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. 

Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)

 Cast: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Melanie Griffith, James Woods, Janet Ward, John Crawford. Screenplay: Alan Sharp. Cinematography: Bruce Surtees. Production design: George Jenkins. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Michael Small. 

In the twisty, satisfying noir Night Moves Gene Hackman shows once again what a terrific actor he was, even though he seems to me a little miscast as a retired professional football player. He brings it off anyway, even managing to be sexy despite a pornstache and one of those '70s hairstyles that looked like a toupee even when they weren't.