Tag Archives: vigilantism

2020s, Action-Adventure, Crime/Detective, Thriller

The Batman (2022)

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Director: Matt Reeves
Screenwriters: Peter Craig, Matt Reeves

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers…

With Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s versions of Batman now sliding into generational memory, and Zack Snyder’s firmly written off as a blind alley, the time is apparently ripe for another reimagining of a character now firmly lodged as a supreme archetype in pop culture. Somewhere along the line Batman replaced Superman as the preeminent comic book hero, supplanting the dream of vast power and matching, rigorously honed moral perspective – the fantasy embodiment of mid-20th century America – with something more concrete and troubled. When Batman first emerged as a comic book character as created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in the late 1930s, he had obvious roots reaching back to the Scarlet Pimpernel and his prodigious pulp fiction and funny pages offspring, including Zorro, Doc Savage, The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, and The Shadow. Batman was also rooted in the cultural climes of the 1930s, a time when gangsters were celebrities, and movie theatres were filled with the influence of the German Expressionist cinema movement with their reality-distorting gravity of style as exemplified by movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Metropolis (1926), all of which inflected the comic’s vision in ways overt and clandestine. Today Batman has survived where only vague cultural echoes of the property’s inspirations resound.

Ever since Taxi Driver (1976) firmly inscribed itself as an ideal model for summarising a dank facet of the modern American psyche where everyone’s waiting for the real rain to come and wash out the streets, Batman, revised radically from the playful version of the character popularised by the 1966-68 TV series starring Adam West, suddenly found himself the perfect mediating vessel. Batman is defined by his seemingly incoherent yet perfect assemblage of traits. Rich but forlorn. Free but obsessed. Orphaned but surrounded by a form of family. Living as an emblem of all that’s desirable in worldly terms yet lacking desire. Batman appeals to the whole swathe of a modern movie audience. To the young, in his ingenious gadgets and naggingly memorable mystique, and his simultaneous defiant attitude towards and exemplification of parental authority. To teenagers in his self-emblazoned embodiment of torment and sceptical campaign to right institutional wrongs. And to adults as the most quasi-complex of superheroes, the one whose splintered psyche is animated in the apparel of his universe. The sprawling old-world manor as the emblem of civilisation with the bole of secrets lodged underneath. The villains who all reflect Bruce Wayne’s alienation and splintered identity back at him. The diffused yet pervasive and ambiguous sexuality.

With The Batman, director Matt Reeves attempts a task of synthesis, charting a middle course between the dusky fantasia of Burton’s films and the sly pseudo-realism of Nolan’s, whilst also harking back to aspects of the material’s early days. His stylistic inspirations, are chiefly movies like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1996), both themselves children of Taxi Driver, and also nod to a brand of burnished style popular in the 1980s as practiced by the likes of Walter Hill, Ridley and Tony Scott and others, directors who created stylised worlds where the streets were always wet from rain and reflected multi-coloured neon whilst some raffishly beautiful people got in trouble. Given how boring so much contemporary filmmaking looks, it’s not surprising that kind of movie is becoming more and more of a touchstone for more ambitious emergent directors. Reeves takes his stylistic conceits and thematic inferences to obvious extremes – it rains so much in his Gotham City I wondered if it’s supposed to be located in the tropics. Reeves, who once upon a time cowrote Steven Seagal and James Gray movies, debuted as a director in spectacular style with the facetious but compelling found footage monster movie Cloverfield (2008) and followed it up Let Me In (2011), a solid remake of the Swedish vampire movie Let The Right One In (2008) and a couple of entries in the renewed Planet of the Apes series. Despite his writing background Reeves  belongs to a cadre of current directors also including Joseph Kosinski and Gareth Edwards who try to fuse highly technical filmmaking with visual artistry.

The Batman also splits the difference in taking on the material in at once exacerbating still further the more serious, grounded aspect of Nolan’s films whilst providing an ironically revitalising stab at providing a classical kind of Batman story. Whilst the very familiar tragedy of the deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents is invoked in the story, it’s not portrayed yet again, nor any other element of his origin myth. Moreover, The Batman sets out to emphasise the title character’s prowess as an investigator, harking back to his status as the “world’s greatest detective” in the comics but long quelled in adaptations. This film’s version of Bruce (Robert Pattinson) has been inhabiting his Batman guise for two years. He’s become, thanks to his alliance with Gotham Police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), a folkloric figure skirting the outermost fringes of legitimacy, regarded with hostility but not quite outright violence by cops, just infamous enough to scare street punks when his searchlight signal emblem is projected in the sky but not yet sufficient to scare the criminal outfits about town. Despite the newly thick pall of goth-noir self-seriousness, in certain ways The Batman resembles the 1966 film of the West imprimatur, directed by Leslie Martinson, more than any other movies of the franchise since, insofar as much of it deals with the essential story pattern of Batman trying to follow a breadcrumb of trails left for him by The Riddler which eventually proves to point to a project of anarchic and iconoclastic intent.

The film’s choice of title confirms a yearning to restore some mystique and mystery to the character, appending a definite article to make him seem less personable and more like the creature haunting the dreams and sneering quips of his criminal prey, and nodding back to the more arcane writing style of the early comic books: he is as much a rarefied emanation of Gotham City’s psyche as The Joker and The Riddler. And so the film opens with Bruce musing in his diary on the purpose of the Bat Signal as a tool of intimidating criminals, warning them he’s out and about, whilst also quaintly musing that he doesn’t merely hide in the shadows, but “I am the shadows.” That line seems like something a teenage boy overly fond of Poe and Nine Inch Nails might write on a schoolbook. But Reeves cleverly insinuates the Batman guise is in part a riposte to the kinds of club-like disguises becoming popular amongst Gotham’s thug element, like a gang of clown make-up-wearing goons who like filming their random acts of brutality and set their sights on a lone commuter (Akie Kotabe) who tries to slip away unnoticed. The gang corner him on an L station only for Batman to emerge from the darkness and beat the living hell out of the gang, saving special rough treatment for one who vainly tries to shoot their masked and armour-plated vigilante. Batman isn’t calling himself Batman yet, instead repeatedly referring to himself as Vengeance, personified.

Gotham is currently in the throes of a mayoral election, with the plutocratic incumbent Don Mitchell Jnr (Rupert Penry-Jones) duking it with young, upstart, reformist challenger Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson). But Mitchell is attacked in his office and beaten to death by a lurking figure who wears a crude, bits-and-bobs disguise. Gordon contrives to bring Bruce in to view the crime scene, because a letter addressed “To The Batman” was found taped to Mitchell’s body, which was also missing a thumb. Gordon’s former partner, now the Commissioner, Pete Savage (Alex Ferns), objects strongly to Gordon’s action, but Bruce is able to sort out the killer’s queasy blend of sick humour and intricate puzzles leading to clues, with the help of his butler, pseudo-father, and former intelligence officer Alfred (Andy Serkis). When Bruce locates Mitchell’s thumb, tethered to a fingerprint-unlocked thumb drive, he and Gordon open it, to find it contains photos of Mitchell with a bruised young woman outside The Iceberg, a popular nightclub, controlled by crime lord Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and his lieutenant Oz, known by his underworld sobriquet The Penguin (Colin Farrell). The thumb drive also, the moment it’s accessed, automatically sends the pictures out online. The mysterious killer, who calls himself The Riddler, soon makes a victim of Savage by kidnapping him and torturing him to death, and makes clear he’s pursuing some vendetta against those he brands the corrupt and hateful overlords of Gotham’s institutions, both official and criminal.

