1971 gave us, among other things, A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's shocking descent into dystopian cruelty; Get Carter, the British crime film, whose murky fatalism offered an antithesis to the cheerful escapism of the swinging sixties; and Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood's squinting, gravel-voiced cop announced a return to cowboy justice against hippie "punks."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210616-why-1971-was-an-extraordinary-year-in-film