MAKING PUNKS WONDER IF THEY FEEL LUCKY:

THE LIFE & LEGEND OF INSPECTOR HARRY CALLAHAN

By Jim Doherty

 

A slightly different version of this article was originally published in the Winter 2008 issue of Mystery Readers Journal . Since I wrote something about the most iconic cop in Los Angeles last issue, I thought it would be appropriate to follow it up with something about the most iconic cop from California 's northern metropolis, and since I already had one handy, I hope no one will mind if I recycle it.

 

Things would have been very different if Frank Sinatra hadn't broken his wrist some years earlier.

He'd been all set to play a tough, grizzled veteran NYPD detective, on the verge of retirement, whose last case would pit him against a murderer of epic viciousness and almost supernatural evil. The script, originally titled Dead Right , by married screenwriters Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink had, in fact, been written with Sinatra in mind.

But that long-ago wrist injury was still occasionally painful, and Sinatra found the huge sidearm that was to be his character's signature weapon, a Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum, too heavy to wield comfortably, so a new actor had to be cast.

Paul Newman was approached, but he was not altogether comfortable with the politics of the script. He did however, suggest that a younger actor, who'd been quite a success on the TV series Rawhide , and who had gone on to make a name for himself in a series of Italian-made westerns directed by Sergio Leone, might be right for the part.

That young actor, a fellow named Clint Eastwood, was contacted. And he was interested. A reliable box-office draw, thanks to those “spaghetti westerns,” though not yet an full-fledged super-star, he'd only played a contemporary cop role once, and that single role, as the titular rural sheriff's deputy suddenly transplanted to the concrete canyons of Manhattan in Coogan's Bluff (Universal, 1968), was really just an extension of the cowboy/gunfighter parts he was already so identified with. The big-city detective in the Finks' script, a thoroughly urban character who, nevertheless, had a decided preference for frontier-style justice, would simultaneously fit him like a glove yet be perceived as a change of pace. Yes, he was definitely interested. So interested, in fact, that he arranged to have some of the production responsibilities of the film shouldered by his own company, Malpaso Productions. At Eastwood's suggestion, Don Siegel, who'd already directed Eastwood in several films, including Coogan's Bluff , and who was something of a old hand at cop films, having also helmed Private Hell 36 (Filmakers, 1954), Madigan (Universal, 1968), and the San Francisco-set The Lineup ( Columbia , 1958), was hired as the director.

Eastwood's casting meant the script had to be heavily rewritten. In new drafts, the cop character was made considerably younger, and the locale, at Eastwood's request, was changed from NYC to San Francisco , Eastwood's home town. Scenes were added that didn't necessarily advance the plot, but did provide insight into the hero's character. Dean Reisner was brought in to do some of the revisions, and was added to the credits. John Milius also did some revisions, but remained uncredited. Now, more than 35 years later, it's no longer clear which of the changes, the youth of the protagonist, the new setting in The City by the Bay, the additional scenes and dialog, etc., were Reisner's, which were Milius's, and which the Finks.

The next step was casting a villain. The killer that Eastwood's character, Homicide Inspector Harry Callahan, would be trying to nail, was supposed to be baby-faced but deadly, a superb marksman, and totally devoid of conscience.

Siegel suggested Audie Murphy, whose shy demeanor and boyishly handsome looks belied his reputation as the US Army's most efficient and deadliest infantryman during World War II. Still youthful looking despite the more than 25 years that had passed since his combat days, Murphy, America's most decorated serviceman, who'd been built into a movie star after the War on the basis of his superb military record, reportedly expressed some interest. Sadly, he died in an airplane crash before filming could start. Over his years in Hollywood, Murphy had developed into a better actor than he'd ever been given credit for, and, while most of his roles were heroic, he'd occasionally played bad guys with great effectiveness, as in the western film No Name on the Bullet (Universal, 1959), in which he portrayed a thoroughly frightening hired killer. Given the chance, he'd have probably excelled as Inspector Callahan's nemesis, but circumstances decreed otherwise, and a new actor had to found.

Forced to look elsewhere, Siegel cast a relatively unknown actor named Andy Robinson, whom he'd seen in a stage adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot . Robinson, then in his late 20's, had precisely the “choir boy” looks Siegel was going for.

