tions are wrong, and this tension seems to extend to interpretations offered by Eastwood on the one hand and Siegel on the other. Eastwood's conservative politics were expressed in the criticism of the system even as Eastwood may have seen Callahan's behavior as mistaken. In subsequent outings, however, Callahan showed he had learned nothing and was still always successful, and Dirty Harry would become a paradigm for violent police films with a certain rightist message in "the way in which the film seems to promote Callahan's excesses brought down upon it the charge that it condones a violent right-wing ideology. Various reviewers thought the film to be an out-and-out apologia for fascism (Smith 90).
The film is told from Callahan's point of view, and he is the central character from the time of the first murder, a woman swimming in a rooftop pool killed by a sniper. Callahan is a near-machine as a policeman and believes that he is always given the worst jobs to do, the ones no one else will. The corollary is that he will do anything because he no longer cares very much about himself since his wife was killed in a traffic accident. He becomes the focus of the sniper, a crazed young man with no scruples at all and with an intense desire to make the city of San Francisco pay him for whatever perceived slights he has endured. In the course of the film, it is true that Zodiac, as the killer calls himself, commits a number of dastardly crimes and is then released by the system because Callahan has gone overboard in his pursuit to the point of t
...