Do you feel lucky, punk? – Dirty Harry
The first utterance of “Do you feel lucky, punk?” occurs early in “Dirty Harry.” Inspector Harry Callahan (Eastwood) is enjoying a hotdog when robbers shoot their way out of a bank across the street, forcing Harry to end his lunch break and confront them with his .44 Magnum revolver.
After a brief shootout, Harry takes a moment to swallow his hotdog and approaches one of the injured hoodlums. “Uh-uh,” Harry says, as the criminal reaches for his shotgun, “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 kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
Harry delivers this not with anger but with levity. He may be “dirty,” but Harry wouldn’t endanger an unarmed, garden variety thief (and he’s too good a marksman to forget how many shots he fired).
However, there is no such levity during the second utterance of this line, when Scorpio (Andrew Robinson), a deranged serial killer, looks down the barrel of Harry’s gun. By this point, Callahan has lost all faith in the SFPD’s ability to stop this man. So, after narrowly saving the life of Scorpio’s latest victim, Harry addresses him in a distinctly bitter tone, goading the killer to pick up his gun so that he can end him. It’s all part of the film’s troubling, noirish morality.
Waiting for Scorpio – Dirty Harry
This moment gives me chills. Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) is already a killer of men, women, and children, but he manages to up the ante by hijacking a school bus with about half a class of children on it. With the bus heading north into Marin County, Scorpio paces the aisle cajoling the kids with nursery rhymes and other weird, child-like gestures. When some children begin to question him, the killer breaks into a frenzy and even hits one child for his lack of enthusiasm. It’s an intense scene that’s not lost its disturbing, haywire energy. In fact, Robinson’s performance was so convincing that it attracted death threats from those who struggle to separate fiction from reality.
Meanwhile, back at City Hall, the mayor speaks limply about appeasing Scorpio’s demands. Inspector Callahan (Eastwood) always took a hard line on the killer, but now he’s outright disgusted by what he’s seeing. He refuses the mayor’s request to deliver Scorpio’s ransom and leaves the room without stating any intention.
Back on the bus, Scorpio continues to terrorize the children and the homely woman driving the bus, screaming obscenities and waving around a pistol. Lalo Schifrin’s score builds, too, rising to a crescendo that breaks when Scorpio, dumbfounded, spots Callahan in the distance waiting for him on a railroad bridge. Finally, this dreadful, spiraling situation has its savior — and it’s brilliant, fist-pumping cinema (metaphysically, of course, I don’t get that carried away).
Harry jumps onto the bus – Dirty Harry
The iconic moments come scene by scene in “Dirty Harry.” As Scorpio takes control of the bus and speeds under the bridge, Callahan positions himself and jumps onto the vehicle’s roof, hanging on for dear life as Scorpio shoots at him from within. Such a maneuver would be an intermediate task for a stuntman, but there was no stand-in for 40-year-old Clint, as he did it himself. Misjudging the bus’s speed would have seen limbs meet tarmac from a height of about 15 to 20 feet.
Eastwood tested his physicality throughout the 1970s. He dangled from the hood of a car in “Magnum Force,” scaled treacherous rock faces in “The Eiger Sanction,” and raced a motorbike for the chase sequences in “The Gauntlet.” If there was one man who could dissuade Clint from a stunt, it was his long-time double, Buddy Van Horn. “There’s been a couple of times that he’s wanted to do something and I talked him out of it,” Van Horn told the Independent. “He’s a pretty physical guy and likes to do his own stunts … He’s been banged up a few times.”
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