Dirty Harry (character) Dirty Harry (character) Inspector Harold Francis Callahan, also known as Dirty Harry, is a fictional character in the "Dirty Harry" film series, which consists of "Dirty Harry" (1971), "Magnum Force" (1973), "The Enforcer" (1976), "Sudden Impact" (1983) and "The Dead Pool" (1988). Callahan is portrayed by Clint Eastwood in each film. From his debut, Callahan became the template for a new kind of movie cop: an antihero who does not hesitate to cross professional and ethical boundaries in pursuit of his own vision of justice, especially when the law is poorly served by an inept bureaucracy. Callahan is often considered
Clint Eastwood (1973), a sequel to "Dirty Harry", about a group of rogue young officers (among them David Soul, Robert Urich and Tim Matheson) in the San Francisco Police Department who systematically exterminate the city's worst criminals. Although the film was a major success after release, grossing $58.1 million in the United States (a record for Eastwood), it was not a critical success. "The New York Times" critic Nora Sayre panned the often contradictory moral themes of the film, while the paper's Frank Rich called it "the same old stuff". In 1974, Eastwood teamed up with Jeff Bridges and George Kennedy in