Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street Paul Cohen and Deborah Allison Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, and the Conservative Backlash Joe Street University Press of Florida, 2016. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8130-6167-2 (hbk) Countless words have already been expended on Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel, 1971) and its four film sequels, ranging from popular criticism to scholarly appraisals of their ideological aspects, including their seemingly simple yet often muddled representation of issues related to law and order; racial, sexual and economic politics; and ideas of national identity. Indeed, such is the level of interest generated by the franchise, it seems astonishing that it has taken a full forty-five years from Dirty Harry’s release for a sustained book-length study to pull together the key issues and debates the films have sparked. Happily, Street’s work proves worth the wait. Thorough, clearly structured, and incisive, it functions as a valuable case study of how popular cinema both reflected and fuelled widespread political and cultural anxieties at a particular historical moment. At the same time, it encourages readers to reflect on both the ongoing reciprocity between culture and politics, and the contemporary challenges of America’s continued struggles to address the societal discontents that first spawned the Harry Callahan persona and which have ensured he remains a simultaneously popular and controversial figure. Beginning with an introductory essay in which he lays out “why Dirty Harry matters,” Street proceeds to explore the origins, core texts, and paratexts of the franchise, and its cultural and political resonance, in six sharply focused chapters. The first features a relatively brief survey of the development of Clint Eastwood’s star image (which became, and remains, inextricably linked with the Harry persona) alongside issues of authorship associated with his serial collaboration with director Don Siegel. The second appraises the various cultural, political and cinematic forebears that intertwined to establish Dirty Harry’s “tone, themes, and subtexts, including its political position” (11–12), with the third centered squarely on a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the first Dirty Harry film. In the three final chapters, Street explores less trodden ground: the four film sequels; “Callahan’s echoes in conservative political rhetoric and Eastwood’s later film career” (13); and a range of other official and unofficial Harry paratexts, from spin-off novels and video games to graphic novels and fan fiction. Street’s general approach to the Dirty Harry franchise echoes that of his earlier book, The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Florida, 2007). A British-based lecturer in American history, he shows himself to be well versed in American politics and economic policy of the second half of the twentieth century and uses this knowledge to ground his arguments about the domestic climate from which Dirty Harry and its paratexts arose. Summarizing relevant political moments and movements efficiently, and with the detached clarity of an outsider, he argues that “like Nixon, Reagan, and the [End Page 23] Republicans, the film cast a critical eye over the previous decade’s missteps and mistakes, both from a national and a local perspective” (64). Whereas national perspectives feature widely (if often more sketchily) in other critical appraisals of Dirty Harry, Street’s attention to the local proves valuable and original. For instance, he describes how the regeneration of San Francisco under mayor Joseph Alioto in the late 1960s and early 1970s contributed to the displacement and disenfranchisement of thousands of poor, single, white men (79), and offers textual evidence to suggest that Callahan’s antagonist Scorpio might be one such man. “Even as it presents Scorpio as wholly unsympathetic,” Street argues, “Dirty Harry hints at the circumstances that produced such a character, while again suggesting that the 1960s liberalism caused more problems than it solved” (80). As the title of the book suggests, and in line with Street’s stated purpose, later chapters follow through his proposal that “Callahan be appreciated as a symbol of the conservative backlash of the post-1960s period” (14). While continuing to locate his textual analysis primarily within the framework of...