Film Forum’s Don Siegel series builds its skull-cracking crescendo tonight and Thursday, with Siegel’s 1968 tandem Coogan’s Bluff and Madigan sharing a twin bill on the way to the series’ climactic Dirty Harry engagement this weekend. And while neither of the first two films mythologize their New York locations to the extreme Dirty Harry did for San Francisco, both offer gleefully cynical views of an urban counterculture that the later film would implode once and for all.
And though Madigan is probably the superior New York film in strict narrative, technical and geographical senses, Coogan’s Bluff is the selection that really must (and should) be seen to be believed. Clint Eastwood stars as Coogan, an iconoclastic deputy sheriff from Arizona who must travel to New York to extradite the fugitive Ringerman (Don Stroud) from East Harlem’s 23rd Precinct. Of course, the tactics Coogan uses to stop crime out west (deftly illustrated in an opening set piece spotlighting revisionist-cowboy-vs.-humiliated-Indian) do not translate to New York, although his resistance to authority–in this case, Lee J. Cobb’s bureaucratically browbeaten lieutenant–hardens into unbending defiance within minutes of his arrival.
Coogan travels to Bellevue, springing the acid-addled hippie Ringerman from his bed and heading to the crown of the Pan Am building for their flight back to Arizona. Alas, the captive’s screeching partners in crime steal him back following an assault on Coogan, thrusting the cop and his cowboy hat into the city on a quest for justice. The archetypes are all here, and anyone with any rough familarity with Siegel’s canon can foretell the rule-smashing lengths his hero will go to settle his score–stepping outside the mainstream as a means of salvaging it.
But the cultural breach in Coogan’s Bluff is by far the most pronounced of any Siegel film: Eastwood’s journey through New York takes him into Day-Glo Hell, the domain of hippies in thrall to songs and dances like “The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel” and sprawling apartments where Edie Sedgwick-esque trust-fund ingenues go to get wasted, laid and ultimately overdose in disgrace. Coogan’s ownership over this cohort is never really in question, as Siegel’s near-parodic indictment of their freewheeling standards plays in contrast to his protagonist’s own rebellion. Eastwood’s iconic virility is its own weapon here, to be replaced three years later (and for the remainder of his career, perhaps) with Harry Callahan’s .44 Magnum; his Coogan is the American West’s answer to James Bond, subverting a garish, feminine antiestablishment with a mainline shot of macho convention.
Anyway, what is primarily appealing here is that while his contemporaries creatively reacted to Vietnam and other political threats stemming from communism, Siegel’s cop trifecta takes it straight to the long-hairs. Madigan may emphasize their psychotic danger (what could be more terrifying, after all, than the enemy stealing our weapons?), and Dirty Harry may torture and kill them, but with Coogan’s Bluff, Siegel underscores their novelty’s spectacular uselessness in light of tradition. Its tactics may be raw, dated–even laughable–but two generations later, they are absolutely worth a closer look.

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