Adrian Lee: “Do you feel lucky, punk?” Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry and Nixon’s silent majority | Conservative Home

Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.

 From our perspective 60 years later, the mid-1960s seem bathed in sunlight.

In Britain, those times conjure up visions of “Swinging London”: Carnaby Street, mini-skirts, The Kinks, the opening titles of The Avengers T.V. Series 5 and trendy young men wandering around in Guards regiment red tunics. In 1997, I went to the cinema with friends to see the first of the Austin Powers films. I will never forget the audience’s universal laughter at the opening scene, when the hero dances down the street to the tune of Quincy Jones’ Soul Bossa Nova.

In reality, Sixties Britain was not as rosy as it seems. Strikes were commonplace, inflation was rising, the U.K. experienced a balance of payments crisis and devaluation of sterling was around the corner in 1967.

America’s social problems were arguably more noticeable.

Despite the idealism of the “Summer of Love” and the material benefits enjoyed by most Americans just by living in such a free and prosperous country, dark clouds were gathering. America was at war in Vietnam, with their army largely comprised of conscripts. This led to protests and violence in the streets and on campuses.

The Civil Rights crisis continued in the Deep South but now emerged a more militant movement amongst urban black youth. In August 1965, the Watts district of L.A. became host to race rioting on a huge and devastating scale. On 15^th, October 1966 in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence (B.P.P.) was formed Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It preached a mixed ideology of black nationalism and revolutionary socialism and quickly developed into a uniformed and armed paramilitary organisation.

Weird cults, many espousing “alternative” religions, developed in the U.S.A. The affluent middle classes began to fear that their sons and daughters could become prey to expert brainwashers of naïve idealistic youths. Finally, in 1969 there was the horror of the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family in Los Angeles.

As the 1960s drew to their close, perhaps the biggest fear among average Americans was the growth in violent crime. Despite the generous “Great Society” social programmes unleashed by the Democrats, the fact remained that within one decade the violent crime rate had more than doubled. In addition, during the 1968 election year, the public had two endure two traumatic political assassinations (R.F.K. & M.L.K.) and more Chicago riots outside the Democratic Convention.

Serial killers started to grab the headlines. The 1960’s was the era of the Boston Strangler and later, Zodiac. Perhaps the most sickening of these crimes was the murder of eight student nurses in their dormitory in South Deering, Chicago. The murderer, a 24-year-old drug addict, called Richard Speck, succeeded in killing three more victims than Jack the Ripper during just one evening on 13^th July 1966.

During the 1968 Presidential election campaign, Richard Nixon made law and order his prevalent campaign theme. On one nightmarish Presidential T.V. commercial, entitled simply “Crime”, Nixon’s voice narrates over dramatic black and white images of police, guns, flick knives and corpses. The candidate proclaims that “We owe it to the decent and law-abiding citizens of America to take the offensive against the criminal forces that threaten their peace and their security and to rebuild respect for law across this country” and concludes with “I pledge to you that the wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in America.” Just before the screen fades and the broadcast end we see the campaign moto: “This time vote like your whole world depended on it. Nixon’s the one.”

The Democrats, in contrast, mouthed tired sociological platitudes. Senator Ed Muskie of Maine said that “We must not yield to the temptation to meet violence with more violence. The answer lies not in repression, but in redressing grievances.” For the American Left, crime was mainly caused by poverty, social injustice, economic inequality and poor housing. So, increased welfare was the cure.

Nixon won the 1968 Presidential election with his appeal to the “Silent Majority” but crime continued to rise. Added to the list of horrors, America started developing its own terrorist groups, such as the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army. In one year alone, Left-wing revolutionary organisations detonated over 1,000 bombs.

On 23^rd December 1971, a fictional motion picture was released that became a box office smash.

Costing $4 million, it took $36 million at the box office on its first run and went onto have four sequels. The film starred Clint Eastwood and was entitled Dirty Harry. Less than ten years earlier, Eastwood was a struggling actor, but that changed when he went to Spain to star in three of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. The films, with their storylines based upon Japanese samurai tales, Ennio Morricone soundtracks and superb cinematography, enjoyed cult status around the world. The part of San Francisco Police Detective Harry Callahan, AKA “Dirty Harry”, became his second career-defining role. The film was originally offered to Paul Newman by Director, Don Siegel, but he declined for political reasons. Newman suggested that Eastwood might be better suited.

