Clint Eastwood plays a renegade cop known as “Dirty Harry” Callahan (the name supposedly derives from the type of jobs he's given). Harry is nothing if not a maverick: he holds his chief, the mayor, the public, criminal rights laws - in short, the whole “ineffective” judicial system - in open contempt. Harry brought an avalanche of accusations against Siegel, ranging from a simple “biased” (pro-police) to “fascist,” despite Siegel's own statement that Dirty Harry was about “a tough cop, a racist son-of-a-bitch,” and that the film showed “that within the (police) force there are ‘pigs' like this.” Only Time Magazine took a (predictably) different approach - adding ammunition while it makes its point: “Dirty Harry is bound to upset adherents of liberal criminal-rights laws.... Callahan is compelled to act on his own. This only reinforces Siegel's theme: that both cop and killer are renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world....” What most of the critics of Dirty Harry agree upon is that the film is stunningly well-directed, and is a masterpiece of the police genre.