Bruce visits The Iceberg in Batman guise and, after bashing his way inside, talks with The Penguin, but his eye is caught by club employee Selina (Zoe Kravitz), whose distinctive boots are glimpsed in the photos of Mitchell. Tracking her, Bruce finds she’s harbouring the bruised girl, Annika (Hana Hrzic) in her apartment, and soon observes her in action in her metier as a cat burglar, breaking in to Mitchell’s apartment to try and steal back Annika’s passport. Bat and Cat form an uneasy alliance as Selina agrees to become Batman’s eyes and ears and penetrate the exclusive club-within-the-club inside The Iceberg called 44 Below, which regularly entertains Gotham’s supposed elite of law and order. There she encounters the city’s chatty DA, Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard), and picks up slivers of information that begin pointing along the path to uncovering a conspiracy linking Falcone and the city bosses. Meanwhile Colson himself is snatched by The Riddler and employed in a most spectacular fashion to crash Mitchell’s funeral.

The Batman betrays efforts to keep up with the zeitgeist: where in Nolan’s films Batman was necessary because the police were under-resourced and outmatched in a cynically neoliberal epoch, here it’s because they’re largely an inherently corrupt organism serving fraudulent oligarchy. The Batman reiterates ideas employed in Nolan’s films, covering similar ground to Batman Begins (2005) in portraying efforts to take down Falcone, a representative of familiar organised crime, only to create a vacuum where more perverse villains will burgeon. Reeves also revisits and intensifies The Dark Knight Rises’ (2012) themes of collective punishment by self-appointed anarchist-avengers, and choice of characterising Catwoman not as a sly opportunist or, like Burton’s take, a crazed and eroticised avatar of feminist rebellion, but a blunter, demimonde-produced rebel locked in a dance of duality with Batman in seeking retribution. That said, The Batman hews in its darker, weirder bent to elements of Burton’s vision, presenting a more detailed and realistic version of its perma-noir city replete with Edward Hopper-esque diners and looming urban-industrial fixtures. Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac (2007) are also evident reference points in remaking The Riddler over as a tricky, ironic, viciously moralistic foe reminiscent of Se7en’s John Doe, and sporting personal branding in his logo and cryptic puzzles reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer’s. The Riddler is a menacing, deeply malignant weirdo who contrives to have one character’s face eaten off by rats. Taking inspiration from something like Se7en, an exemplification of a movie that contrives to look grown-up but actually disseminates the worldview of a morbid high schooler, doesn’t charm me.

Allowing that kind of Sadean edge also pushes The Batman into territory verboten to kids and a mite unpleasant for grown-ups too. Reeves is at least judicious, implying and skirting such grisly things whilst avoiding overt gore. The Batman labours to construct a mood of creeping, incipient dread infecting all things that makes Burton’s once-controversial style choices – remembering that he was the one who fatefully inducted darkness and grit into the lexicon of the modern fantastical blockbuster – seem nearly as playful and frivolous as the West series by comparison. The pall is emphasised by Michael Giacchino’s grand and menacing score, which builds themes, in radically different counterpoints, derived from “Ave Maria,” which The Riddler adores. The film’s extreme length, at nearly three hours, is enforced in large part by Reeves’ extremely deliberate pacing, and it’s both a plus and a minus in terms of the movie’s overall success. Reeves strains to give every gesture and plot turn a sense of weight and foreboding, each revelation leading on to another, grimmer truth. One real plus of The Batman is that it believes in basic principles of popular cinema as a blend of story and style. Even if the story is very familiar as it largely from god knows how many urban thrillers and conspiracy dramas, it’s more than just a convenience to pass the time between action scenes and cheap jokes that come every five minutes to sate seat-kicking 13-year-olds.

Despite its veneer of social invective, The Batman is as nostalgic in its way as anything in current cinema, looking back longingly for an age of romantic desolation in big cities rather than the smothering blandness of a gentrified age. Preoccupation with the dark side of the Batman fantasy as rooted in vigilantism, a contemporary concern augured deep in the zeitgeist by films like Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver itself as well as perpetual tabloid controversy, was initially interrogated in the likes of Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke before then being transmitted into the movies, supplanting the old, simple image of the masked, heroic crime fighter. Dirty Harry itself can be seen as both a derivation and anticipation of eras in Batman lore with Harry as the Dark Knight and Scorpio as The Joker. The septic avenger angst is now so familiar, in short, as to be as big a cliché as anything it was meant to dispel, especially when it has become, in its own way, just as romanticised. Reeves however tries to take it seriously in his own way. The film makes much of the common roots of Bruce, Selina, and the Riddler’s motives to become extra-judicial punishers, with sharply divergent sociological and psychological paths trodden to become what they’ve become. This kind of characterisation tries to take on themes of inequality and privilege, with Selina explicitly suggesting only someone born rich can afford morals. Trouble is, this treads very close to making very conservative arguments: Bruce, rich and comfortable despite his traumas, has the luxury of being good; Selina, hardscrabble survivor, is more focused, angry, and ready to countenance theft and murder; Riddler, product of an orphanage, is a maniacal slayer, forging a shadow army out of the dispossessed and the never-had like the embodiment of every upper and middle class nightmare. Good things those lower orders are being kept in hand.

Of course, there are other ways of reading this. Reeves’ attempt to return the material to a zone that feels more psychologically animate makes it easier to see the characters as facets of the same personality – Bruce/Batman as superego, Selina the ego (and anima), Riddler the id. Bring on the Joker for superficial antithesis. Farrell’s Penguin is left out of this equation. Burgess Meredith’s fabulous performance in the West series made the Penguin the most intelligent and impudent of Batman’s opponents, so he took on a greater importance there than in other mediums. Here the character is most plainly used as a movie buff and acting fan reference point: Reeves has cast Farrell and covered him in make-up to do a pinpoint imitation of Robert De Niro’s similarly transformed performance as Al Capone in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). Reeves and Farrell do sneak in a deft reference to the more traditional version of the character as he’s left waddling when Bruce and Gordon tie his feet after capturing him for interrogation. There is nonetheless appropriate cunning in positing the character in a  milieu that’s an extrapolation of a 1930s movie gangland (Jared Leto’s much-mocked but interesting performance as the Joker in Suicide Squad, 2016, also tried to bridge such roots, but with his nods going to James Cagney and George Raft). There’s a coherently and realistically paranoid lilt to the film’s vision of the official ruling class and underworld bosses of a city locked in an uneasy, mutually contemptuous but inescapable gravity, a state of decay where Batman seems most justifiable.

