From Roger Greenspun's December 23, 1971 review of Dirty Harry:


Dirty Harry fails in simple credibility so often and on so many levels that it cannot even succeed (as I think it wants to succeed) as a study in perversely complimentary psychoses.
What does succeed, and what makes Dirty Harry worth watching no matter how dumb the story, is Siegel's superb sense of the city, not as a place of moods but as a theater for action. There is a certain difficult integrity to his San Francisco, which is not so beautiful to look at, but is fantastically intricate and intriguing—a challenging menace of towers and battlements and improbable walls.

It is from the properties of such a theater that Dirty Harry creates its own feelings and makes its only real meaning, and occasionally even generates a curious misty atmosphere that owes nothing to vague imaginings and everything to a desperate awareness that for this world the only end of movement is in pain.