Word: callahans
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...Dirty Harry" Callahan (Clint Eastwood) has earned his nickname by succeeding at the hardest, ugliest jobs in the police department. Single-handedly he stops a bank robbery, and when everyone else fails, he talks down a suicide attempt. Harry goes on while his partners lie dead or maimed. So naturally, he leads the search for Scorpio. San Francisco's mysterious sniper-extortionist. And after frustrating set-backs and a trail of mutilated victims--one expects nothing less--Harry gets his chance with what has become his private devil...
Whenever Dirty Harry plunges into violence--which is most of the time--its own irresistible force massacres any lingering qualifications. With civilized society tangled in procedural dogma only raw power can destroy the menace. And Harry Callahan is not exactly gun-shy. The carnage is lovingly detailed: a swimming pool filling with blood, machine-gun fire splattering the city, knifings, beatings, kidnappings, and more. Much more. Siegel excels at wrapping his audience in horror. The bank robbery is a virtual ballet of gunfire and blood. The methodical irrationality of Scorpio's sniping blasts away one's logical defenses; the killer...
...films are spare, the scripts laconic. This is partly a question of personal style and partly the approach best suited to his frequent leading man, Clint Eastwood. In Dirty Harry, Eastwood plays a maverick San Francisco cop named Harry Callahan who sasses everybody-his chief, his superiors, even the mayor. A psychopathic killer is on the loose, sniping from rooftops, kidnaping young girls to hold the city up for ransom. Callahan is against the mayor's decision to pay the ransom. When he is appointed to deliver the $200,000, he typically decides to try to trap the killer...
Dirty Harry is bound to upset adherents of liberal criminal-rights legislation. Callahan holds such laws in contempt and violates them openly. He is compelled to act on his own. This only reinforces Siegel's theme: that both cop and killer are renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world. Siegel makes the point in eloquent cinematic shorthand, notably in the film's opening, where a shot of a policeman's badge dissolves into the muzzle of the sniper's rifle, and later when Callahan catches up with the killer in a deserted...
Above all, Hitchcock's analysis suffers from his failure to take a closer look at much of what is going on in radical theology. He looks instead at radical journalists like Novak and Daniel Callahan and magazines like Commonweal. These are, to be sure, good indicators of what radical Catholics are thinking about. They are not substitutes for analysis of theology itself. What is significant about radical theologians like Jurgen Motlmann (a Protestant) and Johannes Metz (a Catholic) is that they rely very heavily upon the Gospel in their analysis. Hitchcock simply dismisses their quest...