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Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash Joe Street. University Press of Florida, 2016.
Astonishingly, Clint Eastwood was not the first casting choice for Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), but after Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne (among others) turned it down, Eastwood would transform into a role that would be his most iconic of a sixty-plus-year career. In four sequels (Magnum Force [1973], The Enforcer [1976], Sudden Impact [1983], and The Dead Pool [1988]), the character's wisecracks became catchphrases (most notably, "Go ahead, make my day"). Indeed, "Dirty" Harry Callahan remains one of the most (in)famous characters in Hollywood history. Audiences loved him, even as some critics (such as Pauline Kael) pointed to the character's not-so-subtle fascist tendencies and attitudes. In Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash, surprisingly the first dedicated monograph devoted to the landmark film, Joe Street examines the political climate that birthed a film like Dirty Harry and how the titular character became a "near-perfect representation of modern American conservatism" (136).
Street first details the specifics of the EastwoodSiegel collaborative partnership, as Siegel helmed...