Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash JoeStreet. University Press of Florida, 2016.

Abstract

Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash Joe Street. University Press of Florida, 2016.Astonishingly, Clint Eastwood was not the first casting choice for Don Siegel's Harry (1971), but after Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne (among others) turned it down, Eastwood would transform into a role that would be his most iconic of a sixty-plus-year career. In four sequels (Magnum Force [1973], The Enforcer [1976], Sudden Impact [1983], and The Dead Pool [1988]), the character's wisecracks became catchphrases (most notably, Go ahead, make my day). Indeed, Harry Callahan remains one of the most (in)famous characters in Hollywood history. Audiences loved him, even as some critics (such as Pauline Kael) pointed to the character's not-so-subtle fascist tendencies and attitudes. In Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash, surprisingly the first dedicated monograph devoted to the landmark film, Joe Street examines the political climate that birthed a film like Harry and how the titular character became a near-perfect representation of modern American conservatism (136).Street first details the specifics of the EastwoodSiegel collaborative partnership, as Siegel helmed four other films with Eastwood as his lead. The first two chapters cover Eastwood's arduous rise to stardom before briefly addressing the genres and cinematic movements that made a film like Harry possible. Street also sets the film in sociocultural context, especially in how it reflects Californian politics of the 1960s, while confronting the associated with its Bay Area milieu. Harry's commonsense approach to crime, in addition to expressing a greater concern for the rights of victims over the rights of criminals, partly explains his appeal to conservative viewers. This is not to say that Harry can appropriately be labeled right-wing propaganda, but the film was suspicious of bureaucratic liberalism and the counterculture. Harry's city, San Francisco, was especially emblematic of where culture had gone wrong: Dirty Harry, then, reveals that the conservative backlash responded not only to liberal lawmaking but also to urban transformation and the perceived problems brought to the cities by the counterculture which itself emerged in part as a consequence of social liberalism (90). Consequently, Street devotes an entire chapter to how San Francisco functions as a character, including a scene-by-scene textual analysis of the film, scrutiny that never grows tedious. …