Dirty Harry's blood-soaked San Francisco was a terrifying reality

A shutdown can do weird things to your brain, like make you decide to rewatch 10 hours of Clint Eastwood prowling around San Francisco with a big gun blasting the hell out of any punk in his way. 

Don Siegel's iconic 1971 San Francisco bloodbath "Dirty Harry" is heralded as one of the greatest crime thrillers of all time. Seeing it (and the four sequels) in 2020 is a tough watch. It is thrilling, and does include a lot of crime, but it's also a right wing fantasy with unapologetic fascist tendencies. The movie also sheds a timely light on a very misunderstood era in the city, and makes me feel a lot better about life here now.

The first scene in the movie, as the credits are still rolling, reveals one of the greatest shots of San Francisco in film. Clint Eastwood as a rogue cop named Harry Callahan (who, guess what, doesn't play by the rules) walks the rooftop of the Bank of America Building at 555 California St. as a wide 270-degree panoramic view of the city unspools behind him.

From the top of the tallest building in San Francisco (at the time), the city looks like paradise. Filmed only three years after the Summer of Love, it's easy to imagine drum circles, flowers, psychedelia and free love unfolding on the streets below, in the city at the epicenter of the counter-culture movement that changed America forever. But as the grisly story soon reveals, the '70s streets of San Francisco were a violent, ugly place and no hippie utopia.