Coogan's Bluff isn't a great movie, but its importance in the Eastwood filmography cannot be underestimated. It was Eastwood's first collaboration with director Don Siegel. It was the first time Eastwood played a cop in a big city. And it set the style for Eastwood's movies for years to come: fast, terse and economical.
The plot is simplicity itself: deputy sheriff Walt Coogan (Eastwood) of Piute County, Arizona, is assigned to to extradite a hippie-gone-bad named Ringerman (Don Stroud) from New York, but ends up tracking him alone through the sprawling urban jungle after his prisoner easily escapes him. The film opens brilliantly with a wide angle shot of the empty Arizona desert, not at all unlike the opening shot of the Almerian desert from For A Few Dollars More. Then a jeep rolls into view and audiences of 1968 got their first big screen taste of Clint Eastwood in the guise of a 20th century lawman, tracking down and capturing an escaped Native American with the kind of wordless, ruthless efficiency that had by then become his trademark. During the excellent opening scenes set in Arizona, we get to enjoy a little gratuitous police brutality courtesy of Coogan, a suspect denied his rights, a warm and extremely willing female acquaintance, and an angry and very harassed superior officer. So far, this plays like Eastwood's half-way house between his Italian westerns and Harry Callahan.
Then we cut to Coogan's arrival in New York. He steps out of the helicopter in a big Stetson and cowboy boots, clean-shaven with short back-and-sides. Compared to the scruffy cool of The Man With No Name and Harry Callahan, Coogan's hick-out-of-water look is a more than a little comical. It's as well to remember here that Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck (Jon Voight) was using this kind of get-up a year or so later as a means of picking up wealthy Park Avenue ladies, then instead finding himself a reluctant gay icon on the seamier streets of New York. Thankfully, Coogan is too preoccupied and too coolly Eastwoodian to have to endure this kind of ritual humiliation, though at least one blowsy femme fatale, coolly spurned by Coogan in the hotel they share, gets to chide him for being a "Texas faggot".
Coogan's Bluff works very effectively when it gets down to the business of being a decent action movie. Eastwood's scenes with Lee J Cobb (playing the weary older mentor to the increasingly impatient Coogan) crackle with biting wit. The action scenes are tightly filmed, edgy and very impressively edited, most notably a fantastically vicious tear-up in a pool hall (this scene alone is a masterclass in powerful editing) and a brilliantly shot motorbike chase through Fort Tryon Park at the climax. You almost feel as though you're on the back of that bike, clinging to Eastwood. But then the film gets bogged down in a romantic subplot that it doesn't really want or need. Coogan wastes no time hitting on sensitive probation officer Julie Roth (Susan Clark) the moment he has clapped eyes on her. He takes her to dinner. She shows him the sights. She cooks him spaghetti. She acts all puppy-eyed and concerned when Coogan gets taken off the case. These scenes go on far too long and become rather tiresome, particularly as Eastwood and Clark get some pretty ropey dialogue to work with ("The colour of pity is red", Eastwood boldly informs her at one point). More irritatingly, Julie serves no real function in the plot beyond providing Coogan with a clue to the whereabouts of Linny Raven, Ringerman's zonked-out hippychick girlfriend.
Things suddenly ram up a couple of gears in the final third however, once Coogan is on the trail of Linny Raven. At this point, the film almost feels obliged to accelerate towards the climax, having wasted so much time on the boring-Julie-sympathy-and-spaghetti-romantic-subplot routine. The "Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel" nightclub scene is like a middle-class Conservative's nightmare of a late-sixties "happening", but as funny as it may seem today, it is a riot of colour, costume and music, which comes as a welcome relief to the rather too sedate pacing of the film's middle third. Eastwood regular Albert Popwell turns up in this scene as whacked-out, switchblade-wielding heavy Wonderful Digby, and though he's only on screen for about thirty seconds, he's typically magnificent. One imagines it would be a lot more fun to spend a night on the town cruising the scene with Digby than cosying up to Julie in her apartment and sampling her spaghetti.
Clocking in at a brisk 94 minutes, Coogan's Bluff is both a fun movie and an effective little action film. Both Eastwood and Siegel would go on to do far better and more interesting work after this, but this was an effectively simple tale for them to find their feet with each other. Don Stroud gives an enjoyably wired performance as the basket-case Ringerman, paving the way for Andy Robinson three years later in Dirty Harry (physically both characters are not unalike). After the "play it safe" western Hang Em High, Coogan's Bluff provided a striking way forward for Eastwood as he developed a screen persona and a friendship with his director that was to pay great dividends in the new decade to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment