Clint Eastwood by critics. Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" wrote that film was "...the best and funniest Clint Eastwood movie in quite a while", and praised Eastwood's directing, intricately juxtaposing the old West and the new West. Later that year, Eastwood starred in "Any Which Way You Can", the sequel to "Every Which Way But Loose". The film received a number of bad reviews from critics, although Maslin described it as "funnier and even better than its predecessor". Released over the Christmas season of 1980, "Any Which Way You Can" was a major box office success and ranked among the
Clint Eastwood in the 1960s seven drafts, preferring Herman Miller's original concept. This experience would also shape Eastwood's distaste for redrafting scripts in his later career. Eastwood and Siegel decided to hire a new writer, Dean Riesner, who had written for Siegel in the Henry Fonda TV film "Stranger on the Run" some years previously. As Riesner drew up a new script, Eastwood was unwilling to communicate with the screenwriter, until one day, Riesner criticized one of the scenes which Eastwood had liked, which involved Coogan having sex with a girl called Linny Raven, in the hope that she would take him to her boyfriend.