“A crisp, beautifully paced film, full of Siegel’s wonderful coups of cutting and framing.” — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
“This is a movie about a couple of killers,” declares the trailer for director Don Siegel’s controversial, long-debated landmark introducing Inspector “Dirty Harry” Callahan, embodied with steely resolve by the legendary Clint Eastwood. Assigned to track down a sadistic sniper known as Scorpio (an unmistakable echo of the Zodiac murders then haunting San Francisco), Harry races against time to stop a string of random killings and kidnappings, even as the case pushes him toward increasingly extralegal methods. What begins as a procedural pursuit steadily erodes the boundary between cop and criminal.
Hailed and criticized in equal measure by film critic Pauline Kael for its visceral force and ideological provocation, Dirty Harry has since been reinterpreted not as a blunt endorsement of vigilante justice but as a probing examination of it, locating its tension in the unsettling resemblance between hunter and prey. Extending the political ambiguity of his own Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel’s taut pacing and exacting visual design collapse moral distance at every turn. Less a conventional cop movie than a kind of urban horror film, Dirty Harry thrills us, provokes us, and ultimately leaves us with a disquieting symmetry in which justice and brutality become almost indistinguishable.
Celebrate Clint Eastwood’s 96th birthday at the Colonial Theatre with a 55th Anniversary screening of one of his most iconic films, presented on a 35mm IB Technicolor print courtesy of Exhumed Films.
