While we’re on the subject of screen legends, here’s one from a different era—Clint Eastwood, on a Japanese poster for Magnum Force, second installment in his five-part Dirty Harry franchise. Having watched Eastwood’s middle-aged disciplinarian Harry Callahan bust caps on various hapless San Francisco miscreants in installment one, seeing him begin to understand in chapter two that corruption starts at the top feels like witnessing major personal growth. It’s just the realization you’d expect him to have given the time period—America’s cherry had been popped by Watergate and Callahan now personified the country's fresh understanding of reality. The series would eventually loose steam, but Magnum Force strikes a balance between the old reactionary Callahan and the new mature one that makes the film the best in the franchise, in our opinion. It opened in the U.S. thirty-seven years ago this month. 

Above is the entire series of Dirty Harry book covers, nicely capturing Clint Eastwood’s famous don’t-fuck-with-me glint. The series, which is known collectively as The Further Adventures of Harry Callahan, was authored from 1981 to 1983 by several people using the psuedonym Dane Hartman.