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Before Charles Bronson could have the door to vigilante justice opened for him, there was Harry Calahan, a San Francisco homicide detective who broke the rules more often then he followed them. That's why they call him Dirty! When a psychopathic killer is loose on the streets of San Fran, Harry must use every trick at his disposal to catch the sicko. The chief and mayor don't approve of his methods and, sure, his partners only last through one film each, but at the end of the day Harry gets the job done.

DIRTY HARRY represents a time capsule film that could never be made today in its form. There's far too much political correctness going around for some groups to tolerate a fictional police character that brutalizes criminals without their due process. I noticed this several years ago as LETHAL WEAPON 3 contained a scene with our heroes putting the fear into a pedestrian for jaywalking. Critics argued that the humor was out of place so close to the LA riots. Funny, but I don't remember people who went out and saw the movie complaining about that scene, it was only the press. This also happened with THE MATRIX as it was compared with the Columbine shootings. Now, I can never again watch that scene without Columbine coming to mind initially.

Back to what I said about DIRTY HARRY being as important as other, more obvious classics of the 70s, my reasoning for that is Harry's adoption into the cultural lexicon. Just as JAWS has its "you're gonna need a bigger boat," DIRTY HARRY brought us "Do you feel lucky, punk?" DIRTY HARRY has become almost an adjective with descriptive properties that even people who haven't seen the film understand. That's undeniable proof that DIRTY HARRY lives on for a new generation that can't get a Harry of their own due to the political and knee-jerk reactionaries that continually try to control the films that Hollywood makes.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

This new special edition of Dirty Harry is a marked improvement over the now-dated previous DVD release from 1997, since there are no longer digital artifact problems during even the brightly lit scenes. Yet, for some reason the film seems to have been only encoded on one layer of the disc, even though the disc itself is dual-layer. In chapters 12, 15 and 16, the image is incredibly grainy and definition is completely lost. I know grain can contribute to problems with compression, but the bitrate is variable and can be increased or decreased (which should have been done here) depending on the needs of the transfer.

Generally the color range is a bit limited, but this is a common trait of many films from the 70's so the dull palette was expected. The contrast is decent, and the blacks are fairly deep during the exterior shots, but they fall apart in the nighttime scenes with weak shadow delineation. Fleshtones are fairly accurate, but periodically they are a bit red at times. Thankfully, edge enhancement is kept to a minimum and is only mildly distracting at times. Overall, a bit better than the previous DVD, but not much.

Audio: How Does the Disc Sound?

This new DVD of Dirty Harry contains the same remastered 5.1 track that was included on the original 1997 release. This mix seems very forced and unnatural when compared to most other remixes I've heard. The majority of the surround sound is limited to Lalo Schifrin's score, but every once in a while some miscellaneous foley effect pops up into the rear channels, or is split across the front soundstage. There is also very little LFE information, and the track still contains analog hiss. The mix does sound a bit cleaner than the previous release, but like the original remix, this still suffers from the limitations of being a mono soundtrack heavy processed.

A French soundtrack is also provided, along with English Closed Captions and subtitles in English, French and Spanish.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Packing much better supplements than the previous DVD, let's start with the more wimpy extras first. Cast & Crew Listings, Behind the Scenes & On Location production notes, a set of Memorable Lines from each film, and the original Theatrical Trailer in anamorphic widescreen are included. Aside from the mildly amusing Memorable Lines and the trailers, however, the other text info is really lacking... eight paragraphs of trivia does not really offer much in the way of great behind-the-scenes detail.

The real bread and butter of this new special edition is the hour or so of new extras. The main supplement is the thirty-minute feature called, Dirty Harry: The Original, which is narrated by Robert Urich and a decent retrospective about the series and its place in cinema history. The interviews include Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Urich, Andy Robinson, Even Kim, Hal Holbrook, John Milius, Patricia Clarkson and director Ted Post. Many subjects are touched upon, including the original intention of shooting the film in Seattle, Dirty Harry's influence on the modern action film, the complications of various script revisions, political reactions from the culture at the time, plus an interesting take on the evolution of the Western to Harry. While this is a very well shot and edited documentary, I wish it focused solely on the original Dirty Harry. Another drawback to this doc is that it was shot with widescreen television in mind, but does not include anamorphic enhancement. Odd.

If the doc wasn't enough, there is approximately 25 minutes of additional Interviews with everyone in the doc including Eastwood, with more of a focus on how the film impacted their lives and careers. (Why is this material not in the main doc? Probably because then it would have ran longer than 30 minutes, and thus everyone would have had to have been paid more?)

Finally, we have the original promotional featurette for Dirty Harry, Dirty Harry's Way. As you would probably expect, there is not much too to this 8-minute piece of fluff, but it is here for you completists.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

No ROM extras have been included.

Parting Thoughts