Dirty Harry
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Dirty Harry |
| Original title | Dirty Harry |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1971 |
| length | 102 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Don Siegel |
| script |
Harry Julian Fink , Rita M. Fink , Dean Riesner , John Milius |
| production |
Robert Daley , Carl Pingitore , Don Siegel for Warner Bros. |
| music | Lalo Schifrin |
| camera | Bruce Surtees |
| cut | Carl Pingitore |
| occupation | |
| |
| chronology | |
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Successor → |
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Dirty Harry is an American crime film from 1971 . In San Francisco gambling thriller was directed by Don Siegel directed and is one of the best known and most influential police films. It shows the unconventional inspector "Dirty Harry" Callahan portrayed by Clint Eastwood on the hunt for a psychopathic serial killer . The film was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012.
action
A man shoots a young woman swimming in a pool from the roof of a skyscraper . The killer leaves at the scene a handwritten message in which he announced to kill every day a man, it should be the city not 100,000 dollars pay. He claims to kill a "Catholic priest or a nigger" next, the note is signed with Scorpio. The mayor instructs Inspector Harry Callahan to catch the killer as quickly as possible. A cynical loner, Callahan is known for his tough, albeit effective, investigative methods and regularly gets into trouble with his superiors. In doing so, Inspector Callahan often fails to comply with the law in order to achieve his police objectives.
Callahan takes up the investigation with his young Mexican partner Gonzales, who is forcibly assigned to the reluctant inspector. The city administration uses an advertisement that appears in the San Francisco Chronicle to signal to the unknown shooter that it wants to pay the requested money, but asks in the newspaper text for a delay in order to collect the large amount of money. However, this does not satisfy the killer and tries to shoot a black youth. He is disturbed by the police, but is able to flee. He later shoots a ten-year-old African American. The police suspect that Scorpio wants to kill a priest next, as advertised, and set a trap for him. After a nightly shooting on the rooftops with Callahan, he escapes and kills a police officer.
The next day, Scorpio, a hippie- style psychopath kidnaps, rapes, and buries a 14-year-old girl. He increases his ransom note to $ 200,000. During the elaborate ransom delivery, Inspector Harry Callahan of Scorpio with a yellow bag containing the money is rushed through the city from payphone to payphone; the anonymous perpetrator uses these public telephones to inform the policeman who is hurrying through the streets and subway stations in the evening further instructions with. In a dark park, Callahan is brutally beaten by the killer masked with a red balaclava . When his partner Gonzales comes to his aid, he is seriously injured by gunshots. At this moment Callahan, lying bleeding on the ground, can pull a switchblade under his pant leg and stab it in the killer’s leg. With the knife stuck deep in his thigh, Scorpio limps through the darkness without the money. He escapes to a nearby hospital and has the stab wound treated there under a false name. In this clinic, Callahan learns afterwards that the hiding place of the killer is in the football stadium Kezar Stadium , where Scorpio lives in a modest dwelling. Then Dirty Harry confronts his adversary in the floodlit football stadium. Disgusted, Callahan presses the whereabouts of the missing girl out of the killer by standing with his foot on the multiple murderer who has fallen and whimpered on the field. The girl can only be rescued dead from a hole in the ground - the autopsy shows that she was murdered shortly after her abduction.
Scorpio is released because his right to a lawyer was denied him and the house search of his hiding place was carried out without a judicial power of attorney, all evidence was thereby useless ( fruits of the poisoned tree ). Callahan pursues Scorpio to catch him engaged in a criminal act. In a basement, the deranged Scorpio lets himself be beaten up by a black-skinned thug for money and starts a public campaign against Inspector Callahan, who is accused of arbitrariness and brutality. The scheming Scorpio, whose face is now bandaged with white gauze, claims to the sensational press that he has suffered the physical abuse by Inspector Harry Callahan.
Scorpio later raids a liquor store, obtaining money and a gun. He hijacked a school bus and asked for the $ 200,000 plus an airplane. The mayor wants to pay and forbids Callahan to do anything against the killer. He still wants to stop Scorpio and can stop the bus on his own by jumping from a bridge onto the roof of the school bus. Scorpio escapes on foot into a quarry. There he unceremoniously takes a boy who is fishing in a lake hostage and asks Callahan to put down his drawn revolver. He lowers his gun, but then quickly raises it and shoots the killer in the shoulder. When the murderer picks up his pistol again, he is shot by Callahan, with the sixth and last bullet from his Smith & Wesson revolver, and falls hit into the water. In the final scene the inspector throws his police badge in a high arc into the lake.
