Eastwood