Physical Specimens: New Clint Eastwood 4K Reviews, Including Dirty Harry, Josey Wales, and Pale Rider

This week in Physical Specimens, our biweekly round-up of new physical media and 4K reviews, we assess new 4K UHD releases of three of Clint Eastwood’s most popular movies, including two Westerns and the prototypical “rogue cop” movie.

Dirty Harry

Warner Bros. capped off April with new 4K releases of three Clint Eastwood favorites, not too long before Father’s Day, where they’re sure to be popular gifts for all the dads and grandads who demand only the best from their AV setups. Although there’s not quite the unity in time and setting that an aesthete might hope for—two Westerns are joined by Dirty Harry, the movies’ preeminent rogue cop—there’s at least a clear thematic threadline combining all three, and it’s the one that connects almost all of Eastwood’s roles. And yes, it has to do with masculinity, obviously.

Harry Callahan, Josey Wales, and The Preacher all have two big things in common: a personal code of morality during immoral times, and the willingness—and preternatural ability—to kill to enforce it. Despite operating in an ostensibly more advanced era, though, and being the only one of the three who’s an officially recognized officer of the law, Dirty Harry is the least ethical of the three. He causes chaos throughout San Francisco in pursuit of his own violent vision of law and order, from instigating a midday shootout on a busy downtown street, to repeatedly threatening to execute criminals extrajudicially. Harry’s an extreme “the ends justify the means” kind of guy, especially when chasing down the Zodiac-inspired killer who taunts the cops and the media throughout the movie. Eastwood would come to question and criticize this kind of vigilantism in later films, but the original Dirty Harry admires the lengths Callahan goes to; like many of Don Siegel’s tough guy action flicks of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it presents its violence with a brutal matter-of-factness that becomes its own almost slick kind of style, and that can’t help but excite the viewer even if they disagree with the tactics on display. Dirty Harry is a grim movie from an era where America’s institutions seemed to be crumbling and its cities were basically being abandoned, and it’s easy to see how its celebration of violence as the answer inspired some of the worst cultural trends of the next… oh, 50 years or so. But viewers will feel compelled to root for Eastwood’s almost nihilistic cop—not just because Andrew Robinson’s sociopathic killer Scorpio is such a relentlessly evil character, but because Eastwood is just so damn charismatic as a terse bastard who treats almost everybody else in the world like shit. Dirty Harry isn’t the genesis of Eastwood’s enduring image as a stoic badass—there’s a very short line between Callahan and The Man with No Name—but it did become the most famous one, and the one that had the biggest, most lasting (and most negative) impact on the wider culture. That can make Dirty Harry a bit tough to swallow ideologically, but Siegel’s lean, direct approach to action and Eastwood’s single-minded commitment ensure that it’s always easy to watch.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Eastwood directed his first movie, the uncharacteristic Play Misty for Me, the same year Dirty Harry was released. Five years later he made what would be his last Western for almost a decade, the Civil War-set revenge film The Outlaw Josey Wales, and you can see him trying to deglamorize and legitimize the violence he commits on-screen. After his wife and young son are killed by rampaging Union soldiers, vengeance-seeking Missouri farmer Wales (Eastwood, natch) joins up with a rogue squad of Confederates who plunder and kill their way through the war’s Western frontiers, with an ultimate goal of taking down the men who slaughtered his family. (Yes, your hero is a Confederate—an all-too-common conceit in pop culture of the ‘70s and ‘80s.) When his squad takes a too-good-to-be-true offer of clemency to turn themselves in, Wales resists—and watches them all get cut down by a Gatling gun after they’re disarmed. Like the over-the-top villainy of Scorpio, the bad guys in Wales are made to look so bad that you don’t blame Eastwood’s character for single-mindedly wanting to kill them all. Unlike Dirty Harry, though, the violence in Josey Wales isn’t exactly exciting; yes, there’s a thrill to seeing them get what they deserve, but most of the violence is portrayed as sad, dirty, and sordid. Eventually Wales winds up on the run from a bounty placed on his head, and gathers a sort of surrogate family around himself—an older Native American man, a young Native American woman, an upright Kansas matron, her beautiful granddaughter (Sondra Locke, in the first of many movies she made with her long-time partner Eastwood). He recreates a sense of the homelife that was violently taken away from him, and seems to forget about his crusade—until the men who killed his original family, who have been pursuing him throughout the film, finally catch up, leading to a lengthy shootout. Despite his great capability for violence, despite his years as a Confederate, there’s no question that you’re supposed to root for Wales here, even as the film depicts violence as an ugly, detestable thing. His newfound family is poised to pull Wales off his path of vengeance until that vengeance basically forces itself upon Wales, with the Union raiders showing up at his new homestead just as they did his first. Throughout it all Wales resembles most Eastwood heroes—he’s supremely capable, always has the upper hand, and utterly irresistible for every woman he meets—but starts to show a clear sense of reluctance that isn’t found in Callahan or his earlier cowboys, a tug of guilt or shame as he nonetheless does what he believes he needs to do to right the wrongs perpetrated against his family. And when he finally seems to have found a way out of that violence, it comes directly to his doorstep once again. 