The neurotic dance of attraction and disdain between Bruce and Selina, constantly grazing each-other whilst wearing their sexuality as masks, has long been a sustaining element of the material, and Reeves to his credit doesn’t awkwardly skip around it like Nolan did for most of The Dark Knight Rises, although he also stops short of acknowledging it as deeply pathological as Burton indicated in Batman Returns (1992). That film, which, despite being violently uneven and about 70% misfire, sported in Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman a definitive characterisation as a post-Madonna, pre-#MeToo sexual avenger. Reeves aims at least to let the couple evince attraction that feels more bodied and hot-blooded than the constant puppy love found in the Marvel Studios series, complete with the odd bit of snogging, even if their relationship is still ultimately stymied and chaste. Bruce’s attraction to Selina is part of his character journey as she taunts his code but also ultimately reinforces it, more perhaps than The Riddler does, through her actions.Unlike a great majority of moviemakers today, Reeves seems aware that he has two movie stars on hand to do what people used to go to movies to see, and so he bravely allows the audience to enjoy watching two very hot people play characters whose chief affinity seems to lie in both being vinyl fetishists. Kravitz, having a good year between this and her starring role in Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi, has just the right screen presence and persona for the role, a gamine projecting a quality half-feral, half-wounded beyond repair, driving her to become a kind of urban guerrilla fighter fighting a private war. She looks so hard, so gimlet-gazed and self-contained, that the sight of her responding to Bruce reveals  someone who might well rather be an animal remembering she’s human. That Selina clearly swings both ways is also signalled in her apparent relationship with the victimised Annika, who vanishes from her apartment, apparently snatched by Falcone and his people.

Later Annika’s corpse is discovered by Bruce and Selina when they spy on a drug deal orchestrated by The Penguin. The Penguin’s goons fire on them when they realise they’re being spied on, but Bruce brings out the Batmobile to chase down The Penguin in a spectacular, sometimes quasi-impressionistic highway chase. Reeves’ cinematic setting, with the sepulchral visual palette and Giacchino’s thrumming, tolling score, reach towards grandeur, and yet Reeves labours at the same time to reset Bruce/Batman at basics – his bulletproof suit and contact lens cameras are fancy stuff but most of the rest of his operation is quite low-tech, reliant on simply hitting stronger and faster than opponents through relentlessly honed skills. The Batmobile is essentially just a souped-up muscle car which, it’s hinted through his predilection for stripping his motorcycle down to components and back again, he likely built himself. Reeves, who keeps any tendency towards boyish delight on a tight leash for much of the movie, at least can’t disguise it in the sense of moment when Bruce first fires up the car, glimpsed in silhouette, revving up the motor with thunderous grunts and spurts of flame to give chase. The chase concludes with an equally iconographic vignette as The Penguin gazes on, battered and mortified, inside his upside-down car as the Caped Crusader emerges from his vehicle, every inch the gothic nightmare to the criminal element he intended, and approaches at a slow, menacing mosey.

In tone and outlook The Batman just about as far as it’s possible to get from the West film and series without perhaps becoming a snuff film, and yet it’s still recognisably the same stuff. Reeves’ work tries hard also to distinguish itself from Nolan’s trilogy. Where Nolan’s films had their arrhythmic, sometimes borderline incoherent visual jazz and propulsive editing, Reeves goes for a stately tension, with painterly smears of drenched colour and punctuated by eruptions of chaos. An early scene where Bruce fights his way into The Iceberg, creaming bouncers and wiseguys, is sleek and bleakly beautiful and touched with an edge of abstract artistry by the flashing lights and booming music, in comparison with a similar scene in The Dark Knight (2008) where Nolan’s gibberish cutting simply located Batman in the midst of a brawl. Later, Reeves reiterates the edge of abstraction to intensify rather than mute an action sequence, as Bruce fights his way into The Iceberg in trying to rescue Selina from her own maniacal choices, his stalking, silhouetted, nightmarish guise glimpsed in the flashing of machine guns as their bullets bounce off his armour. There’s a fierce beauty to such moments, and the film as a whole, and if I liked The Batman more than Nolan’s films, it’s because Reeves is a far more elegant filmmaker. On the other hand, Nolan’s expansive, fidgety narratives kept tripping over themselves because they tried to do too much and betrayed Nolan’s hyperactive synapses, whilst The Batman tries to make a busy but essentially straightforward narrative into the stuff of epics.

There’s a lot of to-and-fro in the plot involving Selina’s covert connection to Falcone – she’s the illegitimate result of his contemptuous fling with one of his club dancers – and the conspiracy The Riddler’s project is meant to both avenge and reveal. Whilst Reeves does manage to keep most of this in balance, The Batman would ultimately have been better, indeed close to the classic of its genre, if it had less focal points. Reeves introduces a motif in the film’s very first scene as The Riddler spies on Mitchell, who plays a bit with his son, dressed as a ninja and fighting invisible enemies in his father’s office. For a moment you think this might be a prelude depicting Bruce in his childhood. Instead the lad, orphaned by The Riddler’s actions in a bitter irony, becomes an emblem for Bruce, who keeps seeing him and experiencing moments of powerful identification that he must keep secret: any expression of emapthy would be a disastrous unmaksing. He saves the boy’s life during a later eruption of chaos, action being the only way he can express and contend with such sad knowledge. Bruce follows the breadcrumb trail to find that not only did Falcone manipulate the city’s honchos to get his former boss locked away but also brought them in as partners in the drug trade, and they divvied up the large urban renewal fund that Bruce’s father established for his own, brief mayoral run not long before he was killed. This in turn obliges Bruce to consider the possibility his father was also corrupt, when The Riddler suggests he had a journalist murdered for prying into his private life, and also to look out for himself and Alfred when The Riddler makes clear Bruce is his next target. This swerve of story essentially goes nowhere. Alfred, wounded in an assassination attempt on Bruce’s life with a letter bomb, angrily tells Bruce the proper story, which does leave Thomas Wayne a compromised and culpable but not villainous figure. The main point of this seems to be to release Bruce from feeling entirely crushed by the mythos of a heroic father (and also that mental instability might be as much his inheritance as Wayne Enterprises) and also able to finally embrace Alfred as decent substitute, as the pair have interacted uneasily through the movie on this topic. Serkis, unusually but effectively cast, characterises his Alfred as an aging man of action eased into a quietly circumspect life of nurturing whilst still musing on his days “in the Circus” (vale LeCarré) and operating as the paternal figure Bruce needs whether he wants it or not. He’s really good and the film needed more of him.

The same thing can be said for Pattinson. For anyone who hadn’t seen any of his performances since his star-making but largely derided turns in the Twilight series, his casting was liable to be bewildering, just as it was inevitable-feeling to anyone who had watched him in the likes of Cosmopolis (2012) and High Life (2019). Pattinson, whose features are the stuff of the officially handsome yet from certain angles appear quite Boris Karloff-esque, knows well how to channel his image towards playing neurasthenic adonii, and twists it a few more turns here. Pattinson’s avowed inspiration for his characterisation was Kurt Cobain as the poster boy for troubled greatness, but with his stringy, floppy haircut looks more like Crispin Glover, whilst his Batman costume with its high, very pointy ears is vaguely reminiscent of the first onscreen appearance of the character, in Lambert Hillyer’s 1943 serial. Refusing to get jacked in a Chris Hemsworth fashion, Pattinson nonetheless projects a newly intimidating physical presence, and he depicts Bruce’s physical bravura well, particularly in the opening fight scene where he mercilessly bashes a hapless thug into submission as much to show his pals what they’re up against as to lay him out. Here the film’s thesis, of Batman as an empowerment fantasy concocted by a haunted young man which he then relentlessly adapted himself into, is illustrated without any further underlining required.

