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The Good:Don Siegel's COOGAN'S BLUFF

 COOGAN'S BLUFF

Clint Eastwood, Don Stroud, Susan Clark. Dir. Don Siegel, Universal, 1968

Do you know why self-styled cinephiles like me sigh, "the great Don Siegel," the way others moan, "Orson Welles, O god..."?

I admit it's probably annoying, but easily explained. Siegel directed the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. He did the montages for CASABLANCA. He helmed DIRTY HARRY. A director usually saddled with b-picture budgets & second-tier actors had a way of turning in genre pictures, like INVASION, which looked & felt like a Howard Hawks or John Ford picture. Simply, Siegel spent a career transcending crap, often for little reward.

As 1968's COOGAN'S BLUFF more than illustrates. Another bare-bones budgeter riffing on the fish out of water trope, with a "modern western" twist for novelty, little in COOGAN'S BLUFF could've looked all that original. Except perhaps Clint.

The first of Eastwood & Siegel's collaborations, culminating in ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, both men find a foil for one another not unlike Wayne & Hawks. Eastwood appears to have his usual low-key fun tangling with Lee J. Cobb's NYPD veteran, Don Stroud's Dennis-Hopper-wasn't-available hipster psycopath, & in trying to undress criminal advocate Susan Clark - yes, WEBSTER's Mom - even though she's mostly too smart for him.

One subgenre of film forever perplexing to me is the "modern western." Despite HUD & GIANT, it has always struck me as peculiar. Then I saw COOGAN'S BLUFF, a pure-d, horse-chase, gunfight western which happened to be set in 1968. COOGAN"s served as the template for NBC's Sunday Mystery, Dennis Weaver's McCloud. I have faint memories of McCloud, but it's hard, now, to imagine Clint not besting Weaver, a gifted actor's, work.

Susan Clark, as mentioned, got married to ex-NFL great Alex Karras & became family-TV icons via ABC's WEBSTER. Tricia Sterling, so startling as Stroud's deranged hippiechick lover, went on to nothing special. A thing must be said about Clint's movies: if he's involved or not, he attracts extraordinary actresses, who never fly as high again. Clark & Sterling serve as but the two for this picture.

If viewers can get by that, & enjoy Siegel & Eastwood's subversion of Western tropes, however, they're in for a satisying two hours at the movies.

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