Pale Rider

Eastwood took almost a decade off from Westerns after Josey Wales; in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s he preferred working with orangutans than horses. He put the spurs back on for 1985’s Pale Rider, in which he used overt Christian symbolism to display the continued evolution of his view of violence. This time Eastwood’s hero—a collar-wearing gunfighter known only as The Preacher—isn’t seeking vengeance; he’s trying to protect a ragtag group of settlers in California who just want to be free and left alone, but are constantly threatened by thugs in the employ of a villainous mine owner who wants their land. If Josey Wales represented a humanized version of Eastwood’s Old West gunslingers, The Preacher is a return to the almost mythic nature of The Man with No Name; he helps the settlers defend their land, destroys the mine, refuses the advances of the mother and 14-year-old daughter (!) who both fall instantly in love with him (of course), and, in a thrilling extended climax, systematically picks off the crack squad of seven crooked marshals hired by the mine to squelch the settlers’ resistance. The Preacher is clearly not a true man of God—he removes his collar when he retrieves his six-shooters two-thirds of the way through the movie, and was apparently left for dead by the leader of the marshals at some point in the past—but his violence is justified and good, used to defend those who can’t defend themselves in the face of greed and unquestionable wickedness. That violence also makes it impossible for him to ever forge true ties, though; he spurns physical relationships, keeps everybody in the community at a distance, and leaves immediately once the fight is over. Josey Wales is redeemed from his life of violence through newfound family; by dealing in death, even when it seems moral, The Preacher cuts himself off from life, closing off the personal connections that create a real man, and turning himself into an earthly echo of the symbolic figure from Revelation referenced by the title. If you think all Westerns are the same, watch The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider back-to-back; the same genre, the same star and director, with similar and related themes, and yet the two are materially different in almost every other way. And although they both give the viewer all the grim, steely Eastwood masculinity they could ever want, they’re far more nuanced and complicated than Dirty Harry. 

All three films are new remasters with HDR10 transfers with Dolby Atmos and original theatrical audio mixes. They’re bright, clean, vivid, yet retain that grainy filmic quality you’d expect. They’re basically a best-case scenario from an audio-visual perspective, presenting state-of-the-art upgrades without sacrificing their original look and feel. If you’ve got an old man in your life with a 4K home theater set-up—or if you are that man yourself, young or old—these editions are the ideal way to watch these movies. The kind of masculinity Eastwood embodies in these movies isn’t necessarily healthy, but if you want to understand the mindset of late 20th century men and the world they created, all three will give you some insight.

Dirty Harry
Original Release: 1971
Director: Don Siegel
Format: 4K UHD Blu-ray
Label: Warner Bros.
Release Date: April 29, 2025

The Outlaw Josey Wales
Original Release: 1976
Director: Clint Eastwood
Format: 4K UHD Blu-ray
Label: Warner Bros.
Release Date: April 29, 2025