Dirty Harry 50th Anniversary: Unearthing the roots of Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry 50th Anniversary: Unearthing the roots of Dirty Harry-

Unearthing the foundations of Dirty Harry is a rather complex affair. It's a foggy picture to say the least, and one that hasn't really been explored to any satisfying degree. Instead we have always been provided with bits and pieces of the story, a cluster of virtual cuttings in order to try and piece together a fuller, more conclusive picture. In many ways, it remains a jigsaw of a puzzle - a puzzle that is seemingly and consistently missing a few vital pieces. This written piece is not intended to be a definitive or conclusive account of the Dirty Harry story, but instead an attempt to construct a rough timeline or guide by using the information that has emerged over the passing decades. It's a history that really needs (and deserves) a far greater and more accurate account. 

Terrence Malick and Martin Sheen on Badlands

The script, titled Dead Right was written by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Joyce Heims (1930 - 1978) (whilst working at Universal) was also uncredited for co-writing the story of Eastwood's character. Harry Julian Fink (July 7th, 1923 – August 8th, 2001) was a television and film writer known for Have Gun – Will Travel (1957-1963) and as one of the original writers who created Dirty Harry. Fink wrote for various television shows in the 1950s and 1960s, and also created several, including NBC's T.H.E. Cat, starring Robert Loggia, and Tate starring David McLean. His first film work was the Sam Peckinpah film Major Dundee (1965). He also worked on Ice Station Zebra (1968), and, with his wife Rita on Big Jake (1971), Dirty Harry (1971) and Cahill U.S. Marshal (1973). Sometime in the late 1960's, agent turned producer Mike Medavoy entered the picture. Medavoy worked in obtaining freelance work (in revising scripts) for a young and talented writer Terrence Malick. Malick spent some 5 weeks writing several early, uncredited drafts of Dirty Harry. 

Jennings Lang

A total of 4 drafts of the script were produced in 1970. Universal Studios had optioned the screenplay from the Finks and Jennings Lang had actually sold the rights to ABC Television with the idea of producing a TV movie of the week. It is hard to pinpoint at this stage if anyone (actors or director) were attached to the project. However, Eastwood first saw the script back in 1969 when Jennings Lang presented it to him (while the project was still at Universal). So Eastwood was already intimately familiar with the early stages of the Dirty Harry project. 

At this point it is worth taking a look at what was typically involved in these early drafts. Originally it was based on a hard-edged New York City police inspector, Harry Callahan. The story began with an opening scene that has Harry lecturing a class of police cadets on "stopping power," demonstrating by firing various guns at a row of watermelons. Callahan is determined to stop Travis, a serial killer, even if he has to skirt the law and accepted standards of policing, blurring the distinction between criminal and cop, to address the question as to how far a free, democratic society can go to protect itself. 

Within these scripts, Travis's victims are not innocent people, like the women in the rooftop swimming pool or the young black boy Charlie Russell in the finished version of Dirty Harry, but instead powerful criminals, the kind the police can't touch, as in Magnum Force (1973). It seems that the seeds of what would eventually become the sequel to Dirty Harry were first sown here.

The ending takes place at the airport, where the killer, Harry and Chico shoot it out after Travis has killed one of the police snipers stationed there and shot down a helicopter. Some versions even demoted Harry to a cameo by the last reel of the film as Marine snipers instead took out Travis! Another earlier version of the story was also set in Seattle, Washington. The story was rapidly becoming a mess. 

Draft after draft was attempted as the Finks and their production cohort Jennings Lang was also attempting to find the perfect actor to fill the role of Harry Callahan. Whilst all of these attempts to solidify a script (and a cast) continued, the screen rights were quickly running out of time. Eventually, the amount of violence in the script was deemed too excessive for television and the rights were  returned to the Finks. 

Warner Bros: A New Home

Rare Warner Bros. Trade brochure

Warner Bros. purchased the script with a view to casting Frank Sinatra in the lead. Sinatra was 55 at the time and since the character of Harry Callahan was originally written as a man in his mid-to-late 50s (and Eastwood was then only 41), Sinatra at least fit the character profile. Initially, Warner Bros. wanted either Sydney Pollack or Irvin Kershner to direct. Kershner was eventually hired once Sinatra was finally attached to the title role. It was during this time that James Caan was also tentatively pencilled in as Travis. For anyone who had seen Caan, and in particular his performance as Randall O'Connell in Lady in a Cage (1964), it wasn’t too hard to understand how this young actor (in his first substantial film role) couldn’t successfully play a psychopathic killer. 

