Coogan's Bluff

The first of five films Don Siegel made with Clint Eastwood is a roughshod affair whose most interesting aspect is the communalities it shares with Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger’s Oscar winner that came out the following  year. It’s not just the central motif of a cowboy in New York but also his encounters with slatternly, blowsy women and other instances of society's motley dregs, as well as the set-piece of the "Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel" psychedelic party, not to mention the inexplicably too-neat-for-a-hippie-chick Tisha Sterling as a precursor to Brenda Vaccaro. They’re all here to create on overall sense of NYC as the paradigmatic urban jungle.

Clint Eastwood plays Arizona deputy sheriff, Walt Coogan, who is sent to NYC to fetch a bad-ass (Don Stroud) to stand trial. Initially thwarted by Big City procedure, represented by Lee J. Cobb ‘s Lt. McElroy, Coogan bluffs his way into getting his man but the latter escapes leaving Walt to hunt for him amongst hippies and low-lives.

The film which was a co-production between Universal and Eastwood’s Malpaso production company is a tin-pot pastiche which starts off in a quite humorous vein – “Put your pants on” says Coogan to an Indian who has gone feral  - aided by Lalo Schiffrin's jaunty score, before settling down to a mechanically violent modus operandi and has little going for it other than Eastwood’s coolly self-contained anti-hero, a type which Siegel and Eastwood would  establish in its iconic form with 1971’s Dirty Harry.

Siegel endows Coogan with a remarkable success with women including a police psychologist, Julie Roth (Susan Clark), and a comparable impermeability to physical beatings, but most noticeably fails to establish any reason for why Coogan is so dead-set on getting his man back to Arizona. And why, other than falling prey to Coogan's alpha-male musk, Ms Roth turns up for a romantic farewell as he heads back to Arizona is anyone's guess

Seigel’s films are always robustly economical and this saves Coogan’s Bluff from being completely awful but it doesn’t make it a good film.

FYI: The film inspired the hit TV show McCloud.

 

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