“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

I had only had my Blu-ray player a few weeks when The Ultimate Dirty Harry Collection arrived. As inconsistent as the collection is, I couldn’t be more excited. After redefining the western as the terse mercenary of Sergio Leone’s westerns, Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel worked over the American cop picture with the angry, violent maverick cop Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971). Tracking a psychotic serial killer named Scorpio (Andy Robinson), he winds up taking on the whole “coddling” system after violating Scorpio’s civil rights in the rush to save a victim this sadistic punk buried alive. The killer signs his ransom demands “Scorpio,” a not-so-veiled reference to the Zodiac killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area for years. The real-life serial killer eluded capture, but on the big screen we get a pure law-and-order fantasy and closure from the end of a barrel. Siegel is lean, terse director who is happy leave “Dirty” Harry the vivid kind of moral conundrum that makes movies interesting, while bringing a hard, jagged edge to the action and the violence. Callahan was made to order for an audience nervous about escalating urban violence in the seventies, the go-it-alone John Wayne cowboy for the modern era. Despite comments about his “long hair” from his fellow cops, he’s square as they come. And as ornery. Harry tossed his badge in disgust at the end of the film, but came back in four more films.

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Dirty Harry delivered justice from the barrel of a .44 Magnum

Clint Eastwood was a Western icon for a fistful of spaghetti Westerns and cynical American copycats. When he strapped on his .44 Magnum to stride the streets of San Francisco as Inspector Harry Callahan, known to the squad as Dirty Harry, Eastwood turned his frontier persona into an urban cowboy on the mean streets of our urban world.

He didn’t get his nickname for hygienic reasons. Everyone offers a different explanation for it: His partners have a habit of landing in the hospital or in the morgue. He’s been known to bend the law in the pursuit of justice. He’s an equal-opportunity bigot.

Harry has the best explanation: “Every dirty job that comes along. …”

In Dirty Harry, Callahan tracks a psychopath with a sniper rifle trying to extort the city for a small fortune (at least by 1971 standards). The killer signs his ransom demands “Scorpio,” a not-so-veiled reference to the Zodiac killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area for years. The real-life serial killer eluded capture, but on the big screen we get a pure law-and-order fantasy, and closure from the end of a barrel.

Harry Callahan was made to order for an audience nervous about escalating urban violence in the ’70s, a go-it-alone John Wayne cowboy for the modern era. Despite comments about his “long hair” from fellow cops, he’s as square as they come. And as ornery.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he growls. “‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

That’s as much dialogue as Eastwood ever delivers in a single scene. He tends to let his eyes do the emoting and his gun do the talking. He doesn’t let distractions like civil rights and rule of law stop him from delivering justice to the scum on the streets. The film’s tagline says it all: “You don’t assign him to murder cases, you just turn him loose.”

In real life, we’d be terrified of Harry and the loose cannon he calls a handgun. On the big screen, we applaud his frontier justice on the mean streets of our modern urban America.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.