Region: 1
Video: Enhanced Widescreen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
Audio: Dolby Digital w/ sub-woofer channel
  Dolby Digital Mono
Language: English, French, Spanish, japanese, Portuguese
Subtitles: English, French, japanese, Spanish, Portuguese
Weight factor: 1 item(s)

Plot Synopsis

"You've got to ask yourself a question: 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" Dirty Harry provoked a critical uproar in 1971 for its "fascist" message about the power of one, as it also elevated Clint Eastwood to superstar status through his most enduring screen persona. Harry Callahan (Eastwood, in a role meant for Frank Sinatra) is a sardonic, hard-working San Francisco cop who can't finish his lunch without having to foil a bank robbery with his 44 Magnum, "the most powerful handgun in the world." When hippie-esque psycho Scorpio (Andy Robinson) goes on a killing spree, Harry and new partner Chico (Reni Santoni) are assigned to hunt him down, but not before the Mayor (John Vernon) and Lt. Bressler (Harry Guardino) admonish Callahan about his heavy-handed tactics. Racing against a deadline to save a kidnap victim from suffocating to death and unbothered by the niceties of Miranda rights and search warrants, Callahan brings in Scorpio, only to see him released on technicalities. "The law's crazy," opines Harry in disgust, before taking it upon himself to ensure that Scorpio doesn't kill again. Directed in violent and efficient fashion by Don Siegel, with a propulsive score by Lalo Schifrin, Dirty Harry was the fourth Siegel-Eastwood collaboration after Coogan's Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and The Beguiled (1970). Critics at the time strongly objected to the heroic image of a cop's violations of a suspect's Miranda rights, forcing Siegel and Eastwood to deny that they were right-wing reactionaries. All the same, Dirty Harry proved to be highly popular and spawned four sequels: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988). ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Editorial Reviews:

"I know what you're thinking, punk...." So begins the most memorable speech from one of cinema's most memorable police officers, "Dirty" Harry Callahan, a role inextricably linked with Clint Eastwood. For fans of hard-boiled detective thrillers, this film has it all. It has so much, in fact, that it would be easy to write it off as gritty-cop-movie cliché, were it not for the fact that Dirty Harry practically invented the genre. If you've seen it before, it probably started here. Dirty Harry is definitely not a politically correct film, and some have decried it as right-wing propaganda. To be sure, criminals' rights are not something that Callahan has much use for, and whiny lawyers are the enemy of honest cops in Harry's world. Dirty Harry is a great example of how an actor can make a role his own; the part was originally offered to Frank Sinatra, then passed through the hands of John Wayne and Paul Newman, before Eastwood got hold of it. This was the fourth time that Eastwood had worked with director Don Siegel, and the pairing clearly works well, augmented here by a snazzy score by Lalo Schifrin. While the violence might be a little strong for some viewers, and others might have trouble rooting for an end-justifies-the-means kind of cop, Dirty Harry is one of the best cop movies, and one of the best movie cops, of all time. ~ Matthew Doberman, All Movie Guide