Clint Eastwood: Has Dirty Harry become anti cop?

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As I’ve said before, I read a lot of conservative film blogs because, well, some of them happen to be really good. It doesn’t mean that I agree with their politics--I just like to read intellectually stimulating writing, especially when it comes to movies and pop culture. A personal favorite is Dirty Harry’s Place, where today, for example, you can see Dirty Harry gloating about the failure of ‘The Lucky Ones,’ which right-wingers are somehow convinced is anti-Iraq war, perhaps because Tim Robbins is in it, as well as accusing Oliver Stone of ‘contemptuous cruelty’ toward, ahem, George W. Bush.

My only problem with conservative film bloggers is that they can’t seem to check their politics at the theater door. If the movie’s filmmaker or leading actor is one of the lefty anti-Christs, notably Sean Penn, Paul Haggis, Susan Sarandon, Steven Soderbergh or Stone or Robbins, they tend to dismiss the movie out of hand, often before they’ve even seen it. A host of righty bloggers had to retract their hysterical criticism of Stone’s involvement in ‘World Trade Center’ after the finished film turned out to be--gasp--a stirring tribute to the early 9/11 responders and their families.

You would think that a longtime conservative icon (and world-class filmmaker) like Clint Eastwood--the real Dirty Harry--would be immune to these kind of cloudy ideological judgments. Apparently not. There was grumbling after Eastwood made ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ which some conservatives viewed as an unsettling antiwar, anti-American film, largely because it was co-written by the dreaded Haggis. Now New York Post critic-blogger Kyle Smith has just weighed in with an early take on Eastwood’s upcoming film, ‘Changeling,’ which Smith describes as...an anti-cop picture.

The film stars Angelina Jolie as a single mom in 1928-era Los Angeles whose son disappears. When the boy is returned by police, she claims he’s not her son. Because the police are portrayed in the film as corrupt, Smith feels free to blame Eastwood, whose willingness to transcend ideological boundaries is apparently viewed with suspicion on the right. Or as Smith puts it: ‘Now [Eastwood] is making anti-westerns, antiwar pictures and...guess what? His latest is an anti-cop picture.’

He also takes a shot at Jolie, whom he describes as looking ‘increasingly skeletal’ and weighing ‘about as much as a gymnast.’ But the Eastwood jab seems incredibly unfair, almost as unfair as all the liberal critics, including the sainted Pauline Kael, who wrote off ‘Dirty Harry,’ one of the most influential pictures of its day, as a nutty right-wing fantasy about courageous cops who’d been emasculated by weak-kneed liberal do-gooders. The film, directed by the great Don Siegel, was a lot more than a right-wing fantasy, just as I’m betting ‘Changeling’ is a lot more than an anti-cop fantasy. I can’t wait to see it to judge for myself. Eastwood is a fearless storyteller. His work deserves better than knee-jerk sniping from critics with ideological agendas, whether from the right or from the left.

Here’s a clip of a classic scene from the real ‘Dirty Harry’ in action: