Trailer
Plot summary
Coogan is a deputy sheriff in Piute County, Arizona, and his boss has had enough of the way he works. He is sent to New York City to bring back James Ringerman, an escaped killer. Detective Lieutenant McElroy says Ringerman is still being treated for an LSD overdose and that the state supreme court must stamp the extradition papers before he can be handed over. In New York, people take him for a bumpkin. He meets Julie Roth, a probation officer, and takes her out to lunch. Unwilling to wait any longer, he talks his way into the prison hospital and gets the attendants to hand Ringerman over to him, then sets out for the airport.
Cast
- Rudy Diazas Running Bear
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Coogan's Bluff (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The title comes from a real promontory in upper Manhattan that overlooks the site of the Polo Grounds, the old home of the New York Giants, and doubles as the name of Clint Eastwood's Arizona deputy.
- The story began life in early 1967 as a pilot for a possible television series, first drafted by Herman Miller and Jack Laird, who had written for Eastwood's old show Rawhide.
- With the script already seven drafts deep, Eastwood called a sudden meeting to tell the team he disliked it and preferred Herman Miller's original idea. The episode left him with a lasting distaste for repeated rewrites.
- Replacement writer Dean Riesner did not speak to Eastwood at all until he criticized a scene the star liked, in which Coogan sleeps with Linny Raven hoping she will lead him to her boyfriend. By Riesner's account Eastwood's face went white and he got one of those Clint looks.
- The film set the pattern for the Dirty Harry tough guy Eastwood would go on playing, began a Siegel partnership that ran more than ten years, and its script became the basis of the television series McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver.
