Dirty Harry

The movie that made Clint Eastwood an icon was the 1971 classic Dirty Harry (I still can't believe that Frank Sinatra was the first choice for this role). In the movie, Eastwood plays Detective Harry Callahan - a cop with a black and white sense of right and wrong and a flare for bending or breaking the rules to bring justice to what George W. might call "evil-doers".

In the movie a psychopath (played by Andrew Robinson who immediately became typecast as "that guy who played the psycho in the first Dirty Harry") had kidnapped a young girl and had buried her alive with only so much time left before she runs out of air. Dirty Harry wounds the psycho in the leg and when he finally catches up with him he steps on the wound to torture the psycho into revealing where he buried the girl.

Unfortunately - the information comes too late and the girl is already dead.

I think it safe to say that most guys (and most girls for all I know) rooted for Dirty Harry as he tortured the information out of the psycho. We cheered and Dirty Harry became an icon because he acted how we wanted our cops to act when faced with those situations - torture and all. Some people today would seem more concerned with the civil rights of the psycho instead of the LIFE of the girl he kidnapped (in the movie the psycho actually cries out the he "has rights" just before Callahan makes him scream in pain).

If Dirty Harry was real life and I was on a jury reviewing Detective Callahan's actions - the only thing I would find him guilty of was having a bad 70's haircut. All the rest would be just fine with me. If that makes me a bad person - then so be it..