Pattinson’s Bruce and Batman aren’t yet clearly divided personas: in Batman guise he doesn’t put on any kind of gruff-rough voice (thankfully), whilst Bruce Wayne is living as a detached and obsessive recluse neglecting not just a social life but also the family’s waning fortunes, far from the studied appearance of a playboy as stolen from Percy Blakeney. Bruce’s habit of venturing into deadly situations without a gun is both defining and also galling, as Gordon quips, “That’s your thing,” as he pulls out his pistol for a venture into an old dark house: not everyone has a few million dollars’ worth of carbon fibre on hand. There’s also an interesting disparity in Bruce’s personal fame and that of the Batman, who is still a spreading legend, whereas Bruce is instantly recognised despite his reclusiveness as the avatar of Gotham’s elite, both glimpsed during his attempts in both guises to get into The Iceberg. Bruce’s decision to appear at Mitchell’s funeral results in many turned heads, including that of Falcone, who scarcely ever leaves his headquarters above The Iceberg Lounge: a mayor’s funeral is the last social unifier. Which is then crashed as a car smashes through the cathedral doors and scatters the crowd before slamming to a halt against the altar. Colson emerges from the vehicle with a bomb tied about his neck and a cell phone taped to his hand. Bruce returns in Batman guise and converses with The Riddler over the phone, who cruelly forces Colson to expose his own corruption before blowing him to pieces.

Bruce, knocked out cold by the blast but protected by the suit, is then carried to the police headquarters where arguing cops want to unmask and arrest him, but Gordon convinces them to let him deal with the captive, and gets Bruce to make a break for it. Here the narrative takes a risk with logic in making you wonder why the cops didn’t unmask him right away. The apparent explanation is Gordon’s shepherding prevented this, but it’s still a bit thin. Better, perhaps, is the notion the rank-and-file cops already largely feel Batman is their last, best friend, in a story that tries to dramatise the longest bow of the basic Batman format, the embrace by the police of a civilian dressed as a bat as a trustworthy, even vital ally: Reeves gives it his best. As far as finally letting Batman the Detective have his day, The Batman is absorbing, even if some of the expository dialogue Pattinson is stuck mouthing is exasperatingly obvious. The trouble is Batman doesn’t come out of it looking that great as a detective, with The Riddler holding his metaphorical hand and leading him step by step into his malignant plan. Bruce eventually foils Selina’s avowed design to assassinate her father in punishment for his many sins, but just as Bruce drags Falcone out of his headquarters with the aid of true cops, he’s gunned down by a sniper from an apartment across the street. This proves to be The Riddler’s home: when they invade the apartment the investigators find evidence of his activities but not their quarry, but he’s soon located drinking coffee in a nearby diner.

Dano, who can play weirdos in his sleep by now, nonetheless modulates his performance mischievously, the figure of bleak, volatile menace captured on cell phone video screen supplanted by a twee, damaged pervert who sometimes whispers in alternation with piercing, drawn-out, quasi-autistic moans that abruptly become words. Here however the film hits a speed bump of narrative intent. With The Riddler imprisoned, Falcone dead, and The Penguin neutralised for the moment, the movie lacks a villain. Turns out The Riddler has a network of fellow internet oddballs and angry orphans who adopt his guise and follow his plan to wreak havoc at Réal’s inauguration whilst bombs he planted around the city unleash flooding torrents. Here Reeves labours to evoke both obvious historical parallels, with shots modelled on the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and movie models, nodding to The Manchurian Candidate (1962) with the assassins lurking in the rafters of the “Gotham Square Garden” to kill Réal. This larger plot, in a campaign of havoc previously confined to one creep, takes everyone by surprise, including the attentive viewer. There’s definitely something interesting in The Riddler replicating himself like glitch code in the city matrix by assimilating other damaged loners and rejects, but where the film might have devoted some of its copious running time to setting this up, it instead sprung as a shocking twist.

The spectacle of the flooding city could have been a memorably apocalyptic signature, but it’s rather flatly done, and Batman can’t do much about it. At least Bruce and Selina can intervene to beat up The Riddler’s assassins in a potent action scene, even if there’s still the problem of their foes not really having any identity: they’re just anonymous thugs. Bruce is almost knocked out of the battle when one of the goons shoots him up close with a shotgun, requiring Selina to help him, and then giving himself an adrenalin injection to roar back into battle as a berserker. This gives way to a visually striking and affecting coda as Bruce, descending into the floodwaters to rescue some cowering Gothamites, holding a flare aloft as a beacon amidst carnage and realising he needs to be more than Vengeance, and he embraces the role of a public hero rather than someone merely following his own obsession. I liked this final flourish, one that endows Bruce/Batman with a character arc without reiterating things that have been done to death with the character. The film ends in curiously languorous fashion with Bruce and Selina going their separate ways, lingering on shots of them riding motorcycles alongside each-other – a definite motif in the film – but then diverging.

The Batman is a peculiar creation at once endemic of and off the beat of contemporary Hollywood, in that it doesn’t entirely succeed, but also feels like a real movie. It takes chances and pulls most of them off, and whilst derivative in vital aspects it has an aura that’s specific, dramatic and aesthetic musculature that’s substantial. The Batman recalls expressions of Hollywood imperial stature like Ben-Hur (1959) or Cleopatra (1963) or Doctor Zhivago (1965), but instead of depicting some great confluence of history and myth it confidently expects an audience to sit through a three-hour mood piece purely because it’s a Batman movie. It comes close to describing an ideal of what a Batman movie can be, even as it can’t quite embrace the extremes it should be heading to, and cuts itself off ultimately from the awareness of the kinky wish-fulfilment Burton, for all his faults, understood. I wish the script was less pedantic and had some of the more blasted romanticism and cynical poetry of its noir and cyberpunk models that Reeves successfully channels into the look of the thing. That it could have been about twenty minutes shorter without any real damage seems obvious. Indeed, the entire style of The Batman risks leaving behind the specific pleasures of pulp fiction and exchanging them for the last word in pseudo-seriousness. But that in itself makes The Batman arresting. If Reeves’ film is better than this might make it sound, and indeed close to my favourite outing to date for the character, it’s through the accumulation of elements, the tangible, powerful style and strong performances, that make it a big, woozy, uneven, but riveting experience. The film signs off inevitably with signals of sequels, apt in this case as The Riddler finds himself, despite his misery at his plan’s failure, making connection with a sardonic fellow prisoner (Barry Keoghan) in the next cell of Arkham Asylum, whose identity will be plain enough to protoplasmic fish in the Challenger Deep. And the very last shots of Bruce watching Selina vanish along a hazy, light-smeared Gotham street at dawn in his rear-view mirror, the duo having fought their way through into light at least, before Bruce sets his jaw and rides on to his mission, does capture that ephemeral pulp poetry the film seeks earnestly.

Standard
1970s, Action-Adventure, Crime/Detective, Thriller

Dirty Harry (1971)

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Director: Don Siegel
Screenwriters: Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, Dean Riesner, Terrence Malick (uncredited), John Milius (uncredited)

By Roderick Heath

Fifty years since the film’s release, the opening moments of Dirty Harry still pack a wallop, a potent aesthetic unit promising cruel and jagged thrills. Director Don Siegel surveys the names of policemen killed in the line of duty carved on a memorial are scanned as church bells chime on the soundtrack with an insistently ethereal overtone, before fading to a shot of a rifle in a man’s grasp, barrel and silencer looming huge and deadly, death from above rendered intimate and literal. A lovely young woman (Diana Davidson) is glimpsed diving into a swimming pool on the roof of a San Francisco skyscraper to swim a few laps. The man with the gun is watching the girl, his telescopic sight zeroing in whilst the camera shot zooms back to confirm the woman’s oblivious link to the man’s bleak intent, space, distance, and height gripped and distorted by the camera lens and the homicidal purpose of the assassin. Composer Lalo Schifrin’s music, an unsettling blend of skittish, pulsing drum riffs, spacy drones and creepy female vocalisations, weave a paranoid and threatening mood.