Whilst the project seemed to be gathering pace at Warner Bros, It was still far from a smooth transition. It was around this period that upcoming writer John Milius entered the frame with a written script that was submitted on September 23rd 1970. Like Malick, Milius was also part of the New Hollywood scene. A group of young maverick filmmakers and writers who would completely reshape modern cinema throughout the 1970's. Malick's involvement with Dirty Harry seemed to have come to an end. In Paul Maher Jr’s book One Big Soul: An Oral History of Terrence Malick, it was cited that ‘Malick, in his own words, was eventually fired by Warner Bros, it was evident that he was far too talented for just rewrites, in fact by 1970, Malick, at age 27, was already working on his own screenplay for Badlands (1973) and was the first feature film that Malick had written for himself to direct.’ Most of Malick’s written material for Dirty Harry was carried over and used in Magnum Force. 

John Milius

Rare advance Ad with Irvin Kershner and Frank Sinatra as Harry

John Milius claimed that he was given three weeks to write a screenplay for Sinatra. He said his main contribution to the film was "a lot of guns and the attitude of Dirty Harry, being a cop who was ruthless. I think it's fairly obvious if you look at the rest of my work what parts are mine. The cop being the same as the killer except he has a badge. And being lonely ... I wanted it to be like Stray Dog; I was thinking in terms of Kurosawa's detective films. In my script version, there's just more outrageous Milius crap where I had the killer in the bus with a flamethrower. I tried to make the guy as outrageous as possible. I had him get a police photographer to take a picture of him with all the kids lined up at the school – he kidnaps them at the school, actually – and they showed the picture to the other police after he's made his demands; he wants a 747 (which is where the Airport ending probably first came into play) to take him away to a country where he'll be free of police harassment, terrible things like this. And the children all end up like a graduation picture, and the teacher is saying, ‘what is that object under Andy Robinson?’ and a cop says, ‘That's a Claymore mine.’ Teacher asks, ‘What's a Claymore mine?’ And we hear the voice of Harry say, ‘If he sets it off, they're all spaghetti.’ Chief says, ‘That's enough, Harry.’ Everybody said, ‘that’s too much, John; we can't have Milius doing this kind of stuff.’ I wanted the guy to be just totally outrageous all the time, and he is. I think Siegel restrained it enough.”

The young James Caan suggested as Travis

Another ending of a Milius script took place in a slaughterhouse, where the killer is employed, and ends not with gun-play (Travis fights Harry and eventually disarms him of his own gun), but with Harry and Travis duelling on a catwalk, Harry wielding a knife and Travis a 2" by 4". Harry stabs Travis in the solar plexus and he topples over the railing and falls forty feet down the sluice onto a pile of bones, while Harry, who is seriously hurt but, it should be clear, will not die, topples off the catwalk  into a pen of sheep. After a moment, he collects himself and sits down in a feed trough, overcome by a new surge of exhaustion and the sheep surround him.

A "Rev. Final" draft dated November 17th 1970 was submitted featuring the combined writing of Harry Julian Fink, Terrence Malick and John Milius. (below)

Meanwhile, elsewhere in pre-production, things seemed to be going from bad to worse. Despite some early publicity (above) announcing Sinatra as star and Irvin Kershner as director, Sinatra eventually left the film after a reported wrist injury which had left him unable to handle the heavy Magnum gun. Once Sinatra left the project, Kershner quickly followed. 

Once Sinatra had left the project, the producers started to consider younger actors for the role. Burt Lancaster turned down the lead role because he strongly disagreed with the violent, end-justifies-the-means moral of the story. He believed the role and plot contradicted his belief in collective responsibility for criminal and social justice and the protection of individual rights. Marlon Brando was considered for the role, but was never formally approached. John Wayne and Robert Mitchum were approached but both declined. In his 1980 interview with Playboy, George C. Scott claimed that he was initially offered the role, but the script's violent nature led him to turn it down. Both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman turned down the role. McQueen refused to make another "cop movie" after Bullitt (1968). Newman believed the character was too "right-wing" for him, but did however suggest that the film would be a good vehicle for Eastwood. 

Warner Bros. offered Eastwood the part whilst he was still in post-production with his directorial debut film Play Misty for me (1971). By December 17, 1970, a Warner Bros. studio press release announced that Clint Eastwood would star in Dirty Harry as well as produce the film through his company, Malpaso.

