Comparison Between Dirty Harry 'And A Fistful Of Dollars'

Dirty Harry(1971) is the movie my arguments are based around along with these Westerns that portray white male power, traditional values, and vigilantism such as McLintock! (1963) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Clint Eastwood the star in Dirty Harry and A Fistful of Dollars shows the white, masculine male as the strength and the man who brings justice, law, and order to the city where a lot of change has taken place recently with the hippie counter culture movement.. John Wayne the star of McLintock! brings the same values to the table as Clint Eastwood and shows the values of a Western through his McLintock character.. Both of their careers have been made through portraying characters that are conservative and this does not change with Clint

Eastwood even when his character is portrayed in San Francisco.
The Civil Rights Movement and the hippie counter culture movement in the 60’s had caused a lot of strife between differing ideologies as the 70’s approached. Just like always through time, cities were a hot bed for progressive values in the 60’s while the rural areas held conservative values and traditions. The anti-war sentiment that came with the hippie movement were largely based in cities and mainly the east and west coasts, while the rural areas were largely against such things as the hippies. There was a conflict between ideologies and values people held and thus the counter culture movement was spawned.
The Western movie with its conservative minded main characters were soon going to be introduced into the city to clean it up where progressives would fail in the movies. Dirty Harry is the movie that would present a progressive minded mayor that would fail to bring law and order to Scorpio, a serial killer, and Harry was there to pick up the pieces and carry out his vigilante justice. Characters in Western’s are largely if not only very conservative minded. In Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood is the character that is bringing back law, justice, and order to the progressive minded city. San Francisco is a very liberal minded city and was back in the 1960’s and 1970’s as well. Harry Callahan is there to establish the order and law the progressive minded mayor will not establish. The mayor is willing to pay off Scorpio to prevent more bloodshed while Harry becomes the vigilante to kill Scorpio where the mayor has failed. Harry knows Scorpio deserves to have justice served to him through Harry’s .44 Magnum.
Dirty Harry is a movie which is born from a changing social climate that spawned out of the 1960’s and the movie shows a battle between conservative and progressive minded values.

Harry Callahan sees the government as being inept and he must become a vigilante to deliver the justice he knows needs to be served. Clint Eastwood’s character from A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western, also played a vigilante role after he witnessed the killing of a family who was supposedly protecting him. This character who has no name then takes the role of the vigilante. This persona that is portrayed in A Fistful of Dollars is almost copied and pasted to Dirty Harry. Harry Callahan of course is changed a bit along with the different setting of San Francisco. Dirty Harry is a response to the civil rights movement and counter culture hippie movement, that the white male was still in power and would restore law and order. It shows the white male masculinity being introduced from the Western genre into the city scene and how it brings law, justice, and order. The conservative values and vigilante justice traditionally found in the Western are introduced into more progressive minded areas such as the cities to combat or show an opposing view to the differing philosophies that have been riled up by the 1960’s

