The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 4

So if you're anything like me, over the last week and a half you've been on a day trip to Tampa to watch the US defeat El Salvador in a preliminary World Cup match, and then you spent the next four of five days watching coverage of the NFL Scouting Combine, which you of course do every year.

Or perhaps not.

And it was fun while it lasted, wasn't it? But now that it's over, it's time to get back to the task at hand, the last double entry of my Profiles in Courage Award winning series on Anti-Heroes.

Anti-Hero #4: Harry Callahan from Dirty Harry

You've got to ask yourself one question: Is this huge, phallic gun covering up for something?

ANTI: My selection of Harry for the list is something of a cheat, since I'm not particularly enamored with the character but his presence allows me to talk about a kind of character that was a one time very popular, and still somewhat is now.

But cheating or not, Harry's not a good dude, nor is he a good cop. Consider this scene, between Harry, Harry's new Mexican partner -- hilariously named Chico Gonzales -- and a fellow cop, De Georgio.

Gonzales: There's one question, Inspector Callahan. Why do they call you "Dirty Harry"?

De Georgio: Ah, that's one thing about our Harry, doesn't play any favorites. Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Nigger, Honkies, Chinks, you name it.

Gonzales: How does he feel about Mexicans?

De Georgio: Ask him.

Harry: Especially Spics.

The only person Harry hates more than his superiors, or his new partner, is the Scorpio Killer, a over-the-top lunatic played by Andy Robinson who claims he will shoot people from rooftops until the city pays him $100,000.

Harry and a fellow cop (Gonzales has been wounded in a previous shootout) eventually get a vague tip that Scorpio might live in Kezar Stadium. But instead of waiting for a warrant or even having probable cause, Harry breaks in. Kicking down the door to the greenskeeper's room, he finds the sniper rifle, and then a chase ensues where Harry blasts Scorpio in the shoulder at the 50 yard line and proceeds to beat a confession out of him on where he's keeping a girl he's kidnapped.

Pictured: standard police procedure.

Unfortunately for Harry, who's supposed to be a cop, he apparently hasn't heard of, you know, the law, so when the DA tells him what he did was grossly illegal and Scorpio will have to be released, Harry's reaction, rather than to feel bad for fucking up so enormously, is to say, "the law's crazy!"

Later, Scorpio kidnaps a bus full of children, and demands to be driven to the airport where he wants a plane and $200,000 to be waiting. And if I see any cops, or any funny stuff, he says, I'll start killing children.

In a move that really should go in the "what the fuck were you thinking?" Hall of Fame, Harry's chief asks Harry, who by this point is so angry he's ready to chew asphalt, whether he wants the job of bag man. I mean, why would you do that? Harry doesn't follow orders. Plus, he fucks everything up!

Thankfully, Harry turns him down. Not so thankfully, he chooses to attack the bus alone, waiting on an overpass and then jumping on it's roof as it passes. Nevermind there's a psychopath inside who could murder every child within reach while you're playing Mission: Impossible on the roof, but Harry is so determined to kill Scorpio he doesn't seem to care about anything else, including dead children. Or maybe he's just an idiot.

So the bus crashes, and Scorpio leads Harry on a chase through some kind of factory. They shoot at each other a few times until Scorpio finally makes it to a nearby lake, where he grabs a kid who frankly must be deaf to have not heard either the bus crash or the multiple rounds of gunfire before now.

Scorpio puts a gun to the kid's head and orders Harry to drop his .44 Magnum. At first Harry looks like he'll do it, but then he remembers how little he cares about children so he pulls a Quick Draw McGraw and miraculously shoots Scorpio in the shoulder, allowing the kid to flee. Harry walks up, asks Scorpio if he feels lucky, and proceeds to blow his head "clean off."(Editor's note: "Off" I buy. But I'd wager "clean" is the last word you'd use to describe shooting someone in the face with a .44 Magnum.)

With Scorpio now dead and shredded pieces of police procedure manuals floating around in the breeze (metaphorically speaking), Harry pulls out his badge, looks at it, and throws it into the lake.

Credits roll.

HERO: Born in a time where public concern over violent crime had reached it's peak, Dirty Harry became a symbol of the kind of avenger who could bring justice when the system -- more concerned with the rights of the accused than the rights of victims -- had failed.

Written mostly by military enthusiast and infamously outspoken right winger John Milius, Dirty Harry sought to show a world where you know who the good guys are (you), who the bad guys are (them), and the laws that stand between you bringing the bad guys to justice are not laws that need to be respected. If you need to use excessive force, well, what's excessive? If you need to plant evidence (not that Harry does this), well, you know he did it, that's what's important.

It's particularly interesting watching Dirty Harry after you watch a movie like Sidney Lumet's Q & A, which features a cop played by Nick Nolte who starts the movie by shooting a drug dealer in cold blood and then rigging the scene to make it look like self defense.