Emergence
The plot of the film is based on the events of the " Zodiac killer " who shot and killed people indiscriminately in San Francisco in the late 1960s. The "Zodiac Killer" was never caught.
The character of Callahan goes back to the real Zodiac investigator Dave Toschi , who was a detective with the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).
First, Frank Sinatra was supposed to play the role of Harry Callahan. When Sinatra was eliminated with a hand injury, Steve McQueen , Paul Newman and John Wayne were considered for the role. Eventually it was taken over by Clint Eastwood. The role of Scorpio was initially to be played by Audie Murphy , who was then killed in a plane crash. Before Don Siegel took over the direction, Irvin Kershner and Sydney Pollack were also shortlisted.
The film was initially supposed to be shot in Seattle , but Siegel and Eastwood chose San Francisco as the location. Clint Eastwood performed all of the stunts in the film himself, including jumping from the bridge to the roof of the school bus.
success
Dirty Harry was a worldwide hit and became one of the most successful films of 1971. After Clint Eastwood had become very popular through his western and action films , this film made his breakthrough as a Hollywood superstar.
The zeitgeist of the Vietnam and Watergate era was reflected in the cynical, illusion-free figure of Harry Callahan . The distrust of the established institutions was articulated in a drastic way by Callahan, when he called the existing laws "crazy". The film deals with the problem of the prohibition of the use of evidence for illegally obtained evidence, which is consistently applied in American criminal procedural law. Callahan describes the pertinent laws as crazy, because they lead to the fact that identified murderers remain unmolested, even though the identified murder weapon was found on them.
But while society was criticized from a left-wing perspective in the New Hollywood films of the same time, Callahan represented more conservative ideals in the role of the larger-than-life gunslinger. Callahan "solved" the problems with his huge revolver (a Smith & Wesson Mod. 29 in .44 Magnum caliber ) - "It blows your head off"; “It's a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world.” (Callahan); "The three of us ... Smith, Wesson and me." (Dirty Harry returns).
In this context it was pointed out that the scorpion killer is a hippie and the film is set in the flower power metropolis of San Francisco. The obvious interpretation is that Dirty Harry also expresses a - in bourgeois circles - widespread unease about the counterculture of the 1960s . Again and again there are derogatory remarks about homosexuality in the film .
Dirty Harry was controversially discussed and, for example, the influential film critic Pauline Kael attacked sharply because, in her opinion, he advocated vigilante justice. Clint Eastwood rejected this interpretation and had a plot drafted for the sequel Dirty Harry II - Calahan (1973), with which he wanted to rebut the criticism of Dirty Harry : Callahan fights a group of police officers who practice lynching.
The contradicting figure of the upright and upright Inspector Callahan was attractive to many audiences and over the years has become a cult figure in American cinema.
The harsh, cynical and psychologically abysmal tone of Dirty Harry shaped the international crime and police film of the 1970s. Influences can be seen, for example, in the very successful vigilante justice film A Man Sees Red (1974) with Charles Bronson or in the French thriller Angst über der Stadt (1974) with Jean-Paul Belmondo .
In every Dirty Harry film, one person is murdered during the first five minutes. In every film, Callahan prevents a robbery.
The well-known one-liner "Go ahead, make my day!" (In the German version "Na los noch, make my day!", Something like "Come on, sweeten my day!"), With which Callahan unites his adversaries wants to provoke ill-considered action and expresses his contempt for her was only spoken of in Dirty Harry IV - Dirty Harry Comes Back in 1983 . Originally this phrase comes from the movie Vice Squad , which was filmed a year earlier and in which actor Gary Swanson utters these words.
The final scene of the film refers to the end of Fred Zinnemann's western Twelve Noon (1952).
The term Dirty Harry is also used in common parlance for the apparently efficient method used by the police or secret services to obtain information through torture. From the mid-1990s, the German late-night show host Harald Schmidt, known for his cynical jokes and derisive gossip, was nicknamed Dirty Harry .
The plot of the film was taken up in the television film Tatort: You alone in essential points: An unknown person shoots a woman in Stuttgart with a sniper rifle and demands a ransom from the city in order not to repeat this act. The declaration of readiness to pay should also be made via a newspaper advertisement and one of the responsible investigators, Chief Detective Bootz , should hand over the money. Here, however, he is also left in the dark about his destination and is constantly provided with new instructions via mobile phone. the failed attempt to arrest the murderer at the handover is also found again. In contrast to the original, the perpetrator in the crime scene does not act out of sadistic motives, but deliberately kills a total of three people, whom she blames for the previous death of her lover; he had collapsed in a bank with a heart attack and died because the later victims failed to provide assistance .
Sequels
The popularity of the Dirty Harry character was so great in the 1970s and 1980s that four sequels were produced by 1988. According to the general tenor, none matched the quality of the original film.
- Dirty Harry II - Calahan (1973)
- Dirty Harry III: The Relentless (1976)
- Dirty Harry Comes Back (1983)
- The Death Game (1988)
Reviews
"[...] a very stylized film [...], with images of a beauty that stands in strange contrast to the plot."
"Thriller, perfect in editing and camera technology, atmospherically dense in its milieu drawing, but on the other hand also extremely questionable in terms of the methods of combating crime and the aspect of vigilante justice."
“Dirty Harry is, with high formal qualities, one of the toughest and most ambiguous films that American action cinema has produced in the 1970s. Don Siegel sees the world as ugly, brutal, without humanity, but his bitterness is unthinkable without a moral dimension: he doesn't enjoy his cynicism. "
“It was only through the laconic embodiment of the anti-hero 'Dirty Harry', who roams the urban jungle like a hunter, that Eastwood became a star in the USA. The film doesn't just owe its success to him: Don Siegel's no-frills direction and the sarcastic script are just as strong. "
German synchronization
In this first Dirty Harry film, the actor Rolf Schult was the German voice of Clint Eastwood. From the second film onwards, Klaus Kindler , generally regarded as Eastwood's main German speaker, took over this role.
Recycling
1990 publisher Mindscape brought out a video game based on Dirty Harry for the Nintendo Entertainment System , it was developed by Gray Matter. The game received mostly negative ratings. In 1995 Williams Electronics Games released a pinball machine for the films by Dirty Harry.
In 2008 a Dirty Harry video game should appear in which Dirty Harry should be dubbed by Clint Eastwood himself. The project was canceled. A publication in the next few years is not expected.
The DVD of the film was released in December 2001. Among other things, it includes a half-hour making-of of the film. Also in 2001 was a Dirty Harry Edition that included all five films in the series. In June 2008 a new Dirty Harry Collection was released, which contains not only improved images but also more extras.
literature
- Frank Arnold: Dirty Harry: Don Siegel and his films. Vertigo Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-934028-05-5 .
Web links
- Dirty Harry in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Dirty Harry at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Dirty Harry at Metacritic (English)
- Dirty Harry in the online movie database
- Dirty Harry in the German dubbing file
- phrases.org.uk: make my day
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cinema : Background article Full of the role: Hollywoods cast carousel issue 02/11, p. 80.
- ^ Andrian Kreye: Dirty Harry in the White House. In: sueddeutsche.de . May 8, 2011, accessed May 8, 2011 .
- ↑ Georg Seeßlen: Murder in the cinema: History and mythology of detective film / filmography: Georg Seesslen: Bibliography: Jürgen Berger. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1981 (Basics of Popular Film, 8th Rororo Non-Fiction Book; 7396), ISBN 3-499-17396-4 , p. 269.
- ↑ The great TV feature film film lexicon. Digital library special volume (CD-ROM edition). Directmedia, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89853-036-1 , p. 2865.
- ↑ Dirty Harry. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Cinema.de: film review
- ↑ German synchronous index | Movies | Dirty Harry. In: synchronkartei.de. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
- ↑ Dirty Harry video game at mashpedia.com (English)
- ↑ Dirty Harry at ipdb.org (English)
- ↑ gamespot.com: Collective staff cuts follow Dirty Harry 'transitioning' ( Memento from August 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) from March 1, 2007.