Blood Sport

Jean-Luc Godard once dedicated a film to him. London's National Film Theater has held a retrospective season of his work. Critics have ranked him with Hawks and Hitchcock for his economic style and strong sense of form. Yet to the average moviegoer, the name of Director Donald Siegel means no more than the brand of popcorn on sale in the lobby.

Coogan's Bluff, Siegel's latest film, will bolster his already exalted position among his followers, even though it may not do much to make his name a household word. Like most of the other 24 pictures he has directed (among them: Madigan, Riot in Cell Block 11), this one is the sort of gritty cops-and-robbers movie that audiences take for granted. Coogan's Bluff has all the qualities that distinguished Siegel's previous efforts: it is fast, tough and so well made that it seems to have evolved naturally, almost without benefit of cast, crew or rehearsal. Those who are willing to look beyond this carefully nurtured air of artlessness, however, will see some of the best American moviemaking of the year.

The story is a variation on the familiar theme of country boy in the big city. Arizona Deputy Sheriff Walt Coogan (Clint Eastwood) is a steely-eyed loner who hunts down criminals as a kind of blood sport. His boss sends him to Manhattan to extradite a prisoner named Ringerman (Don Stroud), who is in Bellevue recovering from an acid trip. He cons the doctors into releasing him, but Ringerman's girl Linny (Tisha Sterling) and a pal named Pushie sap Coogan as he is about to step on the plane for Arizona, stealing his gun and his prisoner. Coogan then sets out to run Ringerman to ground in an attempt to salvage his personal and professional honor.

Siegel fleshes out this lean plot by taking a long look at low life in Fun City. Using discotheques, squad rooms and pool halls, he creates a tense atmosphere of violence that encloses the action like a straitjacket. Eastwood, who has hitherto displayed nothing more than a capacity for iron-jawed belligerency in a series of Italian-made westerns, performs with a measure of real feeling in the first role that fits him as comfortably as his tooled leather boots.

Coogan's Bluff is what the trade used to call a B picture, but Siegel is not bothered by such distinctions. "I make Tom, Dick and Harry movies," he says. "I'm not interested in those 10,000 Tom, Dick and Harry spectaculars where everything seems to get lost in the shuffle." It is not very likely that Siegel will ever get a spectacular to direct, partly because his movies have seldom done very good business, partly because the studio executives do not care for his bellicose, independent ways. "The brass made me put a prologue and epilogue on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that damn near ruined the whole thing," he recalls. "And after the first screening of Riot in Cell Block 11, all the executives filed out without saying a single word. I sometimes feel like a prophet without honor in my own land."

Born in Chicago 56 years ago, Siegel got his start in films in the Warner Bros, montage department, directed his first feature (The Verdict) in 1946. Like some of the unpretentious Hollywood professionals who have been proclaimed geniuses by the French critics, he takes such praise lightly. He has never seen a Godard film, and was astounded by Parisian cineastes who said that "they went down to see 'a Siegel' the way we might say we're going down to look at a Picasso or something." As he told an enthusiastic audience at the National Film Theater, recalling his years of obscurity: "I'd like you all to know that I'm deeply honored. But where were you when I needed you?"

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