and emotional and physical momentum characteristic of Walsh’s work. Earle is set free only to hurtle into darkness and a harrowing showdown on a mountainside.

Humphrey Bogart as Roy EarlePHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION

Bogart was eager to be cast as Earle, after many less challenging parts. In Walsh’s electrifying “The Roaring Twenties” (1939), he played a gangster who is hard to the core. Earle is more complex—an Indiana farm boy turned bank robber who endured over eight years in prison and, set loose again, can’t help searching for what he lost along the way. Ida Lupino, who, alongside Bogart, had delivered a strong performance in Walsh’s darkly gripping trucking-world drama “They Drive by Night” (1940), also starred, receiving top billing.

After his release, the aging Earle drives west to carry out a jewel heist at a California resort hotel for an ailing friend who bought his pardon, Big Mac ( Donald MacBride ). He meets up at a mountain camp with two young, hotheaded gang members and a woman one of the men picked up in a Los Angeles dime-a-dance joint, Marie (Lupino).

Ida Lupino as MariePHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION

Marie is a kindred spirit—smart, tough and vulnerable, with a similar urge to break out of unbearable situations. Earle lets her stay. The two become a makeshift family with a stray dog, Pard, although Earle wastes attention on Velma ( Joan Leslie ), a sheltered and ultimately ungrateful young woman he met along his journey. After the caper goes wrong, hope waxes and wanes as the story moves toward a breathtaking climax, shot brilliantly on location.

In a small but unsettling comic role, Willie Best plays Algernon, a superstitious young handyman at the camp. The Criterion release includes an interview with the film and media historian Miriam J. Petty, who speaks about this talented Black actor’s career and the legacy of such limiting and stereotyped roles in Hollywood. Noting how this flattened character highlights the depth of Earle’s, she says: “He’s not there to show us things about Algernon. He’s there to reveal things about Roy Earle.”

In an excellent discussion between the critic Farran Smith
Nehme and Dave Kehr, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, that is included with the release, Mr. Kehr says: “Everybody has their own idea of what the essence of cinema is. And I think, to me, it’s Raoul Walsh—it’s movement, it’s matching shots, it’s moving through space, it’s texture and light and sound.”

THE ASCENT 1977

CRITERION COLLECTION

The Ascent: Out in the Cold

By Fanny Howe

JAN 26, 2021By Fanny Howe

Larisa Shepitko was born in eastern Ukraine in 1938. Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, who left the family, fought in World War II. Her mother raised her and her two siblings on her own, and the moment Larisa graduated from school, she was on the road to Moscow to study filmmaking. She was sixteen and sure of her vocation.

On the set of The Ascent

She entered the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), where Andrei Tarkovsky was then still studying. The war had been permanently etched into the minds of Soviet children, who had witnessed its atrocities or lived with their effects. By the time of the cultural thaw that began after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, they were beginning to be able to express in film and literature what they had seen, and in this way analyze it beyond politics and psychology.

At film school, Shepitko found her mentor in Alexander Dovzhenko, a major figure of early Soviet cinema. The realist films being made throughout Europe in the postwar period provide a glimpse of a time before women had or expected much. We still stirred the batter and shook out the broom and changed the sheets by turning them over. (The last children to witness this have almost disappeared.) But Shepitko was destined for more.

From her first feature, her graduation film, Heat (1963), she was recognized and awarded. She went on to make three more feature-length films—Wings (1966), You and I (1971), and The Ascent (1977)—in addition to two student shorts, a segment of an omnibus film, and a movie for television. 

Her greatest works possess a startling intimacy: Wings is the story of a former fighter pilot, once ecstatic in the air, now dulled by her return to ordinary earth as a school principal; The Ascent is a wartime parable whose stark winter landscapes throw its characters’ suffering into terrible relief. In both of these, the whiteness of snow and clouds punctuates the plight of the human figures.

The Ascent is also particularly haunting for its Christian symbolism. Religious practices that were by and large derived from the Eastern-rite Catholic Church in Ukraine lingered underground there after the churches were shut down by Stalin. The relics of Christianity still turn up, shadowy and broken, in the backgrounds of many Soviet postwar productions. You see this even in works by the most secular filmmakers, well into the eighties; Shepitko, who later in life found a spirituality that inclined toward the mystic, did not regard herself as religious.

Tall, dark, and good-looking, Shepitko married the Russian director Elem Klimov (whose Come and See, like The Ascent, ranks among the great war films) and gave birth to a son, Anton. She was continually interrupted by illness and accident—she suffered from hepatitis during the making of Heat, sometimes becoming so ill that she directed from a stretcher; and, while shooting her short The Homeland of Electricity (1967), seriously injured her spine in a fall—but did not hesitate to go to the limits with her actors and crew. She shot her last film in perilously cold weather. Shepitko had a continuing fear of death that made her both superstitious and visionary. She died at age forty-one in a car crash.

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The story of The Ascent—based on the 1970 novella Sotnikov by Vasil Bykov—is a simple one: two Soviet partisans get separated from their unit; they are lost and lashed by snow and wind. The film opens in an empty white field that slowly unfolds into a cluster of soldiers, who rise to their feet, carrying their belongings with them. It is not long before the stakes of the story are established: Shots ring out like bells. The people fall and run; one turns and shoots back and hits someone as the rest climb toward the hills and woods. After this retreat, Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) and Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) leave in search of supplies and sustenance.

The Ascent is set in Belorussia, the site of a Nazi genocide. Survival by collaboration was rife, and Nazi massacres of peasants and Jewish people frequent. Shepitko had been a child in the world where this was happening. Her movie shifts between the business of survival and another ultimate question: Why live in such a world? 

The drama is about varieties of snow as much as it is about varieties of religious experience. The snow blinds you, gets in your boots, freezes your feet and hands, breaks on your lips, and slows you down. In the film, there is no straight path through it, partly because the snow has obliterated almost any signs of paths or stopping places. The sites where action occurs have either been burned to the ground or are about to be.

There is a syndrome called visual snow syndrome, in which white dots are endlessly sprinkled across a person’s field of vision—comparable to the “snow” we know on analog screens. Visual snow, all you can see, the face of Christ just as easily found in there as the shape of a tree—an after­image that trails the snap glance, organizing it into the hollow face we know from painting and film. In a similar fashion, the viewer scours the forbidding, snowbound images of The Ascent for such signs of life and meaning. Throughout the film, there are traces of a dying Christ, of pale martyr­dom, of pure nihilism. Nothing comes to save or enlighten the two soldiers. Their faces and actions are recapitulations of faces and actions that have occurred throughout history.

On the set of The Ascent

Shepitko was there for the iciest days on the set of The Ascent, even though she was frequently ill. It was grueling to shoot in the cold, but her cast and crew were there to accompany her in her attempt to account for the brutality that had overtaken the world in the first several years of her life. “The impression of a global calamity certainly left an indelible mark in my childhood mind,” Shepitko said.
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 the struggle down on the ground is the most ineffaceably haunting aspect of The Ascent. The sun spreads its platinum light across floor and furniture and on the awful evil of the suited man at the desk who organizes tools for torture, the shiny implements used by doctors around the world. The prisoner’s idealism and defiance only make the interrogator smile. When the prisoner asks him what he was before the war, the laugh is on the prisoner when the man all but says, I was like you.

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