When I was young and Walt Disney ran a good company my favorite tv show was this:
Posted on 05/02/2026 2:29:10 PM PDT by Twotone
Dirty Harry was released near the end of 1971 and became an immediate hit, and just as immediately began a feud between its star, Clint Eastwood, and Pauline Kael, one of the most influential movie critics in America. In her review, published in the New Yorker on January 15, 1972, and titled "Dirty Harry: Saint Cop", Kael called the film "a kind of hardhat The Fountainhead" and "an almost perfect piece of propaganda for para-legal police power."
"When you're making a picture with Clint Eastwood, you naturally want things to be simple, and the basic contest between good and evil is as simple as you can get. It makes this genre piece more archetypal than most movies, more primitive and dreamlike; fascist medievalism has a fairy-tale appeal," Kael wrote, adding near the end of her review that "Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced."
Invoking fascism not once but twice, Kael set the tone for the most vociferous criticism Eastwood would face for much of his career, and fired the first shots in a simmering vendetta between the actor and the writer that would inspire Eastwood to make a Kael-like critic the victim of the killer seventeen years later, in his final Dirty Harry sequel, The Dead Pool. "Please," San Francisco film critic Molly Fisher (played by Ronnie Claire Edwards) begs the killer, "I have a heart condition."
"A critic with a heart," he replies. "That's a laugh."
The film opens with what Kael called a "rather strange" choice – slow pans down the names of San Francisco Police Department officers killed in the line of duty on a memorial in the lobby of the city's Hall of Justice.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Not to be confused with the obnoxious critic, Waldo Lydecker.
It's a sub-genre of science-fiction / fantasy - like "Steam Punk." Kael wasn't implying that such a world could actually exist.
Regards,
I think Clint Eastwood’s movies secured the spirit of America for all time. Mel Gibson in the Patriot also did it, a movie about Francis Marion, ( The Swampfox).
The leftist asshats who want to rule America? THey are nothin’ and we will make sure they stay nothin’ .
I reckon so.
Especially The Enforcer when Tyne Daly was hired.
I have been a Clint Eastwood fan since I was a child too young to understand politics, but I always held tight to his attitude or spirit.
Eastwood somehow invokes Freedom, courage, and deep kindness.Interesting. Maybe he is connected to St. Michael, ! ( grin).
I watch it at least once a month.
Not quite that often, but several times a year, and fast forward through several segments that I find boring...not too many, but watching the clouds...
When I was young and Walt Disney ran a good company my favorite tv show was this:
I'm not defending the validity of Kael's claim that Eastwood's film reflected "fascist medievalism." I'm only refuting qualifying your claim that "fascist medievalism" didn't exist; it does or could exist - as a literary sub-genre.
Regards,
Francis MArion was perhaps the greatest of Patriots. He and his men endured untold privation to defeat the British.
BUt he is no longer taught in high school history.
That would make the students too independent and 2nd amendment rowdy ! ( sarc.)
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