When one sits down to watch the “Dirty Harry” series, which is finally being released in its entirety by Warner Bros. as a DVD boxed set, fully loaded with special features and new transfers, one question seems to burn in the mind: People actually paid to see these movies?

Produced between 1971 and 1988, when violent crime seemed to be on a never-ending upswing, the five films in the series — “Dirty Harry” (1971), “Magnum Force” (1973), “The Enforcer” (1976), “Sudden Impact” (1983), and “The Dead Pool” (1988) — can leave the average viewer befuddled. It’s not just that we now know our cities didn’t collapse and that the crime rate didn’t continue expanding into infinity. And it’s not that the early “Dirty Harry” movies look, decades later, like dusty dress rehearsals for the Reagan era, with a leathery actor mouthing tough talk to reassure frightened Americans. No, it’s because, after the first two installments, the series fell into the very sinkhole of violence and nihilism that it claimed to be reacting to.

The original “Dirty Harry” is a stripped-down action flick with barely a wasted second. Even the critic Pauline Kael, who described it as “fascist,” admitted that it is a taut, effective thriller, maybe because director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood had made nearly the same film a few years before. When Frank Sinatra hurt his wrist and dropped out of the low-budget “Dirty Harry,” its producers ran to Siegel and Mr. Eastwood because they had a reputation for coming in on time and under budget, and because their 1968 policier “Coogan’s Bluff” was a blueprint for “Dirty Harry.”

Based on the unsolved Zodiac killings in San Francisco, “Dirty Harry” was a dose of celluloid Viagra for an impotent police department. The Miranda v. Arizona ruling of 1966 had seared the image of a liberal Supreme Court tying the hands of good cops into the public mind when the justices overturned the conviction of a Hispanic rapist because police violated his rights during the arrest. Violent crime was reaching epidemic levels and television was pumping images into suburban homes of angry minorities and hippies rampaging through Watts and Chicago. Many were scared their town was next.

By 1971, police officers were “pigs,” and the sexy stars were crooks like Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke” and Dustin Hoffman in “Midnight Cowboy.” Mr. Eastwood, on the other hand, looked like a vicious hayseed, with his hair brushed back in a rockabilly pompadour, a series of sweater vests tucked under cheap suits, and high-water pants that ended two inches above his shoes. He was a middle-aged square at a time when movie heroes were young and hip.

But he was also a tough screen presence for a country that wanted to see criminals put in their place and stripped of their romanticism. The scene that made him an icon comes early in the first film, when Detective Harry Callahan (Mr. Eastwood) stops to get a hotdog, then guns down four black bank robbers while still chewing, striding down the middle of the noonday street with a .44 Magnum in his hand.

Standing over a wounded gunman, he growls, “I know what 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 a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

The gunman backs down, and Callahan reveals that his gun was empty all along, and that’s what the middle class wanted to see: a criminal brought low and emasculated by a representative of law and order. It didn’t matter that the rest of the movie hinted that Callahan was an emotionally stunted Peeping Tom who lived alone. His justice was bad to the bone, and Mr. Eastwood was instantly embalmed in his role. Funnily enough, the man playing the gunman was Albert Popwell, a terrific character actor who played a vicious pimp in “Magnum Force,” a radical militant in “The Enforcer,” and Callahan’s partner in “Sudden Impact.” He’s twice the actor Mr. Eastwood is in the series, but perhaps because he more resembled what passed for a criminal rather than a cop in the cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, more often than not he’s bullet fodder.

Mr. Eastwood quickly found himself up to his elbows in the franchise, even directing some of the scenes in the first film, and was eager to avoid charges of racism. So the second film in the series, “Magnum Force,” focused its anger on a gang of traffic cops who form a vigilante death squad to take out the trash. It was a good choice, because the only people whom middle-class suburbanites fear more than minorities with weapons are traffic cops. With its faceless, leather-clad angels of death rubbing out “scum,” the movie gave Dirty Harry a chance to hold the line for law and order while lecturing his enemies on the value of due process. After “Magnum Force,” though, things went terribly wrong.

Mr. Eastwood nominated his longtime buddy, James Fargo, to direct the third Dirty Harry film, “The Enforcer”; the star himself directed the fourth, and his stunt double directed the fifth. Each one is worse than the last.

The villains in “The Enforcer” are hippie militants (it was the late ’70s, after all; the dream was over) who confirm Rush Limbaugh’s worst fears by turning out to be homosexual pimps and hookers. Six years later, “Sudden Impact” was a huge hit, even though it resembles an episode of “Murder She Wrote,” with an aging Callahan moving to a small town and running into a female vigilante. By the time of “The Dead Pool,” in 1988, Mr. Eastwood is finally the same age as Sinatra would have been in the first film, and the picture is a travesty. Lalo Schifrin turns in a score that sounds like a dog being beaten with a Casio keyboard, and the highlight of the movie is a young Jim Carrey lip-synching a performance of “Welcome to the Jungle” before having a drug-induced freak-out and dying while making a noise that sounds like a sea otter.

A few months before “Dirty Harry” was released in 1971, another rumpled, morally compromised cop hit movie screens: Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection.” That flick grossed twice what “Dirty Harry” did and won five Academy Awards. But Doyle was too much a creature of the ’60s (and a well-written one, at that), with too many shades of gray to hold together a franchise. Dirty Harry, on the other hand, was an easy forerunner of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the hugely popular action cartoons that would rule multiplexes in the ’80s.