Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/18/25

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, April 18, 2025

Coogan's Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968)

Susan Clark and Clint Eastwood in Coogan's Bluff

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee J. Cobb, Susan Clark, Tisha Sterling, Don Stroud, Betty Field, Tom Tully, Melodie Johnson, James Edwards, Rudy Diaz, David Doyle. Screenplay: Herman Miller, Dean Riesner, Howard Rodman. Cinematography: Bud Thackery. Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Robert MacKichan. Film editing: Sam E. Waxman. Music: Lalo Schifrin.

If it weren't that it has the hard, garish, overlighted look of most movies in the 1960s, Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff could almost be called a neo-noir. It has the genre's requisite unlikable but determined tough guy protagonist, willing to use sex and violence and flouting the law to achieve his goal, even if it means getting beat up several times. There's something masochistic about Clint Eastwood's Coogan, a deputy sheriff sent from Arizona to Manhattan to recover a fugitive. The screenplay gives him no backstory to explain his headlong relentlessness, but then there's nothing much to the screenplay beyond setups for action. It's an almost cynically mindless movie.