1968's
Coogan's Bluff, whether you've heard of it or not, is a deceptively historic movie. It brought Clint Eastwood out of the western milieu he'd been so well-known for through his TV series
Rawhide and his Spaghetti Western cycle with Italian director Sergio Leone (
A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad & The Ugly), and into the streets of U.S. cities like New York (
Coogan's Bluff), San Francisco (the
Dirty Harry cycle), Phoenix (
The Gauntlet), and New Orleans (
Tightrope).
And it brought director Don Siegel back to the forefront of American directors (that is, after the French film magazine
Cahiers Du Cinema had already vetted him in the 1960s). TV director Alex Segal (
Playhouse 90) was first at the helm of
Coogan's Bluff, but later producer Jennings Lang (who went on to help out with Eastwood's
High Plains Drifter and
Play Misty For Me, as well as with disaster epics like
Airport '75, Earthquake, and
Rollercoaster) felt a quicker, more no-nonsense director was needed for the project. Fortunately, the great director Don Siegel was under contract to Lang's company, Universal, and thus a lucrative collaboration between Eastwood and Siegel was afoot--a collaboration that would lead Eastwood to dedicate his 1992 Oscar winner
Unforgiven to both Sergio Leone and Don Siegel.
If one reads about Eastwood's and Siegel's directorial senses, one would find that they are quite similar: as Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel puts it "[Siegel] was Clint's kind of guy: a decisive filmmaker who didn't waste time, words, or film on the set." Any examination of any actor's experiences with the director Eastwood--Morgan Freeman, Hillary Swank, Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, and the casts of
Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, High Plains Drifter, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird, Play Misty For Me, Breezy, or
Mystic River (and those are all huge casts)--will turn up commentaries about Eastwood's fair, effective, but no-nonsense, one- or two-take approach to filmmaking (his films are legendary in Hollywood for coming in under- or on-schedule and under- or on-budget).
Even before they met, Eastwood and Siegel needed each other. Eastwood required Siegel's know-how. But Siegel hungered for the power of Eastwood's fame and name. We should remember: in 1956, Siegel completed the classic sci-fi/sociological study
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has, as of 2008, been remade three times: as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 78),
Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 93) and
The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 07).
This
HAS to be a record over the course of 50 years. Name me
one movie that has been remade almost every decade since the original has hit the screens.
Believe me, you can't. Obviously the original Siegel-directed
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an influential movie. But after Siegel made that movie, he was offered
NOTHING. This is clearly a political response to Siegel's incendiary, left-leaning work about the negatives of unconsidered conformism in the light of the Cold War Communist scare. But, regardless of his ever-so-slight blackballing, Siegel kept going, through B-movies and TV-films (including 1964's originally TV-bound remake of 1946's
The Killers, staring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan--in his last role, as a villain).
When it came time for
Coogan's Bluff to be made, producer Lang had obviously hit on something perfect. As a result of Lang's suggestion, Eastwood watched some of Siegel's 1950s films and liked them. He'd also heard (from actor/director Mark Rydell, of
On Golden Pond and
The Cowboys fame) that Siegel was a director who could get things done in a hurry. Siegel, meanwhile, watched and loved Eastwood's Italian films done with Leone. In 1967, the two men met in Carmel, California (the same town that of which Eastwood would eventually become mayor in 1986). According to Siegel, they discussed "dames, golf, dames, the glorious weather" and then, once Siegel was called quickly back to Hollywood, the team quietly decided that they could certainly work together, and all of this happened without the two having discussed very much about their first film together.
When all was said and done,
Coogan's Bluff turned out to be an entertaining fish-out-of-water actioner that had Clint playing a horse-ridin', cowboy-hat-wearin' Arizona cop who storms New York City in pursuit of an on-the-lam bad-guy headcase played by Don Stroud (who later reteamed with Eastwood in 1971's
Joe Kidd) Co-star Lee J. Cobb (
12 Angry Men, The Exorcist and
Death of a Salesman's original Willy Loman, on Broadway and on film) was his usual grumpy self as the NYC detective whose work habits clash with Coogan's rough, no-Miranda-rights method of law enforcement.
A suitable precursor to Eastwood's more violent later work with Siegel (including
Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, and Escape from Alcatraz),
Coogan's 
Bluff was later shamelessly ripped off by the creators of NBC's Emmy-winning hit TV series
McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver in the acclaimed lead role. The TV series failed to even credit Herman Miller, the writer of the original novel and screenplay to
Coogan's Bluff. Still, to this day, this is inexplicable and unforgivable, as anyone who see both the movie and the TV series can easily attest.
