But while it's true that Eastwood's work, as an actor and especially as a director, has espoused a vague political philosophy -- and one that has evolved over time -- it has never been nearly as programmatic as either his admirers or his detractors imagine. The films he made early in his career were never as "conservative" as their reputation, and even his most prominent revisionist works -- "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby" -- are not as "liberal" as theirs. Both the fascist medievalist of the 1970s and the neo-Nazi eugenicist of today have been largely the projections of his accusers' own political nightmares.

There are any number of examples of liberal undercurrents embedded in Eastwood's early work: the futility-of-war subtheme of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"; Josey Wales' decision to forgo his (eminently justified) vengeance against the man who betrayed him to the Union in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"; the gender education imparted to Eastwood chauvinists by strong women in "The Enforcer," "The Gauntlet," "Tightrope," etc. But no early film was as explicit a subversion of Eastwood's vigilante image as "Dirty Harry's" 1973 sequel, "Magnum Force."

The film opens with the acquittal, on grounds of inadmissible evidence, of a San Francisco labor boss suspected of murdering a union reformer and his family. (The family is important, as a consistent Eastwood theme is the particular evil of those who harm women or children.) On his way home from the courthouse, the labor boss is killed. This is followed by the executions of several other top crime figures, including a pimp whom we've watched kill one of his girls by pouring drain cleaner down her throat. The killings, it turns out, are being committed by a squad of renegade cops on the force, cool, good-looking hotshots (among them a pre-"Hutch" David Soul, pre-"Otter" Tim Matheson and pre-Dan Tanna Robert Urich) not unlike younger versions of Eastwood himself. Unsurprisingly, they invite Harry to join them in their campaign to rid the streets of scum. Somewhat more surprisingly, he declines. ("Apparently you've misjudged me," Eastwood tells Soul, in a line perhaps intended equally for his liberal critics.) In the end, he is forced to kill his young imitators, along with the superior (played by Hal Holbrook) who had been working with them.

Why is "Magnum Force," with its explicit rebuke of vigilantism, so rarely cited as a film in which Eastwood began the deconstruction of his vigilante icon? One reason is that in subsequent films (including the remaining "Dirty Harry" sequels) Eastwood reverted to his vengeful, outside-the-law persona with little obvious alteration. But another likely factor is the feel of "Magnum Force." In art as in politics -- and certainly where the two intersect -- our responses are often more attitudinal than philosophical. We respond to the tone and then interpret the underlying facts in a way that will be consistent with that initial reaction. And while the moral of "Magnum Force" may have been in clear and deliberate opposition to that of "Dirty Harry," the atmospherics weren't all that different. Once again, Clint is alone in the department. (No matter that this time it's because his boss and fellow officers are fanatical vigilantes rather than criminal-coddling bureaucrats.) Once again, it ultimately comes down to him, the Good Man against the Bad Men, with no time for mercy or cowardice or playing by the rules.

Further evidence that Eastwood's reputation as "the enforcer of law and justice" was as much a product of his movies' attitude as of their politics can be found in the 1978 ape-buddy flick "Every Which Way but Loose." Though hardly a "serious" film, it was Eastwood's most successful movie till then, raking in an astounding $85 million. Eastwood plays Philo Beddoe, a bare-knuckles brawler who wears a cowboy hat, drives an old pickup, and listens to country music. Although most of the movie is devoted to his disputes with two cops and a biker gang, his real cultural foil is a snooty USC student who's onscreen for less than two minutes early in the film -- just long enough for her to describe the country-western mentality as "somewhere between moron and dull normal" and then be cut down to size by Beddoe. In one of the most successful examples of pre-"Passion of the Christ" politico-cultural marketing, the film's distribution specifically targeted rural and small-town theaters in the South and West.

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