What bluff?
I don't get the title? There's no bluff in the movie.
shareI was searching for an explanation as well because I think the character Coogan doesn't play any bluff at all.
I think the reason for this title is something else. "Coogan's Bluff" is a landmark in New York, it's the name of a cliff or its surrounding (you can find something in Google Maps about it, and there also is a Wikipedia lemma for it).
So this is kind of a pun. New Yorkers might recognize the title as something they know in their surrounding, anybody else might expect to see a movie about a guy bluffing someone.
I'm not aware if any scenes of the film were shot on this special place (maybe the garden scenes?), but that would add some spice to this explanation.
Thanks, you seem to be right on the money with that theory. Wikipedia entry on the movie has this small section about the deleted scenes from the DVD release of the movie:
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Home media releases
The DVD version of Coogan's Bluff is edited by approximately three minutes in all regions for unknown reasons. The missing scenes include Coogan receiving his assignment to return Ringerman from New York, a short scene in a hospital, and a scene in which Julie talks about Coogan's Bluff, a lookout point over the ocean near New York (the real Coogan's Bluff is a site on Manhattan Island between Washington Heights and Harlem), tying the location into the film's title. The earlier video release did not have these edits, and was released uncut.
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Of course, this is the version that I saw and I had no idea that there were scenes cut from it, especially scenes that explain the ambiguous title. They literally cut out the scene that explains the title from the one version of the movie that the most people will be familiar with. No wonder we got confused then.
The Germany title for the movie is "Coogans großer Bluff" ("Coogan's Great Bluff") which makes finding out the original meaning even harder. I guess the Germany translators had no idea what they were doing (which is not uncommon by the way).
shareI'd say so but I can't really blame them. Even if you're an American, unless you actually know the city pretty well, there's no way you'd know that there's actually a place called Coogan's Bluff somewhere. And in 1968 there were no Internet and Google Maps to tell you that. In fact, you wouldn't even have any reason to question the title at all unless you've seen the whole movie and paid attention. Maybe the producers thought that the movie will probably financially do best locally where the film was set so they came up with such a bizarrely specific local name in order to try to attract the locals but also sell it under that catchy title to everyone else as well, anyway. Who knows.
Anyway, here's a thread about the missing scenes from the DVD that explain the title.
Coogan's Bluff (1968) : Scenes missing in DVD
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062824/board/nest/134966556
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