Don Siegel

  • Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

    Coogan’s Bluff (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I unintentionally built myself a hippies-as-seen-from-1968 double feature while watching I Love You Alice B. Toklas and Coogan’s Bluff back-to-back. My favourite is an easy pick—not only is Coogan’s Bluff far less annoying than the first film in this double bill, but it’s an interesting bridge between Clint Eastwood’s western roles and his Dirty Harry tough-guy persona. The transition from one to the other is nearly literal, as he plays an Arizona rural lawman travelling to Manhattan to extradite a fugitive. The film plays quite a bit with the clash of culture that this implies, with the staid and conservative protagonist confronting Manhattan as a den of crime and perversion, discovering the hippie subculture along the way. But Coogan’s Bluff is not so much a sociological study as a crime thriller, with Eastwood chasing down the escaped fugitive with detectorial savvy and two-fisted vigour. As a portrait of late-1960s New York City, it’s not bad—more clean-cut than the blaxploitation films that would pop up soon afterward, but still evocative at the street level. For Eastwood fans and film historians, Coogan’s Bluff is most notable for being the first collaboration between Eastwood (an actor often quick to tell directors what to do) and director Don Siegel, which would turn out to be the first of five films they would do together. It also definitely feels like a first draft of the kinds of characters that Eastwood would adopt as persona over the following two decades, and exactly the kind of meaner-tougher film that would dominate the 1970s. It still plays rather well now (although watch out for the blunt sexism), and gives viewers a prime-era Eastwood in late-1960s Manhattan.

    (Second viewing, On TV, November 2020) There are two things that I find interesting about Coogan’s Bluff, a contemporary crime thriller featuring Clint Eastwood as a tough Arizona lawman sent to New York City in order to capture a fugitive. The first being that this is a film that combines a very familiar Eastwood character (the laconic western gunslinger) with the late-sixties trend of trying to figure out the new shape of the society that changed during the decade. So it is that we have a typical Eastwood character taken out of westerns in order to figure out what to do with those punks, hippies, city slickers and women abusers. If you’re thinking that Eastwood revisited similar territory later on in later archetypical movies such as Dirty Harry, that brings us to the second interesting thing about Coogan’s bluff: that it was directed by Don Siegel. Siegel, of course, was one of the very few directors that Eastwood ever tolerated well, leading to four subsequent collaborations, including—you guessed it—the 1971 urban thriller exemplar Dirty Harry. There’s a city-mouse-in-the-city quality to Eastwood’s squinty trip to the decadent Big Apple that clearly plays on stereotypes that would grow even stronger in the gritty 1970s, and if Coogan’s Bluff keeps things a bit less dark than many of its imitators, it still plays on what would later become well-known tropes. But perhaps more significantly, it does appear like a crucial turning point for Eastwood, bridging two phases of his career as an actor, literally taking his persona from the Wild West to the Big City.

  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

    Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2019) The premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been made and remade so often (often with the serial numbers filed off, meaning that the 1956 film’s three official remakes only hint at a much wider legacy) that I expected a return to the original to be, well, a bit dull. Hadn’t I seen all of this in 1978, 1993 or 2007? But as this predecessor played, I found myself gradually taken with the sure-footed execution of director Don Siegel and even more so by its atmosphere. Setting a story of viral conformity in a small town of the mid-1950s now feels like the best of all possible choices despite how on-the-nose it feels—a then-contemporary setting now accumulates a great deal of subsequent respectability: one imagines that if nothing of the sort had been made, a later filmmaker would have done it. The execution also dovetails into the growing nightmare of realizing that your friend and neighbours are being replaced by alien doubles—as the film advances, the period black-and-white cinematography (widescreen!) becomes harsher as the night falls—while one can remain unconvinced by the framing the device, the voiceover narration and the high-contrast cinematography combine to evoke a delicious sense of late-period noir science fiction that definitely underscores the film’s origins. And there’s the thick political allegory of the story, which (fascinatingly enough) can be read as either anti-Communist, anti-McCarthyism, or both, or neither. In more timeless matters, the performances of Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter are essential to the film—their characters’ obvious love for each other tightens the screws of the conclusion (the real conclusion, not the tacked-on happy epilogue) and makes the film much stronger as well. It’s not only that Invasion of the Body Snatchers has aged well—it’s that, from the get-go, it nailed down the essentials of the story in such a way that its predecessors could not improve upon.

