Coogan's Bluff (film)
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| Coogan's Bluff | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Don Siegel |
| Produced by | Don Siegel |
| Written by | Herman Miller |
| Starring | Clint Eastwood Lee J. Cobb Susan Clark |
| Music by | Lalo Schifrin |
| Cinematography | Bud Thackery |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 1968 |
| Running time | 93 min. |
| IMDb profile | |
Coogan's Bluff is the title of a 1968 Universal film starring Clint Eastwood, Lee J. Cobb, Seymour Cassel and Susan Clark and directed by Don Siegel. Eastwood plays the part of a young veteran deputy sheriff from a rural county in Arizona who travels to New York City to extradite an apprehended fugitive named Ringerman, played by Don Stroud, who is wanted for murder.
The movie's most distinctive and elaborate scene takes place in a large, psychedelic-themed nightclub called The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel. Also notable is a poolhall brawl with Coogan fighting off a dozen men, and a climatic motorcycle pursuit between Coogan and Ringerman through the Cloister's Park. Furthermore, there are two sequences in the movie, one at the beginning and the other at the end, the second echoing the first. This is the same device used in "Dirty Harry", when Harry gives the "Are you feeling lucky?" speech, first to a bank robber and then to the killer in the last scene. In this film Coogan, hunting a renegade Navajo, disappears in a cloud of dust caused by him spinning his jeep. He then sneaks up on his quarry. In the final scenes he performs the same trick on a motorcycle to capture Ringerman.
Herman Miller was responsible for the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman. Miller's work on this film is credited with inspiring the NBC / Universal television show McCloud. In addition, the film's soundtrack was composed by Lalo Schifrin, who also wrote the theme song of the popular 1960s television show Mission: Impossible.
The character of Coogan, a quiet but tough lawman who clashes with his superiors and short-cuts police procedure to get results, would be successfully revisited by Eastwood and Siegel in "Dirty Harry" and its sequels. This was also the first of five films over the next ten years involving the actor/director partnership of Eastwood and Siegel.
The name of the film itself is a playful reference to a New York City natural landmark, Coogan's Bluff, a promontory in upper Manhattan overlooking the site of the former long-time home of the New York Giants baseball club, the Polo Grounds. Coogan bluffs his way out of Ringerman's jail cell with Ringerman in tow, to take him back to Arizona without going through extradition.
- During the aforementioned nightclub scene, a few frames of the 1955 film Tarantula are inserted; this film showcased one of Clint Eastwood's earliest film roles as a jet pilot.
- This film was the basis of the 1970-1977 television series McCloud, which starred Dennis Weaver as a visiting lawman from Taos, New Mexico assigned to duty with the New York City Police Department.
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