Coogan's Bluff | 1968

With hindsight, it feels like Don Siegel was working his way up to the classic Dirty Harry with a couple of more tentative films, first Madigan with Richard Widmark, then Coogan's Bluff – which added Clint Eastwood.

Where possible, Siegel liked to avoid studios and film on location. The opening scene, set in 'Arizona', with Western Deputy Sheriff Walt Coogan (Eastwood) bringing in a suspect was shot in the more convenient Mojave Desert, near Mojave itself, Southern California.

Having pissed off his superiors with his unorthodox methods, Coogan is assigned the task of bringing back a fugitive called Ringerman (Don Stroud) currently under arrest in New York City. It's time for the rogue cop operating by his own rules to adapt to the Big Apple.

Coogan arrives (and departs at the end of the movie) by helicopter at the old helipad atop what used to be the PanAm Building, now the MetLife Building towering over Grand Central Station at 200 Park Avenue.

You won't be able to make a similar entrance, though. The noisy, and largely unpopular, pad was closed down in 1977 after a fatal accident (in which, incidentally, Michael Findlay, the director of the notorious movie Snuff, was apparently decapitated).

Although there's an ambiguous attitude to Coogan whose undoubted talents turn out to be inappropriate in the big city, we're never in any doubt about the outcome.

He takes a cab to "177 East 104th Street", and that is exactly where he's taken.

177 East 104th Street, at 3rd Avenue up toward East Harlem, used to be the 28th Street Precinct Station but here – just as it was in the director's previous film Madigan, it becomes the '23rd Street Precinct'. The building is still recognisable though it's now Hope Community Hall.

Here Coogan is constantly thwarted by by unimpressed and uncooperative NYPD Detective McElroy (Lee J Cobb), meaning he needs to stay in the city longer than planned.

Never mind, he's soon flirting with, and ultimately exploits, probation officer Julie (Susan Clark), going for lunch with her at the Tavern on the Green, Central Park West at 67th Street, a much used location most famous from Ghostbusters (being pretty much across from the possessed apartment block).

For no obvious reason, they're suddenly opening up to each other as they stroll in Fort Tryon Park, north of Washington Heights overlooking the Hudson River, where Julie helpfully points out The Cloisters, foreshadowing the end of the film.

They're on the Park's Northeast Terrace and that oddly fascist looking monument with its bronze eagles is nothing more sinister than the base of Fort Tryon Flagstaff. The monument was blown down by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and a replica now stands on the spot.

BTW, although the plot centres on a bluff by Coogan, Coogan's Bluff is actually the name of a promontory near the western shore of the Harlem River in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Upper Manhattan.

Coogan's investigations take him to a crazy Manhattan disco where his suit and stetson stand out against the (rather embarrassing) hippie debauchery.

Siegel wanted a vast, cavernous space so the "Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel Disco" scene was filmed on the huge opera house set built at Universal Studios in Los Angeles for the 1923 silent Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera. In fact, a couple of the 'New York' street scenes were filmed on the Universal backlot.

At the disco, Coogan finds Ringerman's girlfriend Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling) who gives him a tipoff. For the next scene, where Coogan discovers he's been set-up at the billiard hall, the authentic Manhattan streets are for a while replaced – fairly obviously –by the Universal backlot.

The furious Coogan doesn't hold back in "persuading" Linny to give up Ringerman's actual whereabouts. He's hiding out in The Met Cloisters, which we were introduced to earlier in the film.

The Met Cloisters is a collection of architectural bits and pieces from various monasteries in Southern France and Spain, assembled at the north of Fort Tryon Park, West 193rd Street at Fort Washington Avenue, towards Inwood. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the complex houses a collection of medieval artworks in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont, and Trie-sur-Baïse—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard before 1913 and moved to New York.

The Cloisters became a convent school in William Dieterle's 1948 Portrait of Jennie, with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, and is seen again in Steven Spielberg's 2021 version of West Side Story.

When Ringerman takes off on his motorbike, Coogan quickly commandeers another bike and the film climaxes with the famous chase through the surrounding roads of the park.

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