Robinson's character, referred only by the self-adopted sobriquet “Scorpio,” conflated elements of several highly publicized criminals from real life. Like Charles Whitman, Scorpio is a highly skilled sharpshooter who kills innocent people from rooftops with a specially equipped sniper rifle. Like Gary Steven Krist, he kidnaps a young girl, buries her alive in a box with a limited amount of air, and demands a ransom for her release. And, like the Bay Area serial killer known only as “The Zodiac,” he adopts a name derived from astrology and uses it to sign taunting letters he sends to the police.

With the revised script completed and a cast in place, filming proceeded briskly and was completed on June 18, 1971 . The movie, now titled Dirty Harry , was released by Warner Brothers on December 23. Another cop film, The French Connection (20th/Fox, 1971), had appeared in theatres a few weeks earlier to critical acclaim, and its star, Gene Hackman, was already being talked about as an almost certain Oscar-winner for his role as a determined NYPD narcotics detective. Some feared that there wouldn't be room for two determined cops in the nation's movie theatres, and that Dirty Harry would compare badly to The French Connection . They needn't have worried. The French Connection did generally fare better with critics (though Jay Cocks of Time gave Dirty Harry a glowing review and put it on his Top Ten for 1971), but the audiences were just wild about Harry.

The film derived its title from the nickname that the hero has been given by his colleagues, a name he's earned because he gets all the dirtiest, most unpleasant assignments. He packs a .44 Magnum (“the most powerful handgun made”), which he's not at all reluctant to use (“When I see a man chasing a woman with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy.”) He's contemptuous of politics, of bureaucratic C.S., and of rules that keep him from getting between the bad guys and the people he's sworn to protect. And he's about to get his dirtiest assignment ever.

A sniper styling himself “Scorpio” has been killing people from rooftops, and he threatens to keep on doing it unless the people of San Francisco pay him not to. A stakeout designed to flush Scorpio results in a shootout, a dead cop, and a getaway by the now thoroughly disgruntled mad killer. He responds by kidnapping a young girl, burying her in a box with a limited supply of air, and threatening to let her suffocate if the city doesn't meet his financial demands, which have now doubled.

Harry manages, after great difficulty, to track the killer down, but, though he's now safely in custody, he refuses to tell where his victim has been hidden, and insists on exercising his constitutional rights to have a lawyer. With time running out, Harry has no choice but to try to force the information from him. Under a form of “enhanced interrogation” that makes water-boarding seem almost pleasant by comparison, Scorpio eventually breaks and reveals the location of the girl's burial site, but when she is found, she turns out to have already died by the time Harry arrested Scorpio, hours before the stated deadline.

Incredibly, the DA's Office, after consulting with an ultra-liberal professor from Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley's School of Law , decides to release Scorpio without charges. Just for the record, this would have been very unlikely in real life. Though the confession Harry tortured out of Scorpio would undoubtedly have been suppressed, the evidence Harry found in Scorpio's shabby living quarters was legally obtained under the principals of both “hot pursuit,” and “exigent circumstances.” And that evidence would have been more than sufficient to prove him guilty of several murders. But dramatically, it was more effective for the namby-pamby lawyers to release Scorpio so he could kill again, and put the blame on Harry.

Scorpio makes the best of his unexpected freedom. He obtains another gun, kidnaps a school bus full of children (in one of his letters, the real-life Zodiac threatened to attack a school bus, though he never actually did), and again makes a ransom demand. This time, though, Harry is able to thwart the scheme, rescue the kids, and kill Scorpio in the final, blazing shootout.

There's no appeal from a bullet.

The film ends with Harry, in a scene reminiscent of Gary Cooper's final gesture in High Noon ( Columbia , 1952), contemptuously tossing his star into a muddy slough.

The movie was more than a success. It was phenomenon. If Eastwood was not quite a super-star to this point, Dirty Harry made him one. And of course, such success made it inevitable, despite Harry's apparent resignation at the end of the film, that there would be sequels.

The first film established an original approach to police movies. Later films in the series would take that approach and turn it into a fairly strict formula, so that what had seemed fresh and innovative in Dirty Harry would come to seem like a required ingredient in the recipe in the sequels.

The established formula went something like this:

 

•  In each Dirty Harry film there would be a violent crime near the beginning, a crime that would have nothing really to do with the plot of the rest of the film, but which would provide an opportunity for an action set piece when Harry intervened.