  • Dirty Harry (1971)

    Dirty Harry (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, April 2018) A lot of baggage has been attached to the Dirty Harry character over the years, from the politics of the film and/or star, to Clint Eastwood’s iconic presence, to catchphrases and situations that would be introduced in the sequels rather than the original film. But the original Dirty Harry is quite a bit better than its modern perception would suggest. Executed at a time when Hollywood was getting grimmer and harsher as a response to the freed shackles of the Hays Code, Dirty Harry is still faintly shocking for its violence and gritty portrayal of early-seventies San Francisco. As a madman terrorizes the city, it’s up to Harry Callahan (a more than impressive Eastwood) to bring order back to the city … by all means necessary. It’s hard, in the current environment questioning police brutality, to watch Dirty Harry and be swept up by cheers for the hero. There’s a basic disconnect now between what we expect of heroes and what the movie delivers—and I certainly hope that the gap grows even bigger as time goes by. Still, the film does stack things up in favour of its protagonist, either by making the antagonist pure evil, or making it clear that the situation around him demands such extreme measures. Better-directed by Don Siegel than you’d expect from an early-seventies crime thriller (including two rather effective helicopter shots), Dirty Harry remains captivating largely due to good plotting and a character compelling despite obvious flaws. Eastwood is extraordinary here, but it’s worth noting that his character is flawed in many respects—beyond the vigilantism, he clearly loses focus on a stakeout and allows a situation to get even worse. Still, the film brushes much of these things aside in an effort to streamline the film’s impact on its audience. (It also multiplies contrivances to explain why the suspect is allowed to go free on those damnable “technicalities.”)  It’s certainly possible to disagree with much of the film’s message while being impressed by its impact, though, and ultimately that’s why Dirty Harry will endure even as it keeps being bothersome in its depiction of police violence.

  • The Shootist (1976)

    The Shootist (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2017) One of the problems of approaching a movie education by going backwards in time is that you see the end before the beginning. You end up watching the revisionism before the classics that are being revisited, and actors at the end of their career paying homage to themselves at their prime. It usually makes sense in the end, but the first impressions can be strange. So it is that while I’m impressed by The Shootist’s approach to the last few days of a legendary gunman (John Wayne, in his final role), I can’t help but feel that I would have gotten far more out of the movie had I seen it after watching the dozens of essential westerns and John Wayne movies. Not only is The Shootist about a gunslinger counting down the days until cancer kills him, it’s explicitly about the end of the Far West as a distinct period—it takes place in a city where automobiles are starting to displace horses, water and electricity are changing the nature of living, and where civilization doesn’t have much use for killers, even righteous ones. The film explicitly ties itself to Wayne’s legacy by using clips from his previous movies as introduction to his character, and there’s an admirable finality to this being Wayne’s last role. I found myself curiously sympathetic to his gruff character, and easily swept along the plot even through (or given) I’m firmly in favour of modernity over the western. Other small highlights can be found in the film—Ron Howard plays a callow youth who learn better, Lauren Bacall looks amazing and there’s even Scatman Crothers in a minor role. Under Don Siegel’s direction, the atmosphere of a city entering the modern age is well done, and there’s a genuine melancholy both to the film and to Wayne himself as they contemplate the end of eras both social and personal. I’m not quite so fond of the specific way the film chooses to conclude, or the various action highlights that seem perfunctory as a way to alleviate what is essentially a contemplative film. But even as I head deeper in the Western genre, I think I’ve found its epilogue in The Shootist.