Word: cop
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...When the detectives have all the information they can get, Doyle exacts a last, unnecessary ounce of submission by forcing him to confess to nonsense accusations by the threat of more beating. The nonsense-accusation sequence is a suspect-baiting device Friedkin picked up from Detective Eddie Egan, the cop on whom Doyle's character is based, who plays the narcotics division chief to Russo and Doyle (Gene Hackman) in Connection and who is soon to star in a film vehicle called Fuzz. The incident goes under the generic title "police harrassment" and is, no doubt, only a generalized adaptation...
DIRTY HARRY. A superb piece of genre film making by Don Siegel about a cop (Clint Eastwood) as renegade...
This is a real police movie. Where The French Connection was fundamentally a chase film, with lots of jolts and a good eye for police procedure, Dirty Harry is a genre piece: it has a fine feeling not only for the danger of a cop's life but also for the monotony and frustrations. It is the best film about cops since Madigan, which, by no coincidence, was also directed by Don Siegel...
...films are spare, the scripts laconic. This is partly a question of personal style and partly the approach best suited to his frequent leading man, Clint Eastwood. In Dirty Harry, Eastwood plays a maverick San Francisco cop named Harry Callahan who sasses everybody-his chief, his superiors, even the mayor. A psychopathic killer is on the loose, sniping from rooftops, kidnaping young girls to hold the city up for ransom. Callahan is against the mayor's decision to pay the ransom. When he is appointed to deliver the $200,000, he typically decides to try to trap the killer...
Dirty Harry is bound to upset adherents of liberal criminal-rights legislation. Callahan holds such laws in contempt and violates them openly. He is compelled to act on his own. This only reinforces Siegel's theme: that both cop and killer are renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world. Siegel makes the point in eloquent cinematic shorthand, notably in the film's opening, where a shot of a policeman's badge dissolves into the muzzle of the sniper's rifle, and later when Callahan catches up with the killer in a deserted...