movements.
To understand Clint Eastwood’s character, Dirty Harry, it is important to keep in mind what the Western character as a whole is. The Western character is someone who lives without the aid of the government. John Wayne in his many different roles always presented traditional values in his Westerns. The most important value he portrays is the importance of a strong masculinity behind each of his characters. In an article by Carl Freedman, in an issue of Film International, he states, “John Wayne has proved to be as the supreme American representation of manly toughness, courage and competence.”(18) There is not a role that John Wayne ever took that did not have him represented with manly toughness. John Wayne’s character G.W. Mclintock in 1963’s McLintock! values how he sets up his cattle empire, and how he did this without the governments help. The Western character takes this route with him being self-reliant and does not see the government as a source of help. G.W. McLintock says, “I don’t give jobs, I hire men.” an obvious jab to how the character viewed the government and it’s role in society. How he looked at it is that the government gave jobs which were not earned. Mclintock also brings into the front light the obvious showing of dominance of male power. He publicly spanks his and chances his wife over town to bring her under control while the whole town follows and laughs. Obviously this is a movie made before feminism could protest against this movie.
Clint Eastwood was also a character that portrayed male dominance. Conservative and traditional values that are attached to Westerns made it’s way into the Dirty Harry series. This quote from Deborah Allison’s editorial in Film International, “Courting The Critics/Assuring The Audiences: The Modulation Of Dirty Harry In A Changing Cultural Climate” shows how Dirty Harry is a character to combat the progressive views of the city, “
Indeed, a large proportion of commentators, from newspaper journalists to academic pundits, were brutal in their condemnation of the film’s perceived political message. Dirty Harry’s narrative centres on the dogged attempts of maverick cop Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) to bring a killer to justice, while hampered by a bureaucratic legal system that is represented as privileging the suspect’s rights over those of the victim. Many critics were especially uncomfortable with what they saw as an advocation of vigilante justice and an inflammatory attack on constitutionally enshrined civil rights.”(18)
The vigilante of Harry Callahan picked up where the government failed to. Dirty Harry sees the mayor is timid about bringing justice to Scorpio over fears of a greater body count so he takes action. This is a central theme to the ungoverned and lawless Western. Now it is presented in the realm of the action movie with Dirty Harry who is there to restore law and order with his .44 magnum. Dirty Harry, “draws on the persona Eastwood crafted in his Westerns--- particularly Sergio Leone’s ‘Man with No Name’ trilogy of spaghetti Westerns.” (Lichtenfeld, 23) With this Clint Eastwood is similar enough to conclude he is here because the city is where the lawless is with all the movements that spawned out of the 1960’s.
Eric Lichtenfeld continues in his book, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie, says “Urban warfare was about to receive the Western gunfighter, who, to bring the law to the lawless… Mythologically, the filmmakers align urban vigilantism with Western heroism and individuality.” As the quote from Eric Lichtenfeld states the Western character is transplanted into the urban vigilante role. Dirty Harry portryaed the same tough, masculine, gun slinging character from A Fistful of Dollars. Eric Lichtenfeld goes on and and later in his book states, “...it is still easy to see in his (Clint Eastwood) Inspector Harry Callahan traits of the western hero:solitude, his laconic speech, the suggestion that he is a man with a past, and the suggestion that he is a man of the past, that his methods cannot be condoned by a progressive civilization.”(23) The city at the time, specifically San Francisco well known for being a liberal minded city, had been sent a “man of the past” to restore order where it was lost from the counter culture movement. The city could not rely on the police for that. Once the mayor told the police to back off so they could give Scorpio his money to stop killing, Dirty Harry took action, and no one else. He had the Western mindset that he was going to deliver justice to Scorpio and that his reign of terror over San Francisco would come to an end through the use of his .44 Magnum.
As with most Westerns and vigilante justice it is often difficult to tell if the vigilante is a good guy bringing justice or a killer who is there to murder. Clint Eastwood is quoted of saying in John Tibbets analysis, Clint Eastwood And The Machinery Of Violence, “Violence has been glamorized since literature began. People have always tried to make the west heroic. But it was not very heroic at all. Little Bill was a sheriff, but he really was just a killer who happened to have the law on his side.” In both Clint Eastwood movies, A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry, we are left wondering is he overstepping the boundaries of what is lawful. In Dirty Harry he disregards the mayors order for him to stop going after the serial killer Scorpio. After he kills Scorpio did he overstep Scopio’s civil rights. Well yes he did, but is it justified since Scorpio had murdered the people he had. These questions are what you are left pondering after seeing both of these movies. These are the questions you are left with after seeing the vigilante movie and for most the killings are deemed to be justified.
After Harry had brought San Francisco back to being orderly had the more traditional and conservative philosophy won? Well no, after Callahan shoots Scorpio, “Harry’s final gesture is to throw away his badge(into the lake), a show of disgust with the system that has hampered his efforts.”(Lichtenfeld, 25) He knows the mayor will have consequences for Harry and Harry is done trying to fight against more progressive ideologies in San Francisco that prevent him from doing what he believes is his job.
Harry Callahan is a figure put into a changed San Francisco that has been largely affected by the counter culture movement along with the civil rights movement. Through his actions white, male power prevails and he kills Scorpio returning San Francisco to a law abiding state. The vigilante of Harry Callahan was a white male. The one least affected by the movements of the 1960’s. The women had their feminist movement and the African Americans had their civil rights movement.Harry Callahan is a character forced into a progressive city to watch Harry as a symbol of conservative and traditional values struggle working within the new system.