United States

Making a welcome return after a seven year absence to his most famous and popular role, superstar Clint Eastwood blazes back into action as tough, hard-hitting, hard-shooting San Francisco policeman Harry Callahan. The result is an unmissable fast-moving and very exciting thriller that the Glasgow Herald described as 'High quality stuff... terrific entertainment'. Once again Dirty Harry is in trouble with his superiors because, while he always gets results, his highly unorthodox methods of crime-fighting tend to a pile of corpses in his wake. So he is sent on a 'vacation' to a small California coastal town to investigate a string of brutal murders. And it is not long before Harry has antagonized the local police chief, triggered off a wave of mayhem and murder and become involved with a beautiful woman (Sondra Locke) who has embarked on a one-woman vendetta against the men who raped her and her young sister... Eastwood is in top form, both as star and director. Time noted 'Big Clint's return to form as a box-office powder-keg', Oracle commented that he 'gives the kind of power-packed performance that keeps him at the top' and New Society thought that 'compared with Harry, James Bond is a layabout'. And the film itself, said The Sunday Telegraph, is a 'smash hit'.