The pull towards godlike judgement is irresistible, predestined: the killer pulls the trigger in obedience, his existence only gaining meaning through the erasure of what he’s looking at, the despoiling of what seems to live in the world’s heart. The vantage suddenly becomes more dreadfully intimate, bullet hole exploding in the girl’s back, her hollow, water-sucking breaths heard as she sinks into the brine and black blood spasms in blue water. The thrill of power worked at deistic remove crashes headlong into the immediacy of hideous brutality worked upon a hapless body, death rendered a palpable and awful thing to a degree even Siegel’s former protégé Sam Peckinpah had not yet quite countenanced in his spectacles of bloodshed.

The anointed agent of retribution is swift to appear: Siegel cuts immediately to the entrance of his hero, such as he is, Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), called onto the rooftops to survey the carnage of this new foe. Clad in grey suit and sunglasses that look like they might deflect such high-velocity bullets, Harry has the quality of a specially bred tracking animal released from his cage the moment his particular talents are required. Schifrin’s jazz-funk theme tags Harry with a jittery but propulsive metre as he ascends into the neighbouring building and collects his foe’s spoor-like leavings: a discarded shell, a pinned note, items left behind specifically by the killer to announce his coming to the powers that be and tease his inevitable pursuer. Siegel’s long-evinced obsession with landscapes of soaring heights and sprawling flats and their connection to the straits of his characters is immediately in play here. The great sprawl of San Francisco is laid out below as the stadium for the oncoming corrida between cop and killer, the gaze of the camera conjoined with the will to countenance such extremes of moral drama.

The killer calls himself Scorpio, and his letter draws a single, totemic groan of “Jesus” as he reads it pinned to an aerial and comprehends that he’s not dealing with just any old nut. Cut to the city mayor (John Vernon) reading out the letter in his office, unable to read out the racial slur Scorpio uses in the letter as he declares “my next pleasure will be to kill a Catholic Priest or a nigger” if he’s not paid a $100,000 ransom. Scorpio’s declared motive is money but he is also, in modern parlance, a troll, one who delights in assaulting social norms and provoking consensus with acts of calculated despoiling, an iconoclast who seems to care less about being caught than about getting to play his game out to the end. Harry, called into a meeting with the Mayor, the Chief of Police (John Larch), and his superintendent Al Bressler (Harry Guardino), senses such motives instinctively and declares a conviction that playing along with Scorpio is asking for trouble. But the Mayor wants him mollified long enough to set up a surveillance net over the city and get the operation to catch him up and running. Harry’s suggestion, that he find a way to meet him, is dismissed out of hand, and his listless attempts to explain basic police work are cut off by Bressler, more experienced in this sort of thing in offering quick, clipped, impressive-sounding measures to mollify the sternly questioning Mayor.

On his way out the door, the Mayor tells Harry that he doesn’t want any more bad headline-making actions “like we had last year in the Fillmore district”, leading to Harry’s serious if wryly pitched retort that “when a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.” A promissory note for Harry’s way of dealing with clear and present danger. And yet in the next scene, when Harry sits down for a lunchtime hotdog at a downtown diner even as he’s noticed the distinct probability a bank robbery is being committed across the street, his first response is to get the cook to call in other cops and “wait for the cavalry to arrive.” But the peal of alarms tells him he has to go to work. He strides out into the street and barks at one of the emerging robbers to halt through a mouth full of chewed hotdog. Rather than desist of course the robber fires at Harry, who brings his signature weapon, a massive Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, to bear and takes out the thieves with a precision that isn’t quite surgical, given their getaway car crashes into fire hydrant and topples a florist stand. Only after the battle is over does Harry glance down and notice the shotgun pellet wounds riddling his leg. Seeing one robber (Albert Popwell) is only wounded and seems to be contemplating grabbing his gun, Harry advances on him and gives a well-polished speech of challenge just about every movie lover know by rote.

Harry Callahan is immediately inscribed as a near-mythical figure, armoured knight or western gunslinger transposed into the contemporary scene, his Magnum his Excalibur capable of extraordinary feats. Or is it less Excalibur and more Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer, the cursed sword of the equally antiheroic Elric, feeding on souls and entrapping its wielder ever more deeply the more he uses it for however righteous ends? What’s particularly interesting about this scene, aside from how it gives the audience true introduction to Harry’s prowess under fire and his ritualistic dominance of his felled opponents, is the way he’s also characterised as a working stiff, trying to avoid being pulled into a gunfight during his lunch, lacking any gung-ho drive to put himself in harm’s way but committing fully once obliged. Treated by a police surgeon Steve (Marc Hertsens) who sets about plucking the shot from his leg, Harry insists on removing his pricey trousers rather than let the doctor cut them off: “For $29.50, let it hurt.” This touch serves a nimble game in the way Harry is characterised, allowing him to be a reasonably well-dressed hero but also one for whom it comes with a hole in his bank balance. There’s also the first hint dropped regarding Harry’s loss of his wife, as Steve unthinkingly tells Harry to get his wife to check his wounds, before remembering and apologising.

Whilst taking over a mythic role in his social function and a movie part designed to transpose the cinematic persona he was carrying over from his roles for Sergio Leone, Eastwood-as-Harry himself stands at a remove from the stony titans of the wastes he played in those films, forced to operate in the real world. Harry soon finds himself presented with an encumbrance to his usual preferred way of working, when he’s assigned a Latino partner newly promoted, Chico Gonzalez (Reni Santoni). Dirty Harry has long been a loaded film to contemplate despite being a popular classic and a foundational work of modern Hollywood film style. The film didn’t invent the figure of the cop driven by his own peculiar motives to play a rough game by his own rules, which had precursors in movies like Beast of the City (1932) and The Big Heat (1953), and some of Siegel’s own earlier works, whilst of course also anatomising a couple of millennia’s worth of duellist dramas going back The Iliad. But Dirty Harry certainly drew up a fresh blueprint for use in infinite variations over the next few decades in movies and TV shows.

Siegel’s film can count movies as disparate as Death Wish (1974), Assault on Precinct 13, Taxi Driver (both 1976), Lethal Weapon, Robocop (both 1987), Die Hard (1988), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Se7en (1996) amongst its errant and quarrelsome children. Michael Mann’s films owe a vast amount to Siegel’s imprint. Even the concept of Batman and The Joker offered in Batman (1989) and doubled-down on in The Dark Knight (2008) as glowering vigilante versus mocking anarchist owe everything to Harry and Scorpio: Andy Robinson’s clownish leer and crazed laugh already trend very Joker-like. Siegel expected a lashing from liberal critics and viewers and got it at a moment in a time when, amidst the wane of the Counterculture moment which he and Eastwood had parodied on their earlier collaboration Coogan’s Bluff (1968), a reactionary spasm was manifesting. Concerns over street crime and social breakdown and the possible necessity, even desirability of vigilante action were on the boil and questions about police ethics and limitations were being vigorously debated from all corners just as they are today. Dirty Harry is still often caricatured as a fascist-vigilante mission statement. Still, moviegoers embraced the film to such a degree Eastwood was finally, firmly established as a major Hollywood star, and he returned to the title role four times.

