Dirty Harry

There are plenty of ways to explore the tension between constitutional protections and justice.  You can take the hyper-realistic approach of "The Wire," which shows police officers' limitations--and their creative solutions--in painstaking detail.  You can take the more abstract approach of 1969's "Point Blank," which casts doubt on the whole notion of authority and bureaucracy.  You can also create a metaphor for the war on terrorism, as "The Dark Knight" does.

Or you blast all those constitutional protections ratified by our Founding Fathers away with a .44 Magnum, as "Dirty Harry" does.

"Dirty Harry" stacks the deck as heavily as possible.  A psychopathic killer has taken a young girl hostage and threatened to kill her.  The only way to save the girl is to violate his constitutional rights against search and seizure.  Naturally, the killer also pays someone to beat him up so he can claim police brutality.  I'm sure these kinds of scenarios occur all the time.

When it's not peeing on the Constitution, "Dirty Harry" has plenty of time for hypocrisy and stereotyping.  Our titular hero shakes his head at the strip clubs that blight San Francisco, but the film has no problem taking us inside a club and showing a few shots of the girls--you know, just to demonstrate how depraved they are.  The camera also lingers over the naked body of an ostensibly 14-year-old girl.  And Harry engages in a little Peeping Tom action while on surveillance.

And, hey, since we're in San Francisco, why not throw in a few homophobic caricatures?  Oh, and of course, all the black characters are thugs, but that's par for the course for this time period.

Get past all the bigotry and you'll find the film is almost charmingly lo-fi.  There are plenty of poorly shot night scenes and dubbed dialogue.  In one set piece, Harry has to run from pay phone to pay phone to prevent the killer from executing the girl.  The scene is meant to be gripping, but it amounts to 10 minutes of watching Clint Eastwood run.

But all the amusing mediocrity in the world couldn't redeem a film this pig-headed.