‘Dirty Harry’ turns 50

(NewsNation Now) — Before we get started celebrating “Dirty Harry” turning 50, let’s make sure we’ve all got that quote right in our minds, shall we?

“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 that 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 one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya, punk?”

We’d had cops in movies and on TV for decades before Clint Eastwood left the world of Spaghetti Westerns and put on a cheap suit and strapped on the aforementioned hogleg. But we’d never had a man like Harry, one whose lack of respect for authority was matched only by his indomitable will to protect the downtrodden and see that justice was done.

Eastwood came into the films as a known quantity, but not necessarily a leading-man type. He’d played mostly cowboys, including Rowdy Yates on the TV classic Western “Rawhide,” and in the classic Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, most notably “A Fistful of Dollars.”

Across five films as Dirty Harry, Eastwood chewed scenery and dispatched bad guys like some sort of American anti-Bond. He didn’t need any high-tech toys or big support crew to get his job done. He needed his .44, his cigarette and an array of quotable dialogue that resonates to this day.

For example: How often have you heard “Go ahead, make my day?” This is from “Sudden Impact,” the fourth movie in the series, but you probably heard it from one of your poker buddies trying to get you to bet into a straight flush.

Eastwood exuded macho in all five movies, but now, later in his career, he appears to be walking back a lot of Harry’s bravado. In his most recent film, “Cry Macho,” he plays a washed-up ex-rodeo cowboy who is sent to Mexico to rescue a boy from his mother, who’s kidnapped him. He teaches the boy (and us) that it’s better to be a good man than a tough one, and that in the end doing right by those who love you is really the only true path.

Similarly, in the criminally underrated “Gran Torino,” he plays a Korean War veteran who is suspicious and resentful of his new Hmong neighbors but comes to love them in his own gruff, profane way. He counsels the elder son of the family that “the way of the gun” is not the one he should follow, even at one point imprisoning the young man in his basement so he can’t get involved in violence.

But Harry will always have fans, and rightfully so. He humanized movie cops. He was the ultimate in flawed heroes, but in the end, justice always triumphed … even if Harry’s idea of justice might not always fit with everyone else’s.