Whilst both films owed much to the success of Bullitt (1968), a movie that did for the modern detective what James Bond did for spies in crystallising the idea of a cool cop, Dirty Harry and its slightly more reputable and thus Oscar-garlanded companion The French Connection gave the cop drama a hard, grim, violent gloss and reinstalled it as a vehicle of gritty entertainment in pop culture. The film had immediate real-life roots in the mythos of the conspicuously uncaught Zodiac Killer’s reign of terror over San Francisco in the late 1960s (and like Bullitt drew on real-life detective Dave Toschi as a model), although analogue Scorpio has a rather different modus operandi, and a few other murder cases were drawn on too. The film’s complex development saw the script, initially penned by husband-and-wife screenwriting team Harold and Rita Fink and then given rewrites by a credited Dean Riesner, a very experienced writer for TV westerns (and former child actor), and uncredited young talents Terrence Malick and John Milius. Milius, as well as introducing the totemic sense of gun lore, took Akira Kurosawa’s crime movies like Stray Dog (1949) as a model in defining Harry as an isolated man and doppelganger to the killer he’s chasing, whilst Malick’s take was used as the basis for the first sequel, Magnum Force (1973). A battery of major stars turned down the role, and in the end it was Eastwood who took on the project with his own fledgling production company Malpaso.

Eastwood had since The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966) been looking for the right vehicle to cement the stardom he gained in Spaghetti Westerns as legitimate in the Hollywood sense, and after a couple of straight Westerns including Siegel’s turn to the Italianate with Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970) and the ill-advised turn to musical comedy in Paint Your Wagon (1969). Dirty Harry finally presented him the ideal chance to graft his squinty, taciturn gunslinger act onto a contemporary scene, and the much-mimicked familiarity of the character’s various catchphrases – “You’ve got to ask yourself one question – ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya punk?”, later giving way to the pithier “Go ahead, make my day,” from Sudden Impact (1983) – depend on the near-symbiotic perception of Eastwood’s presence in the role and the role itself. And yet there’s an offbeat quality to Eastwood performance despite its seeming familiarity. Eastwood never plays Harry as particularly physically dominant or cocksure, often seeming a beat or two out of alignment with the world around him, as if tired and wired all at once. His clenched, oddly undulating drawl conveys hints of ennui and contempt as well as the struggle he has day in and day out keeping his behaviour and reactions on an even keel.

More crucially, Siegel, who began his career as a studio artisan prized for his montage work and had to fight to be given a shot at directing, Siegel, whose feature directing career had nearly ground to a halt in the mid-1960s like many other Old Hollywood talents, confirmed his comeback after auteurist-minded critics had kept candles burning for him with a movie that looked and sounding almost super-modern. Siegel had been wrestling with his ambivalent feelings about justice and policing since his debut feature The Verdict (1946). That film set in play many ideas and images repeated in Dirty Harry, from the opening bell chimes to the soaring vantages and the central figure of a policeman who commits to his own ideal of justice. Siegel returned to the theme later of a cop battling political pressure as well as some of the same imagery in Edge of Eternity (1959). Siegel’s temperamental drift towards film noir and thrillers saw him often offering criminals and ne’er-do-wells as protagonists as often as cops and traditional hero figures.

Siegel’s natural sympathy for outsiders fighting for their lives and identities could be applied to victimised innocents like the luckless humans of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the Native American foundling-turned-avenger of Flaming Star (1960), and the doomed proto-beatnik soldier of Hell Is For Heroes (1962), through to brutal and destructive and but existentially beleaguered criminals as in films like Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), Private Hell 36 (1954), Baby Face Nelson (1957), The Lineup (1958), and The Killers (1964). Siegel’s immediate acolytes included Eastwood, Peckinpah, and Ida Lupino who co-wrote and starred in Private Hell 36, and just about everyone to take on a modern cop and urban action movie lies under his influence. Dirty Harry allowed Siegel to set up these two essential types of character in direct warfare and played at extremes, Scorpio’s truly anarchic spirit and Harry’s increasingly maniacal response operating as schismatic halves of the same personality, Siegel’s own. Siegel had displayed with Two Mules For Sister Sara readiness to draw on the Italian Western template, and Dirty Harry, like the same year’s Klute, suggests the influence of Italian giallo film also creeping into Hollywood, Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) in particular, what with Siegel’s emphasis on voyeurisitic points of view matched to Schifrin’s score which betrays evident similarities to Ennio Morricone’s for Argento with the eerie female vocals and outbreaks of dissonant jazz.

At the same time, Siegel’s own stylistics were cutting-edge for the time, working with his great cinematographer Bruce Surtees in utilising inventive and sweeping use of wide-angle lenses to distort space and invert relationships, particularly evident in the opening shots of Scorpio and his vantage, the use of much handheld camerawork, and allowing the usually hard-edged texture of Hollywood cinematography to dissolve into semi-abstraction in the use of ambient light and long zoom and telephoto lens shots. As he had already done in The Lineup, Siegel uses the very geography of San Francisco and its spaghetti sprawl of new highway passes and ramps to present the idea of landscape as a trap as well as a mimeograph for the psychic and moral exigencies of the battle. This is particularly crucial in the climax, where Harry exploits certain knowledge about how to ambush Scorpio, but also propels much of the narrative, including the long central sequence where Scorpio forces Harry to run all over town in his attempt to pay the ransom, in order to make sure he’s not being followed – not counting on Harry and Chico being cleverer in arranging for a radio link – and informs the more sociological dimension of the story. Harry and Chico’s nocturnal excursions become epic journeys through the intestines of a modern American city, encountering lovers, hookers, muggers, gays, and would-be suicides, small fry at swim amidst neon blooming like ocean coral all looking for their own personal oblivion, behaving in ways that would have been kept hidden away just a decade before. Only cops like Harry and Chico have to engage with such a world in a spirit of obligation.

The Mayor’s hope of buying “breathing space” by answering his demand for money with a personal column missive pleading “be patient” proves exactly the wrong move as the smirking Scorpio is seen properly for the first time, tearing up the newspaper page and unpacking his rifle for another killing, this time taking aim at a gay couple having a date in a park. Luckily one of the patrolling helicopters spots him before he can shoot, forcing him to flee. Harry and Chico, patrolling in their car, cruise the district as the sun goes down and Chico spots a man carrying a suitcase the same colour as what Scorpio was carrying: investigating Harry finds it’s not their man and gets beaten up by some neighbourhood brawlers who take him for a peeping tom: Chico intervenes but Harry insists on letting them go, taking it as an occupational hazard. Called in to intervene as a man (Bill Couch) threatens to leap from his death from a rooftop, Harry lifted on a fire hoist and instead of playing placatory with the man provoking him into lashing out so Harry can knock him and bring him back to the ground.

