Dirty Harry has a cult following and has remained one of the most celebrated neo-noir vigilante action thriller franchises in cinematic history. Starring Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, the series has helped to shape the actor’s career.
Despite extreme popularity, Eastwood has some aspects of the movie he is not very fond of. Some of his iconic scenes and dialogues in the series have been referred to in pop culture and that made the actor eventually tired of it.
Hated One Line from the Original Dirty Harry Movie
Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film Dirty Harry has made a mark in popular culture, the film still has a wide fan following. Eastwood played Inspector Harold Francis Callahan aka Dirty Harry in the movie. The bada*s cop has several iconic lines, but “Do you feel lucky?” went overboard and Eastwood grew tired of hearing the line over and over again.
In the fourth installment of the franchise, the 1983 Eastwood-directed Sudden Impact also had a line that would remain in the hearts of fans. Sudden Impact’s “Make my day” stuck like “Do you feel lucky?” Eastwood once told Esquire,
“I kind of had a feeling ‘Make my day’ would resonate, based upon ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’ in the first movie. I thought that Smith & Wessen line might hang in there, too. But ‘Make my day’ was just so simple. I still get it a lot.”
Later, the actor confessed in an interview with David Breskin that the lines have eventually become too irritating to bear for him.
“I knew when I did Sudden Impact that ‘Make my day’ would be the key line to the whole picture just when I read it on the page. Now, I didn’t know it would go like it did. People flew banners with it here, above the golf course. After a while, I really got sick of hearing it.”
He further added,
“It’s disappointing. I’ve run into young people along the way, and they are disappointed if I don’t pull out a gun. I used to have guys, after Dirty Harry, pull up next to me and say, ‘Hey, call me an asshole like you did in the picture.’ People ask me to say, ‘Do you feel lucky?’ I can’t. I played it at the time. But now I couldn’t say it without laughing.”
However, interestingly, the franchise would have been on a different line altogether if other actors before Eastwood took the part.
The Accidental Casting of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and the Audience
Eastwood was not even in the picture when the initial casting of the movie was in place. Many prominent celebrities including singer/actor Frank Sinatra were considered for the part of Dirty Harry. Eastwood was a wildcard entry to the film after their final actor Sinatra met with an injury. “They tried Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen. Then they finally ended up with Frank Sinatra,” Eastwood told MTV News.
“That sounded like a pretty lame excuse, but it didn’t matter to me. I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ But since they had initially talked to me, there had been all these rewrites. I said, ‘I’m only interested in the original script.’”
Don Siegel and Eastwood’s collaboration worked as the movie went on to become a major hit grossing over $28 million, and became a fan favorite that opened doors for the later sequels.
However, Eastwood’s relationship with the audience was a bit different at the time. “You’ve got to have that love-hate thing with your audience,” Eastwood told David Breskin. “If you love ’em, they won’t respond to you. I never hated them, but I made them reach forward to me,” he added.
“I feel like if they lean forward, and they see that they’re interested in what I’m doing, fine, but if you get to placating the audience, it becomes condescending to them, and then they’ll feel that. Maybe they won’t seem sensitive at times, and they may ignore you when you do your best work, but by and large they are cut in to the whole thing. And that’s how they pick the people they want to embrace.”
Sometimes, popular movies may impact an actor’s life as Eastwood was very frustrated with the outcome of the immense popularity of the Dirty Harry series. The franchise encompasses five movies.