Every Which Way but Loose (1978) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: James Fargo
STARRING: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis
RATED: PG/REGION A/1:78/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1
AVAILABLE FROM Warner Brothers
The Only Film Where Clint Eastwood Loses a Fight to an Orangutan and Somehow Still Looks Cool.
Let’s get one thing straight: Every Which Way But Loose is not a good movie by any traditional definition. The plot is thinner than a gas station coffee filter, the tone is so wildly inconsistent it feels like it was edited by a drunk rodeo clown, and Clint Eastwood spends most of the film punching people while wearing a tank top that wouldn’t pass a high school dress code.
And yet… somehow… it rules.
Clint Eastwood plays Philo Beddoe, a bare-knuckle trucker/street fighter with a heart of gold, fists of fury, and an orangutan named Clyde who may or may not be the film’s actual protagonist. Together with his brother Orville (played by Geoffrey Lewis, looking like a man whose day has never gone well) and the aforementioned ape, Philo drifts around the American West punching strangers for cash and chasing after a country singer named Lynn Halsey-Taylor, played by Sondra Locke — who seems to be running from something, possibly this script.
Somehow, that’s the entire plot. There are fights. There are trucks. There are long, inexplicable musical montages. There’s an angry biker gang called the Black Widows who ride tiny motorcycles and have the combat proficiency of an undercooked meatloaf.
And, of course, there’s Clyde the orangutan, whose performance is so good that you almost forget he steals every single scene just by showing up and scratching himself.
You might think this film was created in a fever dream, but no — someone wrote this. The script is like someone dared to mix Rocky, Smokey and the Bandit, and Lassie, then threw in a primate and said, “Let’s see what happens.”
It turns out what happens is box office gold — the film was a massive commercial hit. Why? Who knows. Maybe people in 1978 really needed to see Clint Eastwood eat a sandwich next to an orangutan. Maybe it was the outlaw-country soundtrack, which slaps harder than Clyde slaps bikers.
All I know is, if you’ve ever wanted to watch a movie where a fistfight breaks out at a hoedown and ends with a man hugging an orangutan in a truck cab, then congratulations: this is your Citizen Kane.
If Shakespeare had written a film about a trucker, his brother, and a beer-loving orangutan taking on a biker gang in the dusty backroads of 1970s America… he would have written Every Which Way But Loose.
But he didn’t.
Because he was a coward.
