MOVIE.RttP{DIRTY HARRY with forensic scientist Amy Brodeur @ The Coolidge!}

Mon, Nov 1 @ 7:00 pm

“I know what you’re thinking, punk. You’re thinking, ‘Did he fire six shots, or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, that will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” - Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry

Forty years after Dirty Harry first hit movie theatres, Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan remains the definitive renegade movie cop and one of Eastwood’s most memorable characters. Marking Clint’s first outing as the coolly laconic, justice-at-any-cost San Francisco homicide detective, this taut cat-and-mouse thriller finds Callahan on the trail of an elusive serial killer named Scorpio (loosely based on the real “Zodiac” killer who terrorized the Bay Area). With the clock ticking on a kidnap victim who has been buried alive, Callahan, impatient with department bureaucracy and legal niceties like Miranda rights and search warrants, uses unconventional tactics to bring Scorpio in, only to see him released due to the inadmissibility of evidence. Do you think that this will stop Harry Callahan from getting his man? Well, do ya punk? One of the landmark movies of the 1970s, Dirty Harry (1971) spawned an entire genre of films taking a vigilante approach to law enforcement.

Dirty Harry takes place in a pre-DNA testing era, and forensic science, while referenced in the film, does not factor into the action’s outcome. In the real world, various elements of forensic science —including biological and trace evidence screening, gunshot residue testing, pattern evidence analysis, bloodstain pattern investigation, mitochondrial DNA and STR analysis, and firearms identification —play a major role in the investigation and resolution of homicides and other violent crimes. Joining us to shed light on some of the scientific tests and procedures used when a crime is being processed is forensic scientist Amy Brodeur, MFS. Currently a faculty member and assistant director of the Biomedical Forensic Sciences Masters Program at Boston University School of Medicine, Brodeur previously conducted casework in the Criminalistics section of the Boston Police Department Crime Laboratory.

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