Eastwood was handed a number of scripts, but he ultimately reverted to the original as the best vehicle for him. Believing that the rewrites had ruined the point of the entire story and proclaimed "I'm only interested in the original script" and he also demanded rewrites. Another of Eastwood’s provisos was that Don Siegel direct the film. Ironically, Siegel was locked into a contract with Universal Studios (the studio that previously owned the rights to Dirty Harry). Eastwood went back to the studio heads at Universal and made a request that Siegel could be loaned to Warner Bros for the project. Universal agreed and Eastwood (and Warner Brothers) had secured their helmsman.

Siegel further agreed with Eastwood on the scripts and both star and director rejected them all. The villain, now renamed "Scorpio", was to be a mindless killing machine who committed psychopathic murders simply because he liked to. Terrence Malick had written the killer as an anti-heroic vigilante who killed wealthy criminals who had escaped justice. Siegel hated the idea and Eastwood agreed that it wasn’t right for this film, but the story stuck with him and he decided later to revisit the concept in Magnum Force. 

Writer Dean Riesner

Eastwood and Siegel hired Dean Riesner (November 3rd, 1918 – August 18th, 2002) to rewrite the screenplay. Riesner had already worked successfully with Eastwood and Siegel on Coogan's Bluff (1968) and on Eastwood's recently completed Play Misty for me (1971). At Eastwood’s instructions, Riesner reverted back and used the original Fink and Fink script as the basis for the film with some biting (and quotable) dialogue from the John Milius version kept in and reshaped the plot and Scorpio into a retelling of the real-life saga behind the Zodiac Killer.

The real-life Zodiac Killer was an unidentified serial killer who had committed five murders in the San Francisco Bay Area several years earlier. Elements of Gary Stephen Krist were also worked into the characterisation, as Scorpio, like Krist, kidnaps a young girl and buries her alive while demanding ransom. In a later novelisation of the film, Scorpio was referred to as "Charles Davis", a former mental patient from Springfield, Massachusetts who murdered his grandparents as a teenager. 

There are significant differences between the novelisation and the film. Among the differences are: Scorpio's point of view — in the book he uses astrology to make decisions (including being inspired to abduct Ann Mary Deacon); Harry working on a murder case involving a mugger before he is assigned to Scorpio; the omission of the suicide jumper; and Harry throwing away his badge at the end. The paperback tie-in novels were by Phillip George Rock (July 30th, 1927 - April 3rd, 2004) and based on the screenplay by Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink and Dean Riesner. 

The UK paperback                     Phillip Rock                     The US paperback

Audie Murphy was initially considered to play Scorpio, but he tragically died in a plane crash before his decision on the offer could be made. The part eventually went to a relatively unknown actor, Andy Robinson. Eastwood had seen Robinson in a play called ‘Subject to Fits’ and recommended him for the role of Scorpio; his unkempt appearance fit the bill for a psychologically unbalanced individual. Siegel told Robinson that he cast him in the role of the Scorpio killer because he wanted someone "with a face like a choirboy". Robinson's portrayal was so memorable that after the film was released he was reported to have received several death threats and was forced to get an unlisted telephone number.

February 8th, 1971 script

In a 2009 MTV interview, Eastwood said "Since they had initially talked to me, there had been all these rewrites. I said, 'I'm only interested in the original script'." Looking back on the 1971 Don Siegel film, he said "The rewrites had changed everything. They had Marine snipers coming on in the end. And I said No. This is losing the point of the whole story of the guy chasing the killer down. It's becoming an extravaganza that's losing its character." Eastwood would also reflect that "Warner Bros. had just had a cop film come out, with McQueen (Bullitt) and the whole climax here again was taking place at an airport. They said, 'OK, do what you want.' So, we just went ahead and made it." 

It is known that at least one prior Fink / Riesner draft was submitted (on February 8th, 1971), but on April 1st, 1971 the official Final Draft of the screenplay for "Dirty Harry", written by H.J. Fink and Dean Riesner was completed. The screenplay consisted of 124 pgs., 546 separate shots and served as an excellent example of what has universally come to be viewed as one of the great crime films of the 1970's. 

It's fair to conclude that Dirty Harry's story - from the printed page to the big screen - was a varied and diverse journey. Whilst it wasn't perhaps the smoothest of landings, it nevertheless catapulted Eastwood from the realms of mere stardom into the upper echelons of superstardom. A critical and commercial success, the film has endured for over half a century. Its influence laid the foundations for a new breed of cop movie, often imitated, rarely equalled, and never surpassed. 50 years on, Dirty Harry remains the original, and the very best of its genre.     

                

Above: Page One from the Feb 8th 1971 script and the very rare final script from April 1st 1971

Below: Eastwood celebrates Dirty Harry with SCREEN columnist Yani Begakis