Coogan's Bluff (Malpaso Productions, Universal, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On my way back from the Musica Vitale “Celebrating Women in the Arts” concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Saturday, March 23 (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/musica-vitale-brings-life-to-widely.html), I had excellent bus luck and had no trouble getting home in time to watch two noir-ish films on Turner Classic Movies I really wanted to see. The first was Coogan’s Bluff, made in 1978 by Universal in association with Malpaso Productions, a company started by the film’s star, Clint Eastwood. Eastwood’s career had had a rather quirky beginning; he was signed as a contract player by Universal in 1955 and put in an unbilled bit role in the 1955 sci-fi/horror film Revenge of the Creature as an inexperienced lab assistant who loses one of the four rats in his care. In 1959 he landed the second lead, “Rowdy Yates,” on a Western TV series called Rawhide that ran six seasons and had a long afterlife on reruns. In 1964 an Italian studio was about to shoot a U.S.-set Western called A Fistful of Dollars and they wanted the male lead of Rawhide, Eric Fleming, to play the lead. When Fleming turned it down, the Italian casting director no doubt thought, “Wait – why don’t we ask the other guy in that show to do it?” So they offered the part to Eastwood, he said yes, and when A Fistful of Dollars was released it became a worldwide hit and made Eastwood and director Sergio Leone international stars. It also sparked a whole cycle of Italian films about the U.S. West inevitably nicknamed “spaghetti Westerns,” including two more with Eastwood: For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Eastwood was suddenly in demand in his homeland, and after making a U.S. Western called Hang ‘Em High he ended up doing a modern-dress police thriller titled Coogan’s Bluff that was in essence the beta version of his 1971 mega-hit Dirty Harry. Both films were directed by Don Siegel and co-written by Dean Riesner, who’d had an interesting career backstory of his own; his father, Charles Riesner, had been an assistant to Charlie Chaplin in the early 1920’s and later a director himself. Under the name “Dinky Dean,” the five-year-old Dean Riesner played a bratty boy in Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (1922), and decades later he was establishing himself in Hollywood as a screenwriter and ended up working on both these Eastwood projects. Coogan’s Bluff is a nicely done thriller in which Coogan (Clint Eastwood) – no first name, at least none that we ever learn – is a sheriff’s deputy in Arizona whom we see taking insane risks trying to arrest a Native American in the Arizona desert. Though his quarry shoots at him with a high-powered rifle while all Coogan has is a standard-issue handgun, Coogan ultimately gets his man, but then antagonizes his boss, Sheriff McCrea (long-time Siegel “regular” Tom Tully), by leaving the prisoner hog-tied on a front porch without formally arresting him or reading him his rights. Then McCrea sends Coogan to New York City to pick up another prisoner, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), who’s wanted in Arizona but managed to escape to New York. Coogan ends up in the Big Apple and writers Riesner, Howard Rodman and Herman Miller cook up a lot of fish-out-of-water gags for him.

When Coogan hails a cab to take him to the police precinct where Ringerman was being held, he’s told by the cab driver the ride will be an extra 50 cents because he was carrying “luggage” – a small mini-suitcase – and later when he checks in at the spectacularly misnamed “Golden Hotel” (a sleazy dive whose main business is obviously renting rooms to prostitutes and their clients), he’s told he’ll need to pay $7 instead of the posted rate of $5 because he doesn’t have luggage. Coogan makes it to the police station, only Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), the precinct captain, tells him that Ringerman is in Bellevue Hospital after he OD’d on LSD (our Hayseed Hero asks how he got LSD while in custody, and I was wondering why he would want such a chancy drug instead of something more predictable like amphetamines or heroin). McElroy tells Coogan the procedure he has to go through, including petitioning the New York Supreme Court for an official writ of extradition and then getting the authorities at Bellevue formally to turn over custody of Ringerman to Coogan, only Coogan can’t be bothered. When I first heard of this movie I’d assumed “Coogan’s Bluff” was a geographical feature, but it really refers to the elaborate bluff Coogan pulls on the hospital authorities to get Ringerman by pretending he’s already dotted the bureaucratic “i”’s and crossed the “t”’s. Coogan gets Ringerman but almost immediately loses him again, thanks to an ambush staged by Ringerman’s girlfriend Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling, whom director Siegel remembered as just as much of a handful during the shoot as her character is on screen) and two male thugs, one of them played by the young Seymour Cassel.

The Terrible Trio manage to steal Coogan’s gun (a piece of symbolic castration the writers apparently borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film Stray Dog, another modern-dress police thriller), and Coogan’s subsequent attempts to recapture Ringerman lead to him harassing Ringerman’s mother Ellen (Betty Field) and compromising an elaborately staged NYPD “sting” operation involving Sgt. Jackson (James Edwards, who in 1949 starred as a Black serviceman victimized by racism in Stanley Kramer’s and Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave and briefly looked like he’d be the first African-American actor to be a star in leading roles, but his career didn’t take off while Sidney Poitier’s did). McElroy threatens to arrest Coogan, pointing out that while he may be a cop in Texas (there’s a nice running gag in which people assume Coogan is from Texas because he wears a cowboy hat, and he continually corrects them and says, “Arizona”), in New York he’s just another private citizen subject to arrest for obstruction of justice. Meanwhile Coogan cruises Linny Raven’s probation officer, Julie Roth (Susan Clark), and gets her to have sex with him by sheer persistence and star prerogative. Later he encounters Linny herself at a 1960’s-style discothéque called The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel (a name Siegel said he got from his then pre-pubescent son Kris), goes home with her and they have sex – only when he asks her where Ringerman is, she leads him into another trap. Siegel was particularly proud of this plot twist; he said he was tired of movies in which the hero gives the villain’s girlfriend such a good fuck she changes sides and betrays him, and in his film he’d have Coogan’s male ego set him up for her trap. The film climaxes in a motorcycle chase in which Ringerman is driving his own bike and Coogan follows in a cycle he’s commandeered from a middle-aged straight couple who were thrown from it after Ringerman crashed into them. “What are you doing with my bike?” the man futilely complains.

The two confront each other at The Cloisters, an old religious building we’ve seen before when Julie tried to take him there and he couldn’t have been less interested; Ringerman falls off his motorcycle and he and Coogan have a fist fight which Coogan wins. Then Coogan announces to the New York police that he’s making a citizen’s arrest of Ringerman, and in the film’s final scene the two are handcuffed together in a helicopter taking them to the airport and Coogan offers Ringerman a cigarette and lights it for him. (These days it’s a shock to see anyone smoking on board an aircraft.) As I noted above, Coogan’s Bluff is essentially a warmup for Dirty Harry: in both films Eastwood is playing an incorruptible but single-minded cop who’s so intent on pursuing his prey (a word that’s actually used in this script) he doesn’t care about such minor little details as the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of equal protection and due process. It’s also very much a film of its time in its open ridicule of the hippie movement and in particular its pretensions about being for “peace” and “love” (among the fixtures in Linny Raven’s apartment are a plate for a light switch that says, inevitably, “You Turn Me On”) when hippies really – at least in this movie – protect and hang with lowlifes and crooks. It’s not really much of a film noir – the characters are too black-and-white (while the film itself is in color) and Lalo Schifrin’s musical score too bouncy and not dire enough – but Coogan’s Bluff works as a police procedural, a fish-out-of-water story and a way of fitting Clint Eastwood’s Western character into a modern-dress tale.