In short: Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

Happy to get rid of him for a couple of days, his boss sends Arizona Deputy Sheriff Coogan (Clint Eastwood) off to that strange and peculiar city known as New York, to transport an escaped fugitive the New Yorker’s somehow managed to catch back to Arizona.

Alas, things become difficult for Coogan from the start. Not only do the primitive city people he is confronted with ignore the fine difference between Arizona and Texas – certainly Coogan’s cowboy hat and boots don’t help there – they also take their dear time with actually putting the escapee into Coogan’s hand. It’s some liberal nonsense about illness at work. Yes, it is unfortunately that kind of movie.

Of course, once Coogan has acquired his man, he finds himself bashed over the head by some of the dirty hippie associates of the guy, and loses his gun to them. His masculinity stays intact, though, I’ll have you know. So our protagonist makes his way through New York looking for his man, while sneering at everyone disapprovingly and trying to fuck every woman he meets.

This Don Siegel joint shows Siegel and Eastwood at their most unpleasant: reactionary – the hippie disco scene must be seen to be believed –, quietly racist, and misogynist. There is a line of this sort of thing running through both men’s bodies of work, of course, but usually, there’s some human insight, some interest in people or violence or how people and violence go together and what that does to them, or even just an exciting plot to either make up for these failings or put them into a more human perspective, often even break them.

Here, there’s nothing of the sort. Coogan’s Bluff has no plot to speak of and consists exclusively of its protagonist wandering around New York sneering at people and things, from time to time exploding into violence on those weaker than him, and pressuring women into sex. Worst, the film never seems to think him anything but a hero, instead of the not terribly competent asshole he is.

But then, Coogan’s an Asshole would not make for the greatest movie title.

Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

In short: Charley Varrick (1973)

Technically, robbing a tiny small town bank should be a job of easy in, easy out, but a chain of unfortunate circumstances leaves former stunt pilot Charley Varrick (Walter Matthau) in quite some trouble. Not only are two of his three partners – one of whom was Charley’s wife – dead but the body count of the robbery also includes a couple or three cops, leading to a rather more enthusiastic hunt for the criminals as Charley had planned on.

Then there’s the fact that Harman (Andrew Robinson), the last surviving partner, is not the most stable of men on his best day, and it certainly isn’t his best day, or week. Even worse, there’s an absurdly large amount of money for such a little bank involved, though most of it doesn’t seem to officially exist, which leads Charley to the conclusion he’s just painted a second target on his back by stealing mafia money.

Charley’s right, too, so soon, not only the police is after him but also sadistic mafia killer Molly (Joe Don Baker). Charley isn’t quite as doomed as you’d assume, though, for his unassuming demeanour hides a pretty effective sociopath with a clever plan to get away with his money, while getting rid of anybody posing a risk to him.

Generally, I’m not the biggest fan of Don Siegel, his films often not quite hitting the spot for me I’d want them to hit. However, there’s really little I could come up with to say against Charley Varrick. Well, there’s one rather embarrassing scene that suggests Walter Matthau to have the sexual magnetism of James Bond, but apart from that peculiar misstep I’ll just write off as a harmless symptom of the director’s inability to cope with female characters (something the rest of the film avoids by not including many women with roles large enough to demand actual characterisation to begin with, of which you can make what you wish), there’s nothing about Charley Varrick that isn’t a lean and decidedly mean crime film.

This film pushes the same buttons of enjoyment that Donald Westlake’s Parker novels did, with a bunch of decidedly unpleasant men fighting it out among another until the least pleasant of them wins in the end, a large part of the pleasure lying exactly in the fact how amoral the whole affair is, with neither Siegel nor Howard Rodman’s and Dean Riesner’s script (based on a novel by John Reese I haven’t read) attempting to make anyone involved look nicer or more heroic than anyone else. Crime, it turns out, is not a game involving the nice.

The film’s plot is pleasant pulpy, containing just the right amount of violence, and is filmed by Siegel in a tight yet laconic manner that isn’t at all interested discussing the ethics or deep psychological reasons of what’s happening on screen, while still finding space to give the characters more dimensions than “is a decidedly unsexy sociopath” or “is a decidedly unsexy psychopath”. The actors are doing the expected fine jobs too, Matthau giving his sociopath bit so well I’m a little disappointed he never got to play Parker, and Joe Don Baker visibly enjoying being the sadistic monster with the mock-polite first impression.

It all comes together quite perfectly, the film setting up a situation that seems ideal for another tale of doomed losers trying to make it big, yet using it instead for a tale about monsters trying to survive in a world filled with other monsters.

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