Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Clint Eastwood sets the actor’s changing fortunes against the backdrop of American politics. Issues of police brutality and right-wing vigilantism, in particular, dogged his career.

In the following extract, the iconic status of one of Eastwood’s most defining films, Dirty Harry, is attributed to a conservative longing for national confidence, power, and social order, all seemingly eroded by foreign military defeats and domestic civil rights and protest movements. Eastwood backed Nixon for the presidency shortly after the film’s release, thereby explicitly lending his star power to issues for which the Dirty Harry character stood as a perfect symbol.

Clint Eastwood said in later interviews that he had realized right from the outset of the project that Dirty Harry contradicted the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona decision of the US Supreme Court, which protected criminal suspects by assuring them they would receive a “Miranda warning” of their constitutional rights before police interrogation. This ruling was generally regarded as a victory for liberals and the bane of law-and-order conservatives.