•  In each film Harry would have a pithy line of dialog that would become the film's tagline, spoken once near the beginning of the film (usually during the violent crime in progress noted in point 1), and at least once more near the end of the film (usually during the action-filled climax described below in point 5).

•  In each film, Harry's partner, always a member of an ethnic minority, or at least of a politically disadvantaged group, would either be killed or seriously injured enough to require extended hospitalization.

•  In each film, Eastwood's friend Albert Popwell would play a small, but memorable, supporting role.

•  Each film would end with a violent confrontation between Harry and the main villain(s).

 

The first sequel, Magnum Force , was released by Warners in 1973. Directed by Ted Post from a script by John Milius (credited this time) and Michael Cimino, it pitted Harry and his partner against a group of rogue cops who have taken it upon themselves to execute criminals who have escaped punishment because of the impotence of the criminal justice system, emulating the real-life Brazilian police “death squads” that had received so much publicity in the early ‘70's. Unusually, there was a slight “whodunit” element in the plot, as the identity of the cop who leads SFPD's death squad is not revealed until the end (though it's unlikely to be a surprise to anyone).

Harry returned in 1976 in another Warners release, The Enforcer , directed by James Fargo and written by Stirling Silliphant and Dean Reisner (returning to the series) from a screen story by Gail Morgan Hickman and S.W. Schurr. In it Harry is assigned to bring down of a group of home-grown terrorists reminiscent of the Symbionese Liberation Army. This particular film is memorable for giving Harry a female partner, played by Tyne Daly, years before a woman inspector would be assigned to SFPD's Homicide Detail in real life. Ms. Daly's performance in The Enforcer was undoubtedly a major factor in her being cast in her best-remembered role as Mary Beth Lacey, the “married-with-children” NYPD detective on Cagney & Lacey . In a sense, she was also following a family tradition. Ms. Daly is the granddaughter of pioneering hard-boiled pulp writer Carroll John Daly, one of whose series characters, quick-shooting NYPD Detective Satan Hall, is often pointed to as a prototype of Dirty Harry.

Eastwood decided to end the series after the third film, making it a trilogy. But it was not to be the end of Dirty Harry.

Warners had acquired a small publishing house called Paperback Library some years earlier, changing the name of the firm first to Warner Paperback Library and ultimately simply to Warner Books. In 1981, Warner Books started a line of “men's action” novels (to be called, with startling originality, “Men of Action”), tapping into the market discovered by writers like Don Pendleton when he created Mack “The Executioner” Bolan, and Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir when they created Remo “The Destroyer” Williams.

Since Eastwood had made it clear that he would do no more Dirty Harry films, Warners decided to make use of the character for the new line of books. There had, of course, been novelizations of the three movies released at the same time as the films, but these new books, though featuring Harry Callahan, would be original novels released under the “Men of Action” banner.

Various authors would contribute to the series, all writing under the house pseudonym “Dane Hartman.” Paintings of Clint Eastwood as Harry would be prominently featured on the all covers. There would ultimately be twelve novels in the series. Richard Meyers, a devoted fan of the Dirty Harry films, fondly remembered as the TV critic for The Armchair Detective , and as the author of the Edgar-nominated books TV Detectives (Barnes, 1981) and Murder on the Air (Mysterious, 1989), would be the man behind “Dane Hartman” for six of those twelve novels.

The series began with Duel for Cannons (Warner, 1981), and ended with The Dealer of Death (Warner, 1983). Some were readable. Some were execrable. Generally, the six written by Meyers, Duel for Cannons , The Long Death (Warner, 1981), Family Skeletons (Warner, 1981), Hatchet Men (Warner, 1982), The Killing Connection (Warner, 1982), and Death in the Air (Warner, 1982) are regarded as the best. The series stopped abruptly when Eastwood was persuaded to return for another Dirty Harry movie. Since the novels were essentially a way for Warners to continue to cash in on the character when Eastwood was no longer interested in making Dirty Harry movies, their raison d'être dissolved once Eastwood changed his mind.

The new film, Sudden Impact (Warners, 1983), was directed by Eastwood himself. Joseph Stinson's screenplay was adapted from a screen story by Earl E. Smith and Charles B. Pierce. This was an unusual film in many respects. The only entry in the series to be directed by Eastwood, and the first and only to be set largely outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, it featured Sondra Locke, Eastwood's then-significant-other, in the co-starring role as the victim of a crime, committed many years earlier, who is slowly wreaking vengeance on her victimizers. Harry is assigned to bring her in, pitting him, for once, against a criminal he actually sympathizes with. The trail leads to the small town of San Paulo (real-life beach resort town Santa Cruz stood in for that fictional locale), where the final violent confrontation takes place.

