[COLUMN] Magnum Force Challenged Dirty Harry | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Magnum Force remains the most interesting and challenging of the Dirty Harry sequels.

Magnum Force was released two years after the original Dirty Harry, and found actor Clint Eastwood returning to the role of gritty San Francisco police officer “Dirty” Harry Callahan. The original film had a somewhat troubled production, bouncing between various studios like Universal before ending up at Warner Bros. At one point, Frank Sinatra had been considered to star before Eastwood jumped on board, bringing veteran director Don Siegel with him.

Dirty Harry was ultimately “a box office bonanza” for Warner Bros., and so the sequel made sense. However, the film was also controversial in its portrayal of an urban police officer who plays by his own rules, torturing suspects and violating civil liberties. When Callahan is warned that a suspect had rights, the officer deadpans, “Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.” Dirty Harry is a movie about the limits of the system, and the need to bend and break those rules to offer true justice.

“The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of the original film. In his own (positive) review, Roger Ebert stated simply, “The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it.” However, the film wasn’t ambivalent about Callahan’s actions. As J. Hoberman argued, Callahan represented “a new synthesis between hipster and enforcer.” He was a new kind of action hero for a new America.

There is a solid argument to be made that Dirty Harry was part of a larger trend. Dirty Harry arrived in 1971. Shaft brought law enforcement to blaxploitation cinema. The French Connection won the Best Picture Oscar. This was, Wesley Morris notes, “the year President Nixon’s campaign threats of law-and-order governance had, at last, come flagrantly true at the movies, the year the American supercop was born.” Harry Callahan was perhaps the mainstream face of that new archetype.

Callahan didn’t emerge from a vacuum. In a way, he represented an evolution of an older archetype embodied by Eastwood, the cowboy at the center of movies like A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As Trace Sauveur contends, Harry Callahan is “the gun-slinging, unrepentant cowboy to follow The Man with No Name’s footsteps, and the inevitable byproduct of America’s origins in violence.” The film even features a showdown after a bank robbery.

Dirty Harry is also one of the great San Francisco movies, and the plot is a heavily fictionalized riff on the Zodiac killings of the late 1960s. This ties into the sense of Dirty Harry as an urban western. In a very literal sense, San Francisco represented the arrival of modernity to the American western frontier. It also positioned the film as part of a retrenchment in the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s. San Francisco had been pivotal to the 1960s counterculture, even as it turned rotten.

To be fair, a large part of the skill of Dirty Harry lies in Clint Eastwood’s performance. Eastwood has a reputation for playing strong and silent stoic types, embodying a rugged masculine ideal. However, Eastwood’s persona has always been more nuanced than that. In contrast to so many of the other action heroes before or since, Eastwood is willing to be vulnerable on camera, to convey a sense of emotional complexity and interiority.

Part of the beauty of Dirty Harry is the sense that Callahan himself is conflicted. As much as he might affect a cynical perspective, it’s obvious that he cares very deeply. He isn’t an inhuman killing machine, he’s surprisingly vulnerable. The problem isn’t that Callahan doesn’t care. The problem is that he cares too much. That’s why he is “Dirty Harry”, why he gets all the “dirty jobs”, because he holds on to that empathy. In Magnum Force, that humanism is obvious in his interactions with deteriorating motorcycle cop Charlie McCoy (Mitchell Ryan). That’s the magic trick of Dirty Harry, in making Callahan sympathetic.

Dirty Harry was successful, but it was contentious. “It was [a] police thriller, a cowboy western and a horror film, it was all of them yoked together,” explained Eastwood’s co-star, Andrew Robinson. “And because of the times it was released in, it became the film that people argued about. Is it fascist? Is it ripe with irony? After that movie I was turned away at auditions for quite a while. A lot of people in Hollywood were angry.” This sentiment bleeds into the production of the sequel, Magnum Force.

Magnum Force was written by two Hollywood legends, John Milius and Michael Cimino. Milius would go on to become a filmmaker in his own right, writing films like Apocalypse Now and directing movies like Red Dawn. There’s an argument to be made that Milius is one of Hollywood’s great conservative auteurs. Michael Cimino would go on to become one of the most consequential directors of the New Hollywood movement, bringing an end to that era with Heaven’s Gate.

“I remember I was very disturbed, writing it, because I didn't know what to do,” Milius explained of Magnum Force. “Usually, I spend a lot of my time on characters. Then I thought it would be interesting to sort of do the flip side, like the other side of a coin, the other side of the argument.” When Milius left the project to direct Dillinger, Cimino was approached to finish the script. “At first I said no,” Cimino concedes. “I didn’t feel used to the genre.”

This may explain the push and pull within Magnum Force, a sequel that feels much more ambivalent about its protagonist and its social context than the original Dirty Harry. Indeed, while the direction film is nowhere near as good, with reliable “steady pair of hands” journeyman Ted Post stepping into the director role vacated by Don Siegel, there is a solid argument to be made that the script for Magnum Force is by fair the most interesting of those five Dirty Harry movies.