These vignettes flesh out both Harry’s approach to policing and the society around him, trying to portray policing as an unceasing stream of crises unnoticed when they’re resolved but all too loudly wailed about when they don’t, in a world filled with people caught in their own little algorithms of perverse behaviour. Harry’s bemused response to them. “These loonies, they oughta throw a net over the whole bunch of ‘em,” he quips to Chico. But he knows he’s just another one: being attacked as a peeping tom prefigures the later stakeout scene, where Harry finds himself fascinated by the human scenes, Rear Window-like (1954), he spies through windows. Scenes glimpsed include a wife chewing out her husband and a hooker stripping down to her birthday suit and meeting a swinger couple, obliging Harry to comment, “You owe it to yourself to live a little, Harry.” Harry’s isolation, signalled early on in his conversation with Steve, stems from the death of his wife in an accident caused by a drunk driver, a tragic turn Harry later explains with a note of intense world-weariness to Chico’s wife Norma (Lynn Edgington). Earlier in the film, Harry and his long-time colleague and pal Frank De Georgio (John Mitchum), as De Georgio responds to Chico’s question on why they call him ‘Dirty’ Harry by noting that Harry “hates everybody”, listing ethnic epithets for everyone, with Harry rounding out the rollcall with “especially spicks.”

Eastwood might well have been remembering this scene for his own Gran Torino (2008) decades later, with its meditations on how working class culture revolves around the giving and taking of insults as a sort of totem of authenticity and ironic fellowship. In context it serves more as a sort of sarcastic piece of trolling in its own right, mocking expectations of Harry’s (and by implications cops in general) as racist and reactionary assholes, whilst also sketching Harry’s outsider quality: his misanthropy is shtick but his real attitude to society is nebulous even to himself. The guy who “hates everybody” is also the guy who defends everybody on the social ramparts, and the mediating figure who ushers people representing outsider groups – Chico in this film, a female partner in The Enforcer (1976) – into his zone and ethos, and the ultimate fates of such figures underline Harry’s sense of his fate to remain alone. Harry’s relations with the Chief and Brenner, played by the marvellously hangdog Guardino, have their own conversant climate, neither man forced to play the hard-ass boss cliché with him, but rather portrayed as men who have experienced the same moral and psychic exhaustion as Harry but retained something he doesn’t have, for better and worse. “It’s disgusting that a police officer should know how yo use a weapon like that,” Brenner notes queasily as he watches Harry scotch tape a switchblade knife to his leg in case of a close encounter, but it’s a disgusting world.

In the morning after their night-time patrol Harry and Chico are called to the sight of what quickly proves to be another successful Scorpio killing, leaving a black teenager gruesomely killed. On the theory that Scorpio will return to the same building he was spotted on earlier, Harry and Chico set up an armed stakeout to ambush him, resulting in a shootout: Scorpio again manages to flee and kills a cop dashing to intervene. Siegel’s carbolic sense of humour manifests as the two men set up their station under a huge rotating sign spelling out “Jesus Saves” in big neon letters, whilst Scorpio himself is offered a juicy target in the form of a Catholic priest who, as Harry tells Chico, volunteered to be bait. The eruption of violence here, as Scorpio proves armed not with his precise and artful rifle but a machine gun, turns the gunfight into an episode of urban warfare. Scorpio’s next ploy is to kidnap a teenage girl, Ann Mary Deacon, and double his ransom demand for her life, claiming to have buried her alive with a depleting oxygen supply. He rings Harry from public payphones and forces him to crisscross the city becomes an agonising comedy of encounters that underline his journey through the city as an exploration of the night.

Harry is forced to fend off some muggers who attack him a dark tunnel by brandishing his ferocious firearm, is momentarily plunged into despair after some random old codger answers one of Scorpio’s calls before he can get to the phone and Scorpio hangs up, and contends with a young gay man (David Gilliam) he encounters in Mount Davidson Park who mistakenly thinks he’s cruising, a vignette that highlights Harry’s barbed sensibility as essentially acquiescent to such wings of human peculiarity (“If you’re Vice, I’ll kill myself.” “Well, do it at home.”). The park has a colossal, looming crucifix as a monument at its heart, where Harry is ordered to meet Scorpio at last: Scorpio has an appropriately vivid sense of moral irony in forcing Harry to seek out such a symbol as the moral crux of the world only to turn it into an arena of cruelty as Scorpio makes Harry toss aside his gun (“My,” Scorpio drawls, instantly making Freudian links, “That’s a big one.”) before beating him to a pulp whilst announcing he’s going to let the kidnapped girl die, and is only kept from executing Harry by Chico’s timely arrival. Chico is shot in the ensuing battle but Harry manages to stab Scorpio with the secreted switchblade, sending the killer scurrying off with a severe injury and without his ransom money.

The ferocity of this movement strays close to the surreal, with Siegel building to matching low and high angles, from high above on the cross as Scorpio closes in on Harry from behind, and a point-of-view shot from Harry himself looking up the cross’s height; all lit with an edge of garish brightness that transforms a public monument into a manifestation of mockingly unattainable divine grace. The steady whisper-scream build of tension reaching its peak as Siegel briefly cuts away to the near-forgotten Chico dashing to the rescue and the jagged, pain-inducing cut from Harry plunging the knife into Scorpio to the killer’s shrieking mouth yawing in the circle of his balaclava’s mouth hole. Despite the seemingly vast disparity in setting and story, there’s certainly anticipation in all this of Siegel’s deeper drop into the dreamlike and the fetidly neurotic in his previous film and perverse companion piece, The Beguiled. The visual intensity and edge of the surreal returns when Harry, now working with De Georgio, tracks Scorpio to Kezar Stadium because a clinic doctor who stitched up his leg recognised him: as Harry chases the assassin De Georgio turns on the lights that arrest Scorpio midfield, brilliant lights freezing the fugitive mid-field and reversing his and Harry’s role as Harry guns him down and starts jamming his shoe into his wound to extract the location of the kidnapped girl.

This scene is of course endlessly disturbing and frightening but also perhaps the height of Siegel’s career, the queasy close-ups of Harry’s obsessive fury and Scorpio’s pathetic attempts to ward him off, all the more enraging to the cop as the killer keeps on trying to maintain the game of obfuscation and deflection in demanding a lawyer and declaring his rights, giving way to an awesome aerial shot as Siegel’s camera, as if retreating in horror and also with a certain discretion, flies back and up into the night, leaving cop and killer stranded in hell on earth in a moment of gruelling squalor and pain whilst the arena of light about them dissolves into darkness. The raw sturm-und-drang of this vision gives way to its sorry immediate aftermath. Having extracted the girl’s location, Harry watches as her naked, bedraggled corpse is dragged out of a pit in a park overlooking Golden Gate Bridge, Harry silhouetted against the sickly dawn light and looking across the bridge in utter solitude, failed in his mission and debased as a man even if he still thinks he’s done the right thing. It’s one of the saddest and most poetic shots in cinema, with Schifrin’s eerie scoring fitting the imagery perfectly.

Harry’s mission to catch Scorpio is defined by the desperate attempt to define that sliver of difference between him and the killer: he might do terrible things but at least has a force majeure motive to claim. Harry works for a society and a motive he believes in but feels increasingly frustrated by its niceties; Scorpio wages war on the same society and uses those niceties against it with calculated will. The film’s sequels set out to shade and moderate some of Harry’s characteristics and build on his more positive and complex ones. Magnum Force set Harry in deadly conflict with a gang of genuine, organised vigilante cops. The Enforcer had him forging respect and amity with his new female partner and finding unusual common ground with a black revolutionary. Sudden Impact saw him romancing a woman engaged in a vendetta wiping out the men who raped her. The Dead Pool (1987), a goofy and very ‘80s retread, sported a vignette where he tried to find a non-violent and non-indulgent solution to a hooligan trying to play to television cameras. Such variations on a theme were worked whilst maintaining Harry’s badass quotient, and they helped make the Dirty Harry series oddly engaging on a human level although they never risked going as far as French Connection II (1974) in deconstructing their prickly cop lead, and the price paid for such shading was Harry changed from a proper antihero into something more safe and familiar. Unforgiven, the film often interpreted as Eastwood’s mea culpa for his violent movie past, really actually exists on a continuum of provocation and questioning in his career leading back to Dirty Harry.

