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Action, Crime, Thriller 102 min R
Rotten Tomatoes89%Metacritic87IMDb
Detective Harry Callahan. He doesn't break murder cases. He smashes them.
When a madman dubbed 'Scorpio' terrorizes San Francisco, hard-nosed cop, Harry Callahan – famous for his take-no-prisoners approach to law enforcement – is tasked with hunting down the psychopath.
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Effortless, plot-driven, meticulous and bleak.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
This is one of these films that you can watch time and time again and still enjoy. Certainly, it's not the best crime story ever committed to film: the actual plot is comparatively straightforward with little by way of anything subtle, but I doubt you will readily find a more charismatic leading man who manages to combine humour, menace and style than Clint Eastwood ("Callahan"). He is a no-nonsense cop who is on the trail of a seriously psychopathic serial killer. After a few red-herrings, we discover quite quickly who the perpetrator actually is - that chase isn't really the point. It is what ensues now - a tense and suspenseful battle of wills between Eastwood and the wonderfully seedy, menacing and maddening Andrew Robinson whose performance here has to be up there with the best, all round, characterisations of any antagonist I've ever seen. Don Siegel keeps the action alive and the cast tightly knit; the dialogue - aside from the now infamous pithy quotes from "Callahan" - is potently sparing. The tension builds-up excellently using the cinematography of the city and a superb score from Lalo Shifrin whilst simultaneously exposing us to what is essentially the seamy, gritty und
Read the whole review on TMDBRecently I've considered drastically negatively re-appraising Clint Eastwood's work, both directorially and as a thespian, as a knee-jerk reaction to his constant defense of the more racially-bigoted face of conservative America, but because of what his work has meant to me as a cinephile over the years, plus in tribute to everyone else's work involved in this film, particularly director Don Siegel's, that simply wouldn't be fair. As well, you're basically getting, boiled down in its 103-minute timespan, 45 years after the fact, the main dilemma facing the USA. Whose rights are more important--the good guys' or the bad guys'? If they're equal, should they be considered equal, and what does that mean to the law enforcement and judicial systems? Quite simply, THE most important American-made film of the past 50 years. NOT my very favourite (that's '2001: A Space Odyssey'), but the most significant. And it hasn't aged a single day because of it.
Read the whole review on TMDBMore than iconography here in dynamite Siegel/Eastwood teaming. The film opens with a shot of a memorial wall in praise of the San Francisco Police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty, a SFPD badge is prominent as the camera scrolls down the ream of names on the wall. Cut to a rooftop sniper shooting a girl taking a swim in a swimming pool, cut to the coolest looking cop you have ever seen making his way to the rooftop scene, he stands and surveys the whole of the San Francisco bay area, this is, his area, and we know we are in for a very special film indeed. Dirty Harry is now something of an institution, the film that pushed the boundaries of cops versus bad guys movies, some of the film's dialogue became part of modern day speak, and it's the film that propelled Clint Eastwood into the stratosphere of super stardom. Often tagged as a fascist film, I think it's more a cynical look at the rights of criminals because Harry is everyone who has ever been a victim of crime, he will do what it takes to take down the criminals festering in society, you break the law and Harry will get you any way he can. Here Harry is on the trail of Scorpio, a ruthless sniper killing at r
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“Does it glamorize what it means to condemn?”
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20 profiled raters. Loved most by The Cartographers; disliked most by The Genre Devotees.
If you loved this film, the television, the book, the music, the game.
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