While Dirty Harry presented its police officer as an urban vigilante dispensing justice that the system was unable or unwilling to provide, Magnum Force switches the perspective. This time, Callahan isn’t the character serving as the extra-judicial judge, jury and executioner. Instead, the film follows a secret cabal of vigilante police officers who have taken the law into their own hands and are exacting bloody carnage on criminals who have escaped justice.

In narrative terms, this was a smart choice. It allowed the audience to more comfortably root for Callahan by providing a contrast. Callahan might not play by all the rules, but he still fundamentally respected the idea of law. Indeed, Magnum Force establishes a reliable template for the superhero movies that would arguably eventually evolve from these urban vigilante thrillers. The audience could root for these heroic rule-breakers because the alternative was always much more monstrous.

In Batman Begins, the audience might balk at billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) assuming he has the moral authority to wage a one-man war on crime, but his extra-judicial process is certainly easier to accept than the extremism of Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson). In Iron Man, the audience might feel uneasy at billionaire industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) holding all of that power for his own personal use, but he’s still a much better option than Obidiah Stane (Jeff Bridges).

Magnum Force presents the audience with villains who don’t exist in opposition to Callahan’s philosophy, but instead represent a much more extreme version of his ideology, allowing Callahan to appear moderate in comparison. It’s a deft move. However, the real beauty of Magnum Force is that while the film uses this to frame Callahan as a more conventionally heroic figure, it refuses to let the audience off the hook for their own embrace of vigilante violence.

Magnum Force leans into the western iconography that informed Dirty Harry. These young vigilantes are motorcycle cops, riding their bikes along the highways and byways of California like modern cowboys. At the climax, Eastwood even mounts one of the bikes to “joust” with an opponent, cementing the idea that Callahan is a spiritual descendant of The Man With No Name. Several set pieces feel lifted from westerns, such as a raid on a cabin operated by a local gangster (Tony Giorgio).

This violence is an extension of that western ideology. Justifying the murders, Lieutenant Neil Briggs (Hal Holbrook) puts them in the context of San Francisco’s history, “A hundred years ago in this city, people did the same thing. History justified the vigilantes, we're no different. Anyone who threatens the security of the people will be executed.” However, Briggs is a modern character, evoking the then-recently re-elected Richard Nixon in his promise, “We’re going to have law and order here.” Of course, by 1973, the public had lost faith in Nixon.

Indeed, Magnum Force suggests that this violence in American streets might be tied to something much larger and much more primal. It is too much to describe Magnum Force as a Vietnam War film, but the movie is haunted by the carnage unfolding overseas. Callahan is impressed by the skill that one of the killers, Phil Sweet (Tim Matheson), demonstrates with a firearm. “Where did you learn to shoot?” Callahan asks. “Not around here?” Sweet explains that they all served overseas.

After all, the violence conducted by these young men is not so different from the reports of atrocities like the My Lai massacre. In a very real sense, these men have taken the war home with them. The climax of Magnum Force unfolds in the “pre-scrapped” ruins of two Second-World-War-era aircraft carriers. It’s a very evocative final confrontation, with two different ideas of American vigilante violence squaring off in the ruins of a monument to foreign wars.

Magnum Force also demonstrates a willingness to implicate its audience. The movie’s opening credits replay Callahan’s iconic monologue from Dirty Harry over a loving shot of a Magnum .44, which then turns to point at the camera. Several of the vigilante murders are framed to evoke scenes featuring Callahan from the first movie, such as his walk across the San Francisco skyline. There’s a recurring question about the audience’s comfort with all this. Is Callahan really so different?

This challenge to the audience is perhaps most obvious in one of the film’s most deeply unsettling sequences, a scene that seems to foreshadow Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver three years later. A sex worker (Margaret Avery) hops in the back of a taxicab and counts her earnings for the evening as the driver (Bob McClurg) watches her through the rear-view mirror. She becomes aware that he is watching her, and cheekily flashes him, opening her legs for his voyeuristic pleasure.

However, the scene quickly turns nasty when her pimp (Albert Popwell) jumps into the backseat. He begins assaulting her. Once again, the driver is presented as a silent witness, a passive observer of the brutality unfolding in the backseat. In one of the film’s most horrific moments, after the driver flees the car, the pimp murders the sex worker by forcing her to ingest drain cleaner. As he wrestles with her, her legs kick and flail widely, framed by the camera to evoke that earlier flirtation.

It’s a graphic and unsettling scene, the most unpleasant in the entire movie. It challenges the audience. When the vigilantes murder that pimp, it’s hard to feel any sympathy or empathy for him. More than that, the driver draws attention to the audience’s voyeuristic thrill at the luridness of the original Dirty Harry. This is Magnum Force in a nutshell, a film that rubs the audience’s nose in the unpleasantness of this sort of cinematic violence, confronting them with their own appetite for it.