The flop movie Burt Reynolds wanted to be his ‘Dirty Harry’: “A ballsy character”Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds go way back, and while they were on an even keel for a while in terms of star power, the former eventually outstripped the latter and left him lying in the Hollywood dust. Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry pushed the future four-time Academy Award winner over the top as an A-list leading man, and it inevitably spawned a slew of pale imitators. As tended to be the case once his star power began to dim, Reynolds was far too late to the party, not arriving until 1989. “Joe is a ballsy character, kind of like Dirty Harry gone amok,” he said at the time. Had he tried to make his own Dirty Harry in the ’70s when he was a big deal, it might have worked, but he was a man out of time in more ways than one.