The Dirty Harry movies have been repackaged as a boxed set. Mark Harris in Slate recapitulates the reaction to the movies. His is a traditional narrative about the movies. I think the traditional narrative about the movies ignores the context in which they were made.
Many of the films made in the years after World War II had a moral ambiguity to them. Yes, these were the years of the films of John Ford with his moral clarity, but these were also the years of film noir. “D.O.A.” featured Edmond O’Brien as a man who has been poisoned and will die but has enough time to find out who poisoned him. These movies tapped into the national air in which country had been living during the war. Who lives? Who dies? It is somewhat arbitrary. Good men died unjustly. Bad men survived unjustly.
During the Vietnam war, there were stories about atrocities committed by American soldiers. The national air favored survival: do what you have to do to survive and return home to us. Every family knew someone in Vietnam and we were okay with doing whatever it took to come home.
This was the environment in which the first movie was made. Dirty Harry does whatever is required to get the information to save the girl. Harry Callahan rebels at the invocation of rights in the absence of responsibility. He goads Scorpio, knowing that Scorpio will offer him an opportunity to administer a rational justice.
There was a huge critical backlash to the first movie. The ‘F’ word was thrown around a good deal and Clint Eastwood made the second movie where Dirty Harry took on a real fascist death squad. The other movies were just shaking the money tree.
Any discussion of these movies and the Dirty Harry character that ignores the context in which the movies were made and initially viewed is simply not valid. It would be equivalent to discussing “High Noon” without acknowledging the Cold War, reducing it to just another movie about a lawman and bad guys.