Fairy tales in New York: Badge 373 / Coogan’s Bluff Double-Bill
Here’s an incredibly rare UK 60” x 40” poster teaming up Badge 373 (1973) with Coogan’s Bluff (1968). It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what year this double-bill was shown, although it was probably around 1974. Badge 373 was not a success, either at the box office or with the critics. The New York neo noir crime thriller film inspired, as was The French Connection, by the life and career of Eddie Egan, here called "Eddie Ryan". Ryan (Robert Duvall), a tough, no-nonsense, abrasive and racist Irish NYPD cop, has to turn in his badge after scuffling with a Puerto Rican suspect who then falls to his death from a rooftop, but that doesn't stop him from heading out on a one-man crusade to find out who killed his partner. Like The French Connection, the film again starred the real-life Eddie Egan, this time as Lt. Scanlon.
Badge 373 was a Paramount picture, so fell under the European CIC banner (Cinema International Corporation) which distributed both Paramount and Universal pictures. So, it probably made sense to team the film up with an Eastwood movie, if only to try and pull back some of it’s fairly poor box-office. As Coogan’s Bluff was set in New York and a crime thriller (and a Universal film) – it seemed like a perfectly logical pairing.
In fact, this was not the only time that Badge 373 was teamed up with an Eastwood movie and perhaps reflected Paramount desperation to try and retrieve some sort of revenue on their film. It was probably around the same time that it was also doubled up with Play Misty for Me (1971) also a Universal Picture.
I’m not sure if either of these double-bill pairings ever materialised outside of the UK, but their limited showings here certainly resulted in a couple of seriously rare posters.
My thanks to Davy Triumph.
No comments:
Post a Comment