The script is comparatively thoughtful, and comparatively thought-provoking, in a way that neither Magnum Force nor The Enforcer was. Strong performances were turned in by Pat Hingle as San Paulo's police chief, a man with a secret he'll do just about anything to keep hidden, and Michael V. Gazzo, in a small but effective scene as an organized crime figure being targeted by Harry. It's far and away the best film in the series, with the clear exception of Dirty Harry itself.

Harry made his final appearance, to date, in The Dead Pool (Warners, 1988), directed by Buddy Van Horn and written by Steve Sharon, Duke Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. It begins as Harry, already San Francisco 's most renowned cop, puts a major-league gangster behind bars, and finds, to his dismay, that this causes his considerable fame to be increased to such a degree that it's getting in the way of his job.

Soon after the Mob case is concluded, Harry is assigned to look into a series of murders involving celebrities. He discovers that the celebrity victims are on lists of well-known people expected to die soon. It's for a game called “the dead pool,” in which players put together lists of famous persons who, because of age, illness, the high-risk lifestyles they lead, or the high-risks professions they practice, have a good chance of dying within the next year. The player whose list has the most deaths on it at the end of a year wins. Is a dead pool player trying to sweeten the odds in order to win? As he investigates, Harry discovers that, due to his own celebrity status, and the dangerous work he does, he's being placed on dead pool lists himself. Suspicion soon focuses on an arrogant film director who's an avid dead pool player. But is he really the killer, or is he being framed?

The Dead Pool has a fairly interesting plot, and makes some pointed comments about the nature of fame. Ultimately, though, it is the mixture as before. Nothing really new is contributed. Nothing really innovative is offered. It is noteworthy for appearances, early in their careers, by Jim Carrey (credited as “James” Carrey) as one of the murder victims, Liam Neeson as the unlikable film director, and Patricia Clarkson as a TV reporter who starts out by ginning up Harry's celebrity for her own purposes, and ends by finding herself falling for him.

It's also noteworthy for being the only film in the series to break a long-standing “Dirty Harry” tradition. For the first and only time, Albert Popwell did not appear in a Dirty Harry movie.

In the months preceding the release of Eastwood's most recent film, Gran Torino (Warners, 2008), there were rumors that it would mark the return of Dirty Harry. Supposedly, the plot would involve Callahan's coming out of retirement to hunt a multiple cop-killer who has been seen driving the titular vehicle, one of whose victims was Callahan's own son (or grandson depending on which source you read). Eastwood pointedly denied these rumors, stating that he is too simply old to credibly play Callahan any longer. And, when Gran Torino was relased, it turned out to have nothing to do with Dirty Harry.

Eastwood may be too old to play him any longer, but I like to think that Callahan's still out there somewhere, still young, still angry, still laying waste to San Francisco's criminal community with that honking big .44 Magnum.

 

 

 

 

ADDENDUM

 

A Dirty Harry Quiz:

 

Listed below, denoted by letters, are five lines of dialog, four small supporting parts all of which were played by Albert Popwell, and five descriptions of violent crimes that have nothing to do with the plots of the movies in which they appear. Further below, denoted by numbers, are the titles of the five Dirty Harry movies, in chronological order according to release. Your job is to match each of the signature taglines, each of the Albert Popwell roles, and each of the violent crimes, to the movie in which they appear.

 

•  “Go ahead. Make my day!”

•  “You're s**t [vulgar colloquialism for noxious excremental substance] out of luck.”

•  “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”

•  “I don't suppose it would do any good to suggest you wait out [here].”

•  “A man's got to know his limitations.”

 

f) A black militant

g) Harry's partner

h) An armed robber

i) A sadistic pimp

 

j) A plane hijacking at SFO

k) A bank robbery

l) A robbery of a Chinese restaurant

m) A liquor store robbery/hostage situation

n) A robbery of the diner where Harry gets coffee to go every morning

 

•  Dirty Harry

•  Magnum Force

•  The Enforcer

•  Sudden Impact

•  The Dead Pool

 

 

 

Answers:

 

1) c,h,k

2) e,i,j

3) d,f,m

4) a,g,n

5) b,l