Harry’s subsequent, bruising encounters with legal authority, represented by District Attorney Rothko (Josef Sommer), sees the detective gobsmacked by the DA’s harsh upbraiding and refusal to prosecute the case against Scorpio because Harry’s actions have tainted the evidence. This scene is the crux of the film in one regard as an angry portrait of legal bullshit getting in the road of putting away an obvious malefactor, and its most facetious, for a cop of Harry’s experience would certainly not be so surprised at Rothko’s points. That said, it’s not so bluntly one-eyed as it’s often painted, as both sides are at least allowed to sound with duelling notes of righteous anger: “What about Ann Mary Deacon, what about her?” Harry questions at maximum growl-slur, “Who speaks for her?” “The District Attorney’s office, if you’ll let us,” Rothko retorts. Of course, the film weights the apparent morality in its hero’s favour because the audience understands what a monster Scorpio is and is obliged to agree with Harry’s verdicts. But this identification is double-edged, as Harry does some despicable and dangerous things that go far beyond the pale but also implicate the viewer: if you were in the same situation and felt the same level of personal and professional responsibility, Siegel ultimately states, you’d act the same way.

Perhaps, for Siegel, it’s a quality lying at the innermost core of being human, the eternal tension between animalistic will and evolved conscience, and beneath the deep underlying root where the two fuse into a base instinct for violence that can provoke and be provoked, a problem the very concept of justice attempts to reconcile. Scorpio uses crime to make himself godlike, and forces Harry in turn to embrace the brutish. Harry’s battles with authority are his inner battles with his own superego, the side of him that knows well what’s right and proper but can’t avoid playing the game by Scorpio’s rules, even as the gamester villain changes the rules when it suits him. Meanwhile Harry, happy to have Chico carry on as his partner once he recovers from his wounds, instead has to deal with Chico’s admission that he intends to leave the force, a decision Harry tells Norma is the right one for them as the two have a moment of quiet reflection on their mutual torments, Harry telling the story of his wife’s death and Norma meditating bitterly on the stream of abuse turned on her husband for being a cop, and asking Harry why he puts up with it, his only comment is “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

The portion of Dirty Harry after Scorpio’s release relieves much of the film’s fixated tension and narrative flow, with Harry reduced to following Scorpio around town, even as the tension resets on a slow burn and the air of malignancy gains new substance. Scorpio thinks up a ploy to fend him off, and plan he takes to the extreme of hiring a Black tough guy (Raymond Johnson) to beat him to a bloody pulp so he can then claim Harry did it and make appeal to the protest crowd. Scorpio provokes the heavy with a racial insult to ensure the beating is particularly convincing, and gets more than he asked for, in a scene laced with grotesque undercurrents, including what seems Scorpio’s perverse delight in in ugly provocations and suffering. Scorpio is a peculiar villain in his lack of any specific identity, presented as a Charles Manson-esque figure in seeming like a renegade from the eternal underclass of human flotsam who has evolved his own crazed philosophy that seems to fit the cynical times. Like Manson, despite his hippie-ish affectations, he’s actually a virulent reactionary, racist, homophobic, and greedy, trying constantly to convert his willingness to give and receive violence into multiple forms of profit, with humiliating policemen like Harry (“Don’t you pass out of me yet, you rotten oinker!”) just as much money in the bank as any ransom cash.

The beating at least gets the result he was hoping for: after telling journalists Harry assaulted him, the cop is forcibly ordered by the Chief to stay well away from Scorpio although there isn’t enough evidence to discipline him, which Harry warns him is exactly what Scorpio wants. Harry is of course right, as Scorpio cleverly attains a gun by assaulting a liquor store owner known for defending his store with his pistol, and uses this to hijack a school bus full of kids on their way home along with their terrified driver (Ruth Kobart), and renews his ransom demand. The film’s maniacal edge resurges as Scorpio forces the trapped children to sing schoolyard songs with increasingly crazed and abusive fervour. Meanwhile Harry finally refuses to be involved in yet another attempt to buy the killer off when the Mayor offers him the task. This time instead, knowing Scorpio is heading for the airport, Harry waits on a railway bridge over the road and leaps upon the roof of the bus as it passes underneath.

Siegel builds to Scorpio’s first glimpse of Harry on the bridge, coming right after Scorpio has freaked out all the kids as the embodiment of a childhood nightmare, as an iconic moment of imminent comeuppance to be delivered by a resurgent and purposeful hero, echoing back to the first sighting of John Wayne in Stagecoach: however tarnished, Harry is finally restored as the heir to the gunslinger tradition, and a few shots later Siegel has Harry walk out of a cloud of swirling dust in reference this time to Eastwood’s famous appearance at the final duel in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Siegel is giving a miniature genre film lesson here as well drawing parallels. The subsequent battle is very restrained by modern action movie standards, as Harry tries to keep his purchase despite speed and Scorpio’s bullets, before he is hurled from the bus roof as the vehicle swerves and crashes to a halt before a rock quarry. Scorpio and Harry have a running gunfight around the quarry, a setting that again underlines the neo-Western feel whilst also encompassing Siegel’s penchant for industrial settings a la Edge of Eternity, before Scorpio snatches up a young boy fishing to use as a human shield.

This time, of course, Harry isn’t to be turned, knowing his foe’s tricks too well, seeming to drop his weapon only to lift it again and knock Scorpio on his ass with a well-aimed shot to the shoulder. That still isn’t the end, as Harry delivers the same challenge to test luck to Scorpio – “Did he fire six shots or only five?” – and Scorpio, being who he is, takes his chance. Which proves his last mistake. Harry’s concluding act of throwing away his Inspector’s star badge is still an ambiguous gesture, one probably inspired by Gary Cooper’s Will Kane doing the same at the end of High Noon (1952). Eastwood was afraid doing it here meant the audience would think Harry was quitting the police force, whilst Siegel argued it was simply a gesture meaning he was throwing away bureaucratic limitations, and Pauline Kael took that further to mean he was becoming a vigilante. Personally, I’ve always found it rhymes with the gesture in High Noon, where Kane, whilst still a dedicated believer in justice, signalled nonetheless in the brusquest manner possible he would no longer be the patsy of a community that did not support him. Harry’s gesture similarly signals the same meaning, only aimed at his superiors.

What is certain about this last shot, zooming out to an on-high remove again as the paltry plop of the star hitting the water is heard and Harry turns and heads back towards the bus with a stiff, grave march, with Schifrin’s gently mournful music on sound, is that the victory brings no particularly great satisfaction because many have died, even if the necessary act of shooting the mad dog is done. The great and perpetual problem is that however much we fantasise at being the upright avenger, the hero on the range, the duellist in the dust, such a solution only ever comes too late, after the crime. And Dirty Harry, whilst delivering on that primal and eternal duel, is ultimately most memorable because it keeps that sorry truth in mind.

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