Coogan's Bluff

One of the movies that I watched off the DVR recently that's on DVD is Coogan's Bluff.

The movie starts off with an odd-looking guy wearing just a loincloth standing on a mountain somewhere in rural Arizona. He's got a gun, and when a jeep starts approaching the mountain, the guy shoots at the jeep! But the driver of the jeep is able to get out and come up on the odd-looking guy from behind. It turns out that the man in the jeep is sheriff's deputy Coogan (Clint Eastwood), and the odd-looking guy is a fugitive.

Coogan takes the fugitive not to the sheriff's office, but to one of his girlfriends who has a place in the middle of nowhere, mostly because Coogan needs a bath. However, the sheriff (Tom Tully getting one scene) finds Coogan and is pissed. To be honest, the sheriff has apparently never liked Coogan. So the sheriff has a job for Coogan, which is to go to New York City and pick up a guy Ringerman (Don Stroud) who is supposed to be extradited back to Arizona.

Once Coogan gets to New York, all of the big-city types treat Coogan like a rube just for being from the middle of nowhere; this including Coogan's two liasons, NYPD Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb) and probation officer/psychology researcher Julie (Susan Clark). They inform Coogan that he's going to have to wait several days to get Ringerman, because he had a bad trip on LSD -- this is 1968, after all -- and he's in Bellevue Hospital. Coogan can't get him until all the T's are crossed and the I's dotted, which is going to take time.

Coogan doesn't have that sort of time, so he bluffs he way into Bellevue to get Ringerman, which more or less succeeds. Unfortunately, somebody's figured out which airport Coogan is going to go through, and they waylay him, clubbing him on the head to get the key to the handcuffs and Coogan's gun. It's up to Coogan to find Ringerman in the big city, without his gun or official sanction from the NYPD.

Coogan's Bluff combines a reasonably good genre: the cop looking for a suspect movie, with one I've never liked: the generation gap movie. Julie has some unorthodox views, and is probably using unethical methods considering the files she's got. And then there's the nightclub Coogan winds up in where he meets Ringerman's girlfriend. It reminded me of the party scene from Midnight Cowboy, another movie about a small-town guy going to the big city. The final chase in Coogan's Bluff worked reasonably well, but the rest seemed a bit muddled to me.

I think the problems with the movie come down to the script, as I can't really fault Eastwood, who is the main focus of the movie. The supporting actors all do reasonably well. Ringerman is pretty much a cipher, but that's not an issue. All in all, I'd recommend Coogan's Bluff to Clint Eastwood completists, but would recommend Brannigan for starters for the "cops seeking an escaped fugitive" movies.