But in Lumet's world, the cop who goes outside the law to get the bad guys doesn't stop there. Once you're willing to break the rules, Lumet argues, where do you stop? As an investigation into the shooting progresses, Nolte's cop is revealed to be a part-time mafia hitman perfectly willing to kill the lawyer investigating him.

And that is taking it a step too far, in my view, but I'd have to say my sympathies in this matter lie largely with Lumet. Ours is not a world of good guys and bad guys. The road to tragedy, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Dirty Harry tries to argue that Harry is good. Not because he is necessarily ideal -- though knowing Milius' work, it's not hard to imagine him arguing that -- but because bad guys are bad, we're know they're bad, and anyone who stands in the way needs either to be ignored or punished.

The movie cheats this point of view by never showing anything negative arising directly from Harry's recklessness. In an early scene, he freely fires his .44 Magnum at a group of criminals robbing a bank, despite the fact that civilians are running all over the street in a panic. Real police officers never, ever do not do this. The money isn't worth the potential loss of life. But Harry shoots away, and wouldn't you believe it, no civilians get hurt.

Dirty Harry doesn't concern itself with these kinds of shadings, and I have to say I find it's moral certitude really sort of naive and quaint. I would argue, as many of Lumet's movies (and movies written by legendary screenwriter David Webb Peoples) do, that people simply do not get to declare who they are. You show your worth by your adherence to the rules of morality, and it is that which guides you to who is good and who isn't.

So is Harry good, or does he just think he is?

Frankly, I'm not sure. As you can imagine from the above, I don't particularly think so. But like my entry on Travis Bickle, I think the question is the thing worth asking, though in this case I don't think the question was particularly on the mind of the filmmakers.

Two things, though, that I'm sure of.

1. A guy like Scorpio is better off dead (or at minimum, in prison).

2. Though Harry throwing his badge into the lake was meant to show his frustration with the justice system, I was personally happy to see him do it for a completely different reason. As Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men might say, "he puts people's lives in danger." There's got to be something heroic about giving up something you're terrible at.

Anti-Hero #3: Sanjuro from Sanjuro

Yes, it's a samurai movie.

ANTI: Rude and unkempt, a killer with a saunter does Sanjuro come into the movie. Nine young samurai have gathered in a room. They are in earnest. Corruption has gripped their clan and they meet to decide how to dispose of it. The boldest one, their leader, says they have discovered that two elders are definitely corrupt. He has reported this to an official, Mutsuta, who says he cannot help them. The eight other samurai start muttering. Bastard Mutsuta. But it's okay, the leader says. He's reported this to the leader of the clan, and he's agreed to help. The samurai mutter cheerfully. The leader, what a great guy!

Then, from the next room, they hear laughing. It is Sanjuro. You are fucking idiots, he tells them. The leader of the clan is the true mastermind, and he will send people here to kill you. And you have also put Mutsuta in danger, by telling the leader you told Mutsuta of the corruption.

Oops.

Sanjuro is a killer for hire, we learn later. He seems to live most of his life in the countryside. Where the young samurai are proper and clean, Sanjuro is rough, unshaven and given to violence. There is almost a Bogart quality about Toshiro Mifune's performance, in that we sense a basically honorable man who has now and then lived dishonorably and feels the shame of it. When he decides to help the earnest, young samurai, who would otherwise surely be killed, we get a sense he's trying to make many old wrongs right.

Late in the movie, when forced to kill an evil man he's double crossed, he warns the young samurai, who by this point see him as nearly a God, "he was exactly like me."

HERO: Sanjuro's heroic act is a lot less subjective than Harry's. Seeing the nine young, basically helpless samurai, he decides to help them. To advise them. In a corrupt world, their sense of direction is valueless, and it takes a man with long experience in underhanded business to know what to do. His talent for killing is unmatched, and he sees the moves of the corrupt coming, and though the young samurai at first oppose him, the more he is proven correct the more they begin to follow him.

He volunteers to pose as a double agent, joining the clan against the nine young samurai. He plans and executes a rescue of Mutsuta's wife and daughter. The wife seems cheerfully oblivious of the situation, but she manages to see into Sanjuro's soul.

Mutsuta's wife: You're too sharp. That's your trouble. You're like a drawn sword. Sharp, naked without a sheath. You cut well, but good swords are kept in their sheaths.

Sanjuro marks his attempt to sheath his sword, so to speak. Rather than profit from death, for this one moment he finds the courage to save lives (eve though he ends up killing a lot of people in the process, each one more reluctantly than the last).

At the end, when he's killed the last enemy, the nine young samurai implore him to stay and be their master. But he refuses. He has found it within himself to act honorably, but in the end he does not belong. His destiny, like so many of these characters, is to wander.