Dirty Harry
Celebrating fascist pigs have never been so stylish. A cinematic marvel wrapped around repulsive ideology, more explicit that Triumph of the Will.
Triumph of the Will is just a boring political rally with a cheering audience. This has nothing but slogans (punk!) and a low level officer fighting the system. He is the underdog fighting the system, the only Hobbesian restraint on having a man with a gun murder every single hippie, john, cruising gay men, negro, you name it. He will wipe the scum of society.
The protagonist is the villain, and so is Scorpio, with his hippie demeanour and Age of Aquarius alias. He is never even named, he represents a generation of entitled crybabies, the anti-boomers. Ironic that the conservatives are the ones dismissing several Constitutional amendment violations.
I think the producers are aware of the extreme right wing connotation, so they had Scorpio use an Arisaka, an MP40 and a Walther P38, all-Axis guns.
Yes, this is not pure propaganda like Rocky III, our villain gets a lot of pushback from his bosses, from the Mayor, from the District Attorney. They are weak willed political slugs, slimy protectors of themselves, unwilling to let our guy decide how to murder suspects. Everyone grills him for one procedure violation or another, but our hero remains steadfast, working for free. Of course, it’s all for nothing. Torturing the guy achieves nothing, the girl was dead anyway. Harry claims this at the beginning, looks like he doesn’t believe in himself.
It’s not even virgin territory, there’s Death Wish and its infinite rehashes, like Hardcore with George C. Scott. For another hardcore fascist police procedural, you need to go all the way to Tropa de Elite, but that is less focused on the police procedural, there’s all on the Full Metal Jacket section. For a left wing breather, you re-watch RoboCop.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.