{"id":11081,"date":"2012-08-26T15:04:07","date_gmt":"2012-08-26T15:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.furiouscinema.com\/?p=11081"},"modified":"2023-06-16T11:15:43","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T11:15:43","slug":"coogans-bluff-fifty-furious-westerns-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furiouscinema.com\/coogans-bluff-fifty-furious-westerns-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Coogan’s Bluff | 50 Furious Westerns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Every now and then we at Furious Cinema turn to one of our favorite classic genres, the western. We\u2019ve previously posted a list of 50 Furious Westerns<\/a>, and to build on that, we\u2019re launching a series of in-depth looks at some classics of the genre. No rules. This is another guest post in the series by Simon Gelten<\/em><\/a> (one of the most prolific writers onThe Spaghetti Western Database<\/a>), make sure you also read his previous articles<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1968 – Director: Don Siegel – Cast: Clint Eastwood<\/a> (Coogan), Lee J. Cobb (McElroy), Susan Clark (Julie Roth), Tisha Sterling (Linny), Don Stroud (prisoner), Tom Tully, Betty Field – Music: Lalo Schifrin<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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Coogan\u2019s Bluff, the second film Clint Eastwood made in Hollywood after his return from Italy, opens with a significant sequence. When we first spot Clint he\u2019s wearing a Stetson, we therefore seem on familiar territory. But Clint is also driving a jeep and wearing the outfit of a modern Arizona deputy sheriff. We\u2019re in a western, still in a western<\/em>, but we\u2019re about to leave the genre\u2019s \u2013 and its star\u2019s \u2013 natural habitat. A couple of moments later, we see the same man, still wearing a Stetson, flying over the city of New York, where he is supposed to extradite a prisoner, a hippy who has committed a crime in Arizona.
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Coogan\u2019s Bluff was one of the several projects offered to Clint Eastwood after the completion of his comeback movie, Hang \u2018m High<\/em>. It appealed to Eastwood because it featured a \u2018Western hero\u2019 leaving his own territory to move into a modern, urban environment: this transition, so he reckoned, would allow him to do the same thing as an actor. Hang \u2018m High had established him as a bankable star, but many had interpreted it as a pseudo Italian western with a typically overloaded, pseudo Italian score, picking up what Clint had left behind in Italy. Coogan\u2019s Bluff is unmistakably American, reflecting a clash between sophisticated law enforcement and frontier-style self-righteousness, according to some one of America\u2019s major internal conflicts (1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The script is a pattern of contrasts, opposing the Old West to the Urban Wilderness of modern city life. Soon after his arrival in New York, Coogan is told that this are done differently on the East coast (We\u2019re not at the O.K. Corral here<\/em>), but of course he won\u2019t listen. The prisoner escapes and Coogan roams the concrete jungle of New York, hat, boots and all<\/em>, a cowboy in the big city, and tracks the man down personally, even though he\u2019s told that his sheriff\u2019s star is of no value in a town which has 28.000 policemen of its own. The image of Eastwood’s character is a bit ambiguous: Coogan\u2019s clear-cut methods are compared favorably<\/em> to modern day bureaucracy, but unfavorably<\/em> to the tolerance of a Susan Clark\u2019s social worker, Coogan\u2019s love interest in the movie.<\/p>\n\n\n

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When a first draught of the story was offered to him, Eastwood immediately noticed the possibilities of it, but he also realized that the story needed a strong directional hand. It wasn\u2019t easy to find the right director, but then Universal came up with Don Siegel. To many people in the business Siegel was known as a proficient low-budget director, who had received some favorable reviews by critics of the French magazine Cahiers du cinema, but the true value of his movies had not yet been acknowledged. Eastwood was impressed by some of Siegel\u2019s work, especially the TV movie The Killers<\/em>. Siegel, on the other hand, loved the Leone\u2019s spaghetti westerns and Eastwood\u2019s laconic acting style. Still things did not run smoothly initially. Both Siegel and Eastwood had strong ideas about the project and it took several rewriting of the script before both men were satisfied (2).

Eastwood needed Siegel, but Siegel also needed Eastwood. Coogan\u2019s Bluff was the second of his so-called rogue cop movies, exploiting the ambivalent role of the police in society. The third, and most influential, would be Dirty Harry, the first had been Madigan<\/em>, released earlier the same year (3). Compared to Coogan\u2019s Bluff, Madigan probably has the better story, but it looks and feels like an old school movie. It took Clint\u2019s laconic approach and dry humor to make the formula really click. And above all it needed his screen persona. There have been better actors in the history of film making, both in Italy and the US, but none of them had ever been able to create a similar effect by simply appearing on screen, by being there (4). Coogan\u2019s Bluff is often funny, and even if the first half lacks excitement, it\u2019s always enjoyable. Although there\u2019s relatively little action, the film set new standard for screen violence with an extraordinary scene in a poolroom, with Coogan, using billiard balls and cue sticks as a weapon, taking on six opponents, apparently killing one of them (note the reaction of one of the police officers). It also seems to announce some of the controversies Siegel and Eastwood would create with their most notorious collaboration, Dirty Harry<\/em>.

Coogan\u2019s straightforward methods seem more effective than those of police captain McElroy (Lee J; Cop, in a fine performance), a veteran who plays things by the book, but both McElroy and social worker Julie are portrayed as sympathetic, caring people, not as the bureaucratic idiots they (or similar characters) would become in the Dirty Harry movies. There\u2019s some understanding between Coogan and McElroy, and Coogan even adopts some of Julie\u2019s humane traits: in the opening scene, set in Arizona, we see him hitting a prisoner in the stomach and tying him to a pole (like an animal, says his boss); in the final scene he offers a cigarette to his prisoner. Coogan is clean-cut and resolute, but he\u2019s also vulnerable and honest, a man with his own share of shortcomings. He\u2019s an opportunist who sleeps with a hippy girl he disdains as a person, but he leaves Julie\u2019s apartment when she gives him only five minutes: his machismo is hurt by this concealed rejection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the treatment of the New York hippy scene, which feels a little off-centre here, gives us a hint of which direction Siegel and Eastwood would take with the character in the future. There\u2019s one scene in Coogan\u2019s Bluff, set in a discotheque, with Coogan towering above the hippies around him, which shows him as vastly superior to his environment, a sort of a moral compass in a degenerated world (5). It would take only one more, albeit radical step to turn Coogan into the iconoclast dirty hero who would make some people\u2019s day, and drive some others crazy.
Trivia:<\/span><\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n