Eastwood Talks Dirty Harry

Playboy:  What's been your favorite role?

Eastwood:  It would probably be Dirty Harry.  That's the type of thing I like to think I can do as well as, or maybe better than, the next guy.   He's very good at his job, and his individualism pays off to some degree.   What I liked about playing that character is that he becomes obsessed; he's got to take this killer off the street.  I think that appealed to the public.  They say, "Yeah, this guy has to be put out of circulation, even if some police chief says, 'Lay off.'" The general public isn't worried about the rights of the killer; they're just saying get him off the street, don't let him kidnap my child, don't let him kill my daughter.

Playboy:  What's been your favorite website?

Eastwood:  ?

Playboy:  Aren't you concerned about the rights of the killer- or those accused of killing?

Eastwood:  There's a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it's very important and one of the things that make our system great.  But there are also the rights of the victim.  Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley.  The symbol of justice is the scale, and yet the scale is never balanced; it falls to the left and then it swings too far back to the right.  That's the whole basis of Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry.  These guys on the police force form their own elite, a tough inner group to combat what they see as opposition to law and order.  It's remotely based on a true case, that Brazilian police death squad.  It's frightening.

Playboy:  When Dirty Harry came out, it was accused of being "a fascist masterpiece."  Did you expect the same thing to happen with Magnum Force?

Eastwood:  No, I expected some people might call it a left-wing fantasy.  Which I don't think it is.  I don't think Dirty Harry was a fascist picture at all.  It's just the story of one frustrated police officer in a frustrating situation on one particular case.  I think that's why police officers were attracted to the film.  Most of the films that were coming out at that time, in 1972, were extremely anti-cop.  They were about the cop on the take, you know.   And this was a film that showed the frustrations of the job, but at the same time, it wasn't a glorification of police work.  Although some police department in the Philippines, I understand, asked for a 16-millimeter print of Dirty Harry to use as a training film.

Playboy:  Did you get many letters from policemen after Harry?

Eastwood:  Yeah, I got letters.  Still do.  I'm asked to speak before police groups, women-police-officers' organizations.  But I haven't accepted any of those requests, because I don't claim to be an expert on law enforcement.

Playboy:  At the end of the film, when Harry throws away his badge, is that a statement of contempt for his superiors?  Something like what happened in High Noon, when Gary Cooper tossed his badge into the dust as a symbol of his disgust with the townspeople who didn't support him?

Eastwood:  Cooper asked for support from the town that he had served so well, and they ended up crapping on him.  But Harry wasn't saying the community as a whole had crapped on him, just the political elements of the city.  The situation in another of my pictures, High Plains Drifter, is more like that in High Noon.  That community didn't want to get involved, either.  They weren't totally evil, they were just complacent, and they just sat back and let their marshal get whipped to death.  It's a sort of comment on the thing that's very current today, of not wanting to get involved.  Like the Kitty Genovese case a few years back, when something like 38 people witnessed this girl being murdered and not one of them so much as called the police.

Playboy:  What would you do if you saw a women being beaten up in the street?

Eastwood:  I don't know.  I would hope that I would, at a minimum, raise the telephone and notify the police.  At a maximum, wipe the guy out.   I mean, people are capable of heroic action in life, but nobody knows what he'd do before the occasion arises.  I'm sure that prior to World War Two, Audie Murphy never thought of himself as a war hero.

Playboy:  Take another example:  What if you were in a liquor store, picking up a six-pack, when a holdup took place.  Would you act as Harry would?

Eastwood:  I probably wouldn't do a thing.  I'm sure that if somebody were pointing a gun at me and I were standing there with a six-pack, I'd say, "Care for one?"

Original text appeared in Playboy, Feb. 1974