Dirty Harry probably isn’t the movie you remember. The amount of racial slurs, senseless shootings, and general lack of fornications to give made for a peak '70s action movie, not so much for modern day. The mixture of crime, drugs, hippies, and radicals made the city of San Francisco the perfect backdrop. The city has come a long way since those days, though some would say the San Francisco of today would benefit from Inspector Harry Callahan roaming the city.
Harry was a different character than the straight-arrow heroes of the previous generation. He was a loner with no life outside his job of busting hoods. Harry followed the laws but hated the flawed bureaucratic system. This idea rings as true today as it did back then.
While Dirty Harry was more political than remembered, it was his mythic costar that seared the memory of movie-goers. There are few couples in history as iconic as Dirty Harry and his Smith & Wesson Model 29. The most powerful handgun in the world could take your head clean off. Watching Harry dispatch punks with the monster recoiling revolver never got old. The lowlife scum didn’t deserve a reload.
