The trouble with ‘Harry’ myth

Go ahead, make my Blu-ray.

Warner Home Video will, in June, release a deluxe, five-movie package of 1971’s “Dirty Harry” and its four sequels — “Magnum Force” (1973), “The Enforcer” (1976), “Sudden Impact” (1983) and “The Dead Pool” (1988).

The set includes brand new audio commentaries by Richard Schickel, the film critic and Clint Eastwood biographer, plus featurettes on the series’ hot-button reputation as a law-and-order apologia that bordered on fascism.

It’s about time we reassessed these movies.

Because everything you think you know about San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan is either wrong or only partially true.

Think I’m crazy?

Well, this punk’s feelin’ lucky.

“Dirty Harry’s” bad rap was crystallized by the late Pauline Kael, the influential New Yorker critic who saw the movie as being on the wrong side of a burgeoning culture war. She called it a “right-wing fantasy” and a “simple-minded attack on liberal values.”

Just two years ago, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice said ” ’Dirty Harry’ was ’Easy Rider’ in reverse, featuring a hippie as serial killer rather than victim.”

These critics didn’t so much misjudge “Dirty Harry” in its particulars as they failed to account for the series’ evolving sensibility. (The movies attracted a patchwork of directors, beginning with Don Siegel, and writers, but the main characters and story world were created by Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink and the uncredited John Milius.)

“Dirty Harry,” to be sure, embraced a rough sort of justice: As embodied by the ineffectual, defendants’-rights-conscious mayor played by John Vernon, the movie suggested post-Miranda America had entered a suicide pact with itself and given over its big cities to reprobates who could break the law and, subsequently, hide behind the law.

Miss Kael noted with disgust a pivotal scene where Callahan is chastised by a San Francisco district attorney and a Berkeley criminal-rights lawyer for torturing the serial killer “Scorpio,” who had buried alive his most recent victim.

“The law’s crazy,” Callahan famously barked.

This sort of angry certitude, however, died with “Dirty Harry.” Recall the film’s grim final scene, as Callahan, having slain the dragon Scorpio, chucked his gold badge into a nearby pond (an allusion to 1952’s classic “High Noon”) — he knew he’d pushed far beyond the limits of the law.

Not here, and not later, is Harry Callahan ever pleased with dispensing violence: He is always a reluctant avenger. Each of these movies ends on a note of almost Nietzschean sorrow at the decline of moral authority.

Out of this fatalism came the equally grim “Magnum Force.”

The first sequel certainly wasn’t as compelling overall as the original. However, at least in its basic plot, it is far less straightforward than its predecessor.

Where in “Dirty Harry” Callahan chased down the almost comically evil Scorpio, in “Magnum Force” he battles a threat from within: a gang of rogue motorcycle cops who have taken the law into their own hands.

In this, I think, it was a direct rebuke to “Harry.” Despite the sinister inferences that Miss Kael, again, drew from the film — she took its vigilante villains for “homosexual Nazis” — “Magnum Force” looked into the same abyss of American urban lawlessness that “Harry” did and stood up, however reluctantly, for our system of justice.

Compare Callahan’s fuming dismissal of civil-liberty niceties in “Dirty Harry” (“the law’s crazy”) to his weary-yet-firm appraisal at the end of “Magnum Force” (“The system’s lousy, but it’s all we have”).

“The Enforcer,” with its interplay of white hippie revolutionaries and black-power charlatans, is arguably the most dated of the series. But it, too, in its way, reveals more of Callahan’s unsung complexities.

A young Tyne Daly figures in the “Enforcer’s” plot as a grossly underqualified beneficiary of the time’s latest outrage of political correctness: gender-based affirmative action. Miss Daly’s Kate Moore, who had never made an arrest in her short career, is promoted to an inspector-level slot and becomes partner to a contemptuous Callahan, who dismisses the department’s new policy as “stylish.”

Yet, gradually, Moore wins over Callahan with her pluck and earnestness — and she ultimately saves his life not once, but twice.

“Sudden Impact,” the first and last in the series to be directed by Mr. Eastwood himself, yielded the immortal “Go ahead, make my day” one-liner, delivered by Callahan at the climax of an outrageous scene in which the inspector thwarts a diner robbery. Entertaining as it was, the movie rather cynically capitalized on the justice-at-all-costs appeal of the franchise — and dispensed with the nuances of its predecessors.

In one early scene, the aging Callahan upbraids a cocky “hood” — his favored term of scorn for petty criminals — who had just escaped conviction on a legal technicality. In another, he verbally taunts an organized-crime oldster, who suffers an apparent heart attack on the spot.

The movie also returns to the theme of vigilantism, with co-star Sondra Locke playing a painter who, one by one, murders the men (and female accomplice) who had raped her and her younger sister.

Callahan becomes romantically entangled with the avenger and tacitly agrees to conceal her crimes.

Yet even in “Sudden Impact,” the vigilantism is tempered by sympathetic femininity: We glimpse the uncommonly brutal gang rape in painful flashbacks.

Taken together (Shall we agree that “The Dead Pool” was an extra-innings irrelevance?), the “Dirty Harry” franchise was not a “right-wing fantasy.” It reflected the center-right pragmatism of Mr. Eastwood himself.

The actor-director, who will be 78 by the time this new collection is released, is said to have flinched from the legacy of these movies and, in his most recent films, decried the cycle of violence.

The truth is, he’s been questioning that cycle all along.