Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry is a 1971 American action thriller film produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first outing as San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) detective "Dirty" Harry Callahan. The film drew upon the actual case of the Zodiac Killer as the Callahan character seeks out a similar vicious psychopath.

Dirty Harry was a critical and commercial success and set the style for a whole genre of police films. It was followed by four sequels: Magnum Force in 1973, The Enforcer in 1976, Sudden Impact in 1983 (directed by Eastwood himself), and The Dead Pool in 1988.

In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant."

Plot

A psychopathic serial killer calling himself "Scorpio" (Andy Robinson) murders a young woman in a San Francisco swimming pool, using a high-powered rifle from a nearby rooftop. SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) finds a ransom message demanding the city pay him $100,000. Scorpio also promises that for each day that the city refuses his demand, he will commit a murder, and his next victim will be "a Catholic priest or a nigger." The chief of police and the mayor (John Vernon) assign the inspector to the case, though the mayor is reluctant because of an incident involving the shooting by Callahan of a naked man with a butcher knife chasing a woman the previous year in the city's Fillmore District.