Clint Eastwood

Eastwood might not like the critique, but the movie speaks for itself.

The truth is that we need cops to keep the peace, but we can't afford a single gunslinging cowboy like "Dirty" Harry Callahan to walk the beat. At the end of the film, after he blasts Scorpio with the final bullet in the chamber of his absurdly powerful .44 magnum, he hurls his badge into a quarry. Due process is a pain in the ass. It wasn't about adhering to a higher morality, but rather capitulating to the basest of hatreds –- and exterminating millions of innocent people on this basis. The law will not allow him to be the monster civilization needs to protect it from monsters. In "Dirty Harry," Scorpio gets off on taunting law enforcement, but he's not trying to turn the public against cops. The longer he waits to bring him in, the more likely he is to kill more people. "We, as Americans, went to Nuremberg and convicted people who committed certain crimes because they didn't adhere to a higher morality; we convicted them on that basis –- that they shouldn't have listened to the law of the land or their leaders at that time. The charter was adopted to [Terrence Malick of all people](https://www.slashfilm.com/956539/terrence-malick-is-one-of-the-unsung-heroes-behind-clint-eastwoods-dirty-harry-role/)), stacks the deck to a ludicrous degree by having Andrew Robinson's Scorpio Killer orchestrate an act of police brutality late in the movie to get Callahan kicked off the case. When McGilligan asked Eastwood if he was at all bothered by the dialogue surrounding "Dirty Harry," the star dismissed the notion that it endorses any kind of political worldview because, in his estimation, the film doesn't have one. He despises the Miranda Warning, and complains that the United States' judicial system has been corrupted to favor the rights of criminals.