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. 

The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964)

Cast: Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, Ronald Reagan, Clu Gulager, Claude Akins, Norman Fell. Screenplay: Gene L. Coon, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Richard L. Rawlings. Art direction: Frank Arrigo, George B. Chan. Film editing: Richard Belding. Music: John Williams.

The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)

Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in The Lineupw

Cast: Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, Richard Jaeckel, Warner Anderson, Mary LaRoche, William Leslie, Emile Meyer, Marshall Reed, Raymond Bailey, Vaughn Taylor, Cheryl Callaway, Robert Bailey. Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant. Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: Al Clark. Music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff.

The Lineup is a police procedural based on a popular radio and TV series that centers on uncovering a drug-smuggling ring that uses unwitting tourists to bring in heroin concealed in works of art and toys sold to them in Asian countries. The title seems to be a bid to draw in viewers of the TV show: The one lineup in the film is incidental to the procedural part of the story, which is really the less interesting part of the movie. Actors Warner Anderson and Marshall Reed play the detectives in charge of things with the stiff "just the facts, ma'am" manner characteristic of cop shows of the day, but things only begin to get interesting when we meet the villains. Eli Wallach gets top billing as Dancer, a twitchy psychopath under the guidance of the more cerebral Julian (Robert Keith), who doesn't like to get his hands dirty and has never shot a gun, but collects people's last words, reported to him by Dancer. They're joined by Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel), the driver supplied to them by the head of the operation, known as The Man (Vaughn Taylor). Sandy is an alcoholic -- Julian refers to him as a "dipsomaniac" -- who keeps a pint handy in his suit pocket, but knows how to drive a car fast through San Francisco streets. And it's those streets that perhaps supply the most interest in the film today, with fascinating location shots including some now-vanished landmarks: the Embarcadero Freeway, which was never finished and was torn down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the Sutro Baths, a museum and ice-skating rink that was destroyed by an arsonist's fire in 1966. Hal Mohr's camera and Don Siegel's direction make the most of these and other settings. Sometimes the settings seem to drive the plot: There's not much reason to have one of the victimized tourists be an administrator of the San Francisco Opera other than to have a scene shot in the handsome lobby of the Opera House, and Dancer and Julian have a hideout in Daly City that affords a sweeping view of the San Francisco airport and the bay beyond. Still, The Lineup is a swift-moving entertainment with a lot of action and suspense.

The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949)

Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Patric Knowles, John Qualen, and William Bendix in The Big Steal

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix, Patric Knowles, Ramon Novarro, Don Alvorado, John Qualen, Pascual García Peña. Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring, Gerald Drayson Adams, based on a story by Richard Wormser. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Samuel E. Beetley. Music: Leigh Harline.

Can film noir be funny? The Big Steal is unquestionably noirish, reteaming as it does the pair from the über-noir Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and involving a lot of twists and turns in its plot centered on a payroll heist. But director Don Siegel and his cast give it a lightness and wit that elicits as much amusement as suspense. Ramon Novarro has some droll moments as a Mexican police inspector.

Beguiling

The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971)

Geraldine Page and Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled (1971)

John McBurney: Clint Eastwood
Martha: Geraldine Page
Edwina: Elizabeth Hartman
Carol: Jo Ann Harris
Doris: Darlene Carr
Hallie: Mae Mercer
Amy: Pamelyn Ferdin
Abigail: Melody Thomas Scott
Lizzie: Peggy Drier
Janie: Patricia Mattick

Director: Don Siegel
Screenplay: Albert Maltz, Irene Kamp
Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan
Cinematography: Bruce Surtees
Production design: Ted Haworth
Film editing: Carl Pingitore
Music: Lalo Schifrin

The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017)

Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled (2017)

Corporal McBurney: Colin Farrell
Miss Martha: Nicole Kidman
Edwina: Kirsten Dunst
Alicia: Elle Fanning
Amy: Oona Lawrence
Jane: Angourie Rice
Marie: Addison Riecke
Emily: Emma Howard

Director: Sofia Coppola
Screenplay: Sofia Coppola
Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan and a screenplay by Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp
Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd
Production design: Anne Ross
Film editing: Sarah Flack
Music: Phoenix

Why some movies get remade and others don't is one of the abiding mysteries of the business. There doesn't seem to be a very clear reason why Don Siegel's 1971 The Beguiled should be a movie that Sofia Coppola would choose to remake 46 years later other than that it's a pretty good premise: a wounded Yankee soldier is taken in by a Southern girls' school who hide him from the Confederates until events turn them against him. The premise does have a slightly pornographic quality to it, but that's unlikely to have motivated this particular version. Whatever the reason, we now have two pretty good versions of the story, the first starring an actor who became known for a taciturn masculinity, the second with a softer, more feminine (not to say feminist, because who knows what that means in any given context) approach. In fact, the two films are almost complementary, notable as much for what the remake leaves out as for the way in which Coppola changes the tone of the first version. Siegel's film is rougher and more action-filled, and it treats the sexual tension of the material in a more heated manner -- not to say overheated, which the 1971 version veers toward in its suggestions that Martha, the girls' school headmistress, not only committed incest with her brother but also had a lesbian relationship with (or at least attraction toward) the head teacher, Edwina. Times have changed, and Coppola steers clear of both, probably because they add nothing to the main story and same-sex attraction doesn't have the the power to shock in 2017 that it did in 1971. Coppola also eliminates a major character from Siegel's version, the slave Hallie, who serves as a kind of interlocutor with Clint Eastwood's McBurney, the two commenting on their different forms of captivity. Although the major characters retain the same general outlines, Coppola's Martha and Edwina, Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst, are less eccentric performers than Siegel's Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman. I think this works to Coppola's benefit, making the women's turn against McBurney more startling, even a little tragic, than in Siegel's film. In Siegel's version, the girl who lures McBurney, called Carol in his film, is more vulgarly hot to trot than Coppola's Alicia, played with more subtlety by Elle Fanning. As for the two versions of McBurney, Coppola gives hers more of a backstory: an Irish immigrant lured into the Union Army by the promise of ready cash when he agrees to serve as a substitute for a Yankee reluctant to fight. Colin Farrell is also a more versatile actor than Eastwood, whose tough guy persona makes it hard for us to accept his acquiescence. The scene in which McBurney eats the poisoned mushrooms comes off better in Coppola's version because Farrell lets us see the poison taking its effect, whereas Siegel decides not to show the effect on Eastwood's McBurney. Yet somehow, I prefer the Siegel film, perhaps because there's an inherent cheesiness to the story's melodrama that Siegel embraces but Coppola strives to downplay.