Coogan's Bluff

Coogan's Bluff (1968) was Clint Eastwood's first collaboration with director Don Siegel, and his first Stateside hit after the Dollars trilogy. A forgettable crime drama, today it's most interesting as a dry run for the far more successful Dirty Harry (1971).

Walt Coogan (Clint Eastwood) is a renegade Arizona cop who plays by his own rules. He's sent to New York City to extradite a criminal (Don Stroud), only to find his job complicated by a condescending New York policeman (Lee J. Cobb), a feminist parole officer (Susan Clark) and everything bad about John Lindsey's New York: hippies, hoboes and hookers. Things go from bad to worse when Stroud escapes from custody, forcing Coogan to embark on a gruelling investigation in the Big Apple.

From 1967 to 1971, Clint Eastwood desperately tried to parlay his success in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns to Hollywood stardom. His early Americans films, for this reviewer at least, aren't a pretty sight: the turgid faux-Leone Westerns Hang 'Em High and Two Mules for Sister Sara, the underwhelming Guns of Navarone rehash Where Eagles Dare. And that's not even mentioning Paint Your Wagon. It wasn't until Dirty Harry that Eastwood shed his Italian baggage, cementing his iconic status and opening the door to a long and fruitful career.

Coogan's Bluff is another exercise in dues-paying. Herman Miller's sophomoric script milks the fish out of water premise for all it's worth, placing a naive cowboy in the midst of big city crime and counterculture. The film stridently posits Coogan as the righteous antithesis to late '60s hedonism, and his misadventures in Liberal Land overwhelm the paper-thin plot. Siegel stages a few neat scenes (a tense opening spoofing For a Few Dollars More, a nasty barroom brawl), only to end the film with a goofy motorcycle chase and a mixed message finale.

Clint is an assured screen presence as always, but Coogan is probably his most unlikeable character, a mean, racist womanizer who unwittingly embodies everything negative about the cowboy stereotype. It's hard to garner much sympathy for him no matter how many jerk cabbies tell him off. Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront) is wasted as a snobbish NYC detective and Don Stroud makes a boring villain. The female characters don't speak well for Eastwood and Siegel's worldview, least of all Susan Clark, a "feminist" who's secretly waiting to be ravished by Clint. The supporting cast includes a few gems: Betty Field (7 Women), James Edwards (The Set-Up), Tom Tully (The Caine Mutiny), Seymour Cassel (Convoy).

Coogan's Bluff is for confirmed Clint Eastwood fans only. Clint was still a long way from refining his persona, and this early effort is best left forgotten as a relic of its time.