Callahan explains in the picture how he came to get his sobriquet. He states that in the Police Department he takes “every dirty job that comes along”. Harry is a conservative swimming in a sea of elitist social liberals and spends half the picture arguing with the mayor (played by John Vernon) and the career-orientated Police hierarchy, who favour negotiation rather than confrontation with the serial killer stalking the city.

The film opens with the camera panning across a marble memorial to San Francisco police officers who had died in the line of duty. In an age when student revolutionaries referred to Police as “pigs”, this film sympathises with law enforcement. Next, we are shown a beautiful woman swimming in a pool on a skyscraper’s rooftop. A shot rings out from a high-powered rifle and the girl quickly sinks beneath the water. The killer, who is loosely based on Zodiac, calls himself “Scorpio”, leaves behind a letter demanding $100,000 from City Hall, or else he will kill again. He specifically says that his next victims will be a black person and a Catholic priest. The mayor immediately agrees to pay Scorpio, despite Harry Callahan’s strong objections. The script draws the audience to Callahan’s side, as appeasing murderers instinctively revolts most.

We are then shown an example of Harry’s approach to law and order. Whilst eating lunch in a downtown diner, a bank robbery takes place across the street. Still eating his Hot Dog, Harry approaches the robbers as they attempt to escape. He kills one robber and the getaway driver and wounds a third. As our hero crosses the road, the wounded robber lies on the pavement. As he stretches out his arm to retrieve a firearm that he has accidentally dropped, Eastwood delivers one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema history:

“I know what you are thinking: “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kind of lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do you, punk?”

The robber decides to surrender, but we are shown that Harry had indeed run out of bullets.

Scorpio’s next victim is a 10-year-old black boy. The belief is that a Catholic priest will be next. A trap is set which results in Scorpio killing a policeman. Scorpio then sends another letter to the mayor, stating that he has kidnapped a teenage girl, Ann Mary Deacon, and demands payment of a $200,000 ransom. Again, the weak mayor agrees to pay to gunman, and sends Callahan to deliver the money. After running around the city for the killer, Harry finally meets him. Despite the payment, Scorpio (played by Andrew Robinson) beats Harry and gleefully says that he will kill him and the kidnapped girl. Eventually, Harry escapes by stabbing Scorpio in the leg. The next day, he discovers the hospital that Scorpio attended overnight and discovers that he lives in a room in a sports stadium.

Harry attends the stadium, and a chase ensues that culminates in one of the most dramatic scenes. During the chase, Scorpio is shot in the leg. Harry approaches Scorpio brandishing his .44 Magnum. In pain, Scorpio starts to speak in a high-pitched voice and demands that his legal rights are observed. Harry asks where the girl is, but he irritatingly repeats his demand to see a lawyer. The scene builds up with Harry almost driven to the point of killing this cowardly, whimpering psychopath. The audience is again drawn to the policeman’s side.

Amazingly, the next day Scorpio is freed by the Court, despite the police discovering the kidnapped girl’s body. This is because Harry is said to have tortured the body’s location out of Scorpio. The District Attorney drops the charge, stating that torture renders the evidence inadmissible. Despite this, Harry keeps following Scorpio. The killer pays a man to beat him and then blames this attack on Harry.

In the film’s final scene, Scorpio hijacks a school bus and demands another ransom. Harry waits on a motorway bridge and jumps onto the bus roof as it passes underneath. The bus crashes and Harry chases Scorpio through a quarry. During the chase, Scorpio attempts to kidnap a young boy, but Harry manages to shoot and wound Scorpio. Once again, he approaches the injured killer with his gun in his hand. Scorpio attempts to retrieve his fallen gun. Harry then delivers the same monologue that we heard earlier with the bank robber culminating in the line “Do you feel lucky, punk?” Scorpio takes his chance to pick up the gun and Harry shoots him into a river. Finally, fed up with the City Hall liberals, Harry removes his police badge from his wallet and throws it into the river with Scorpio’s corpse.

Despite becoming the fourth highest grossing picture of 1971, Dirty Harry was instantly controversial. Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, called the picture “deeply immoral” and concluded that the “action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced.” Stanley Kaufman of the, Democrat-supporting, New Republic, called it “disgusting”. However, what seemed to most upset the cultural Left was that it rhymed with Nixon’s law and order agenda and was the first conservative “message” film to be made in decades.

It was a populist trailblazer that set the scene for Nixon’s landslide re-election in 1972.