He was a maverick cop, but he was a good guy. His superiors were often forced to rebuke him or even discipline him, but we knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. About the same time, Robert Redford made a good film called Three Days of the Condor , and that was about the turning point, I think. Certainly Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Eddie Robinson, played monstrously bad men, but they get killed in the end. Now we see, more and more, anyone in the military, for example, above the rank of major, is likely to be a bad man.
Clergymen tend to be unreliable and pompous figures.
Not necessarily evil, but silly. And wrong, of course. In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint's film, In the Line of Fire , the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president. And more recently in that film Dave , at least sort of a comedy, but the president is a bad man a terrible man. It seems that even when we get patriotic writers like Tom Clancy, people at least in an early stage like Clint Eastwood who did some very good movies, that support American principles, Hollywood somehow manages to distort them.