Clint Eastwood And Don Siegel's Legendary Partnership Started With A Heated Argument
by Joe Roberts · /FilmWe may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
Before "Dirty" Harry Callahan made his debut in 1971 one underrated Western merged Clint Eastwood's two most famous characters. "Coogan's Bluff" was not only noteworthy for being one of Eastwood's earliest American films as a leading man following his "Spaghetti Western" trilogy, it marked the first time he collaborated with Don Siegel. The director would become one of his most trusted collaborators but you wouldn't have known it if you'd been in an early development meeting for "Coogan's Bluff." It seems after Siegel wrote a version of the script, he was met with disapproval from Eastwood, leading to a full-on argument that required a producer to step in.
One of the things that separated Eastwood and John Wayne was that the former broke away from powerhouse directors to chart his own course. Eastwood made the transition to directing early on in his career, and even earned a reputation for "riding herd" (as he put it) on directors whose films he was only supposed to be fronting. But Siegel was one of the few filmmakers for whom he seemed to maintain a certain respect throughout his career.
It's a good thing, too, otherwise we might have been robbed of "Dirty Harry" and "Escape from Alcatraz" — two of Eastwood's best films. Next to Sergio Leone, then, Siegel remains Eastwood's most important directing partner. When they were paired for "Coogan's Bluff," however, Eastwood didn't like Siegel's script one bit and let him know as much, leading to a quarrel between the two in which the director yelled at his defiant star, "Screw you!"
Clint Eastwood didn't like Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff script
In 1968, Clint Eastwood was not the icon he would become. He was known for starring in CBS's "Rawhide" and his "Dollars" trilogy was starting to get some traction Stateside. But otherwise he needed to establish himself as a reliably popular movie star in the United States. In '68 he starred in a Western that also featured "Gilligan's Island" actor Alan Hale Jr.. That went some way to proving he could carry a Hollywood production but he needed to maintain the momentum. He did so with "Coogan's Bluff." The crime thriller saw Eastwood play an Arizona deputy sheriff who's sent to New York to extradite a killer. This was the first time Eastwood returned to Universal Pictures after having been fired the decade prior for a very weird reason. It was also his first time meeting Don Siegel.
In "Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979-1983", Eastwood recalls how the film came together. "Universal had three or four scripts on it," he said. "So I read all the scripts on it and I liked the original one, or at least the one written by Roland Kibbee." But Siegel was soon brought in to provide his take on the story, and when he delivered it Eastwood was ready to tear it down. "[Siegel] went back [to New York] and he wrote a story," remembered the actor. "And I didn't care for the story too much. We got in an argument in [producer] Jennings Lang's office. I said, 'I don't like the story,' and he said, 'Well, screw you. If you don't like it, too bad.'"
A producer helped Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel make up
It seems likely that the seeds of Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel's initial falling out had been cast before the director flew to New York to pen his "Coogan's Bluff" script. As Eastwood told Paul Nelson, "Don likes to write on the exact location; he feels it helps him. I feel that if the story's there, it can be written here and placed in India — and it can be written in India, placed here. If the story's there, it's there." Even prior to their clash, then, Eastwood was likely dismissive of Siegel's writing method because it went against his own perception of how films should be made. This would be a fatal mistake for any filmmaker hoping to collaborate with the actor, as evidenced by the time Eastwood fired the director of his classic Western "The Outlaw Josey Wales" in the middle of shooting.
It seems we have producer Jennings Lang to thank for ensuring the great Eastwood/Siegel collaborations of years later actually came to fruition. As the actor explained, "To Lang's credit, he said, 'Why don't you guys just sit down and work it out together?' So instead of going to New York to write, we sat down and worked it out." After that, Eastwood and Siegel went through every "Coogan's Bluff" script they had and "took the best things that we liked out of all of them." It proved to be the right approach after their version of the film became a box office success and debuted to mostly positive reviews. But it was more important than that. It cemented a creative partnership that ultimately yielded "Two Mules for Sister Sara" (1970), "The Beguiled," (1971) "Dirty Harry" (1971), and "Escape from Alcatraz" (1979).