Stars: Clint Eastwood, Susan Clark, Don Stroud, Tisha Sterling, Betty Field, Lee J. Cobb, David Doyle, James Edwards, Tom Tully

Director: Don Siegel

Summary: An Arizona sheriff accompanies his extradited prisoner to New York and loses him in the concrete canyons of Manhattan.

This fish-out-of-water film was the beginning of a long association between Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood, who stars as the eponymous deputy sheriff from Arizona. The cowboy-cop is sent to New York City to extradite escaped murderer James Ringerman (Don Stroud), only to be told by police lieutenant McElroy (Lee J. Cobb) that the killer is recovering from an acid trip at Bellevue Hospital and can be released only with his doctors' approval. After some low-key flirtation with probation officer Julie Roth (Susan Clark), Coogan decides to take the bull by the horns and tricks Ringerman's Bellevue attendants into releasing him. However, on the way to the airport, the Arizona-bound cop is waylaid by Ringerman's amusingly wacked-out girlfriend, Linny (Tisha Sterling), and beaten senseless by a goon, allowing his prisoner to escape. Later, while in Julie's apartment, he surreptitiously extracts Linny's file to get her address and tracks her to an Electric Circus-like club whose habitues he regards with utter disdain. An amusing action film, COOGAN'S BLUFF makes much of the irony of the laconic Old West, with Eastwood being equally put off by both the bureaucratically hamstrung cops and the acid-fueled hippies.

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Clint Eastwood is Walt Coogan, a deputy sheriff from Arizona on the loose in the urban jungle of New York. Searching for a violent prisoner he has let slip ("It's got kinda personal now"), Coogan, in Stetson and cowboy boots, runs up against hippies, social workers and a bluntly hostile New York police chief played by Lee J. Cobb. It's a key film in the Eastwood oeuvre, the one in which his definitive persona first emerges, marrying the cool, laid-back westerner of the RawhideTV series and the Italian westerns to the street-wise, kick-ass toughness which would be further developed in the Dirty Harryfilms. Directed by Eastwood's mentor, Don Siegel, Coogan's Bluffhas pace, style and its share of typical Eastwood one-liners (to a hoodlum: "You better drop that blade or you won't believewhat happens next"). Like all Eastwood's successful movies, it cunningly plays it both ways. Coogan represents the old-fashioned conservatism of the west in conflict with the decadence of city life. Yet he's the perennial outsider, hostile to authority, a radical loner who gets the job done where bureaucracy and legal niceties fail. The film was to be the inspiration behind the TV series McCloud, in which Dennis Weaver took the Eastwood role. --Edward Buscombe

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	1968
Release Date:	June 6, 2005
Runtime:	90 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	902 920 9
Keywords:	Action, General, Adventure, Bluff, Coogan's
Genre:	Action/Adventure