An appreciator of
Coogan's Bluff--mind you, an incredibly engrossing movie--cannot forget the contribution of Don Stroud. As a result of his outstanding performance as Eastwood's nemesis, Stroud later became the star of Roger Corman's
Bloody Mama and
Von Richthofen and Brown (AKA
The Red Baron), and of cult classics
Live a Little, Steal a Lot,
The Buddy Holly Story, and
The Amityville Horror, as well as scads of special appearances on an amazing lineup of TV shows (including
McMillan and Wife, Adam-12, Ironside, The FBI, Gunsmoke, Police Woman, Hawaii-Five-O, Charlie's Angels, CHIPs, Knots Landing, Fantasy Island, The A-Team, McGuyver, and
Babylon 5). In
Coogan's Bluff, he invests his slimy character with a strangely appealing blend of malice and hippy-dippyness (some of which date the movie considerably). I have to note here that my mother, Lynn--an avid drive-in movie buff--has always had a thing for Stroud, who sported blond-haired good looks while also delivering wild-eyed villainous performances (which typecast him throughout his career). I've always thought her love for Stroud was strange, but, hey, there it is!
I conclude my examination of the deceptively low-key
Coogan's Bluff by mentioning its jazzy score by Lalo Schifrin (
Bullitt, Mission Impossible, Dirty Harry, Cool Hand Luke, and many TV show themes), some of which comes into play during a scene set at a wild-assed 1968 NYC hippy club humorously deemed "The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel." If someone was smart, they'd open a club with that incredible moniker. (Actually, I now think there
is one located in Dublin, Ireland, but where is its NYC counterpart?)
Coogan's Bluff may not be a must-see, as must-sees go. But it's a movie you will not, I guarantee you, mind seeing at all, my friend.
Skaterdater is, to my knowledge, the first skateboarding movie ever, and still the best I've seen (Gleaming the Cube and Dogtown and Z-Boys are pretty good, though). Look at how deftly director Noel Black catches the innocent, all-barefoot hot-dogging of this Cali street gang (his steady cameraman Michael Murphy deserves props, too). And that this is a love story, ultimately, captures my sentimental side. It's a simple movie, really. for kids: skateboarder has to choose between his pals and the girl he's starting to like. But this skillfully wordless movie won the Golden Palm for Best Short at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for 1965's Oscar for Best Live-Action Short--however it lost out to Le Polet (The Chicken) by France's master filmmaker Claude Berri (Germinal, Jean De Florette/Manon of the Spring). 
Noel Black went on to direct the shocking yet somehow laconic 1968 cult movie Pretty Poison starring a shy, shaky Anthony Perkins (what other kind of Perkins is there?) who finds himself under the utter erotic spell of a cute psychopathic cheerleader played by Tuesday Weld (in a career performance). Then the director went on to struggle with two more theatrical films, 1970's troubled Cover Me Babe with Robert Forster (who's role was to be played by Al Pacino, whom the studios hated) about a desperate student filmmaker, and Jennifer on My Mind, about a 
doomed romance between two New Yorkers who first meet in Venice. Then he largely settled for TV movie work and episodic fare for show like Quincy, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, and One Life to Live. But he's produced three more theatrical releases: 1979's enjoyable A Man, A Woman and A Bank with Donald Sutherland and the incredibly lovely Brooke Adams; the obscure horror movie Marianne starring Kitty Winn (the nanny in The Exorcist and Al Pacino's girlfriend in Panic in Needle Park); and Private School, the 80s teen sex comedy with Phoebe Cates, Matthew Modine and Emmanuelle herself Sylvia Kristel. 
Skaterdater is a sweet movie. It won't shake your world, unless you have a taste for Big Daddy Roth drawings and Hang Ten shirts. But it will give you insight into the beginnings of the skateboarder subculture. I love the jangly guitars by Nick Venet and later Republican political figure Mike Curb (who did the score for biker films like The Wild Angels, The Glory Stompers, and Born Losers). One last trivia note: its Assistant Director was Carroll Ballard, a contemporary of George Lucas and Francis Coppola and the later director of such similarly dailogue-deprived filmic studies as The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf, and Fly Away Home. 
