By Lee Pfeiffer

The decline and decay of American urban centers in the 1960s- along with the inevitable soaring crime rates- inspired Hollywood studios to reflect the general mood of society. It was clearly a tumultuous period, perhaps the most divisive era in American history since the Civil War a hundred years before. Race riots, Vietnam War protests, assassinations of high profile figures and soaring poverty rates combined to provide a perfect storm of social unrest. Always a barometer of where society was at at any particular point in time, the major studio releases begat a tidal wave of urban crime movies. Many of these centered on a single "lone wolf" protagonist...the "dirty cop", if you will, who generally had disdain for following constitutional rights in his quest to fight crime, often within the very police department he worked for. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, we saw...