'COOGAN'S BLUFF'........EASTWOOD & SIEGEL WARM UP FOR "DIRTY hARRY"......

Coogan's Bluff (1968)   In this first collaboration between Clint Eastwood and veteran director Don Siegel, you can spot all the tropes they'd pour into their groundbreaking action-cop thriller "Dirty Harry".......

                   Eastwood's modern-day Arizona sheriff Coogan is a soft-spoken thug with with a fully functioning sex drive and no sympathy for criminals he tracks down and cracks down on, much like an Old West bounty hunter....

                    In the brilliantly handled opening sequence, you see both sides his personality in play......after capturing a Native american murder suspect, Coogan leaves the poor sucker chained to the front porch of a house he's stopped by.......in order to dally with a married hot blonde who's currently home alone......

                      This....uh.....break in law enforcement protocol does not endear Coogan to his enraged boss, who promptly ships our hero off to New York City, where he's to extradite an escaped  murder suspect (Don Stroud).

                     And we're off to the Big Apple, where Eastwood encounters the expected barrage of fish-out-of-water jokes.........and the implacable bureaucracy of the New York police, as exemplified by the perpetually angry Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb).

                     Ignoring Cobb and  all those big city petty legalities, Eastwood manages to spirit his quarry out of a prison hospital......but then he's bopped unconscious by Stroud and his his wild hippy girlfriend (Tisha Sterling). Undiscouraged by the fuming Cobb, Eastwood goes on the hunt, taking on a crowd of pool hall hoods in a brutal, well staged knock-em-down........and then it's on to Central Park, where he finally nails Stroud after a  brief but furious motorcycle chase.

                     Don Siegel directs this pulp with the same spare, stripped down efficiency he'd later bring to 'Dirty Harry'.......though he's visually hobbled here by the cheap TV-style look of so many Universal studio movies in the 1960's.......(though there's some filming in New York, most of the movie reeks of Universal backlot sets in L.A......)

                     But it's fast and fun, especially featuring its ludicrous visit to Universal Studio's idea of a hippie nightclub. ('The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel', we kid you not........in which, Oh My God.....you can spot same sex couples KISSING......while the club's multi-media wall shows 1955's 'Tarantula', the monster later napalmed......by a young Clint Eastwood)

                     A few years later, 'Coogan's Bluff' ended up re-cycled and homogenized by the studio into into the TV show 'McCloud' with Dennis Weaver taking over as a Southwest lawman plopped down in New York.........but as far as we know, unlike Eastwood's Coogan, Weaver never  jumps in a bathtub with a married babe or pounds a guy into jelly while on top of a pool table.....

                    For that kind of  rough-stuff, prime Don Seigel goodness......only Clint will do.
3 stars (***)>