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The Godfather & Dirty Harry

The Godfather was the highest-grossing film of 1972, while Dirty Harry was a major success the year before. Both films can be defined loosely as being in the crime genre, but their generic differences are considerable. The Godfather is in the tradition of the gangster film, though it melds this with a traditional family drama, while Dirty Harry is a police drama that owes as much to television as to earlier movies for much of its structure and theme. The Godfather was directed by Francis Ford Coppola in his first major studio feature, while Dirty Harry was directed by Don Siegel, a veteran with many films to his credit by the time he directed this one. The way the two filmmakers approach their material is quite different, and yet in one respect they are similar--both filmmakers respond to the socio-historical forces of their time and embody some aspect of those forces in their work.

Clint Eastwood stars as the title character in Dirty Harry, a character he would play several more times in sequels because of the popularity of this film and the character it spawned. Eastwood would make five films in all with Don Siegel, and Siegel would also serve as his mentor when he started directing on his own with Play Misty for Me in 1971. One of the key films the two made together was Dirty Harry. The film was seen by many critics as an expression of right-wing anger at crime and the supposed hobbling of the police, with the character of Harry Callahan serving as the policeman who does not understand how the system can fail so greatly in the face of a certain type of criminal. Harry Callahan is clearly an officer who operates beyond the pale of accepted police regulations, and the evidence he secures is thrown out because of his behavior. Yet, he does not see it that way and believes it is the system that is wrong, not him. There is an apparent tension in the film itself between rooting for Callahan and any understanding that his ac...

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The Godfather & Dirty Harry. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:08, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691987.html