A rural Arizona lawman heads to New York City to extradite an LSD fiend and killer in 1968's Coogan's Bluff. Clint Eastwood stars and Don Siegel directs. It's an entertaining crime thriller.
Coogan (Eastwood) garners mockery for his cowboy getup and expectation to transfer custody of the killer, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), without much paperwork. NYPD Lieutenant McElroy (Lee J. Cobb) explains to him he's gotta talk to the D.A. and then the New York supreme court and wait an indeterminate amount of time for the doctors to release Ringerman from Bellevue, where he's recovering from LSD withdrawal. So Coogan waltzes right into the hospital and bluffs his way all the way to Ringerman's doctor whom he convinces to release Ringerman to his custody without any paperwork whatsoever.
You might expect this to be a conservative fantasy about a lone cowboy navigating the waters of liberal lunacy, bureaucratic and psychedelic, and you'd be right. But the politics here aren't so obnoxious, though when Coogan decks a guy for fondling a woman's breast against her will, I didn't believe that she would've chewed Coogan out for it the way she does. But I suppose for a particularly avant-garde psychotherapist it wouldn't be out of the realm of imagination. Susan Clark plays Julie, the psychotherapist who wants to obstruct Coogan's attempts to track criminals with relationships to Ringerman. But she succumbs to Coogan's charm and what she doesn't give up to him he steals from her filing cabinet.
The movie takes a page from Yojimbo--establishing its protagonist as a kind of ultimate badass and then having him ambushed and worked over by a couple of lowlife thugs. Coogan's Bluff does this early in the movie and it works as a great source of tension and motivation. I think most viewers will be incensed by the injustice and the film firmly puts us in Coogan's corner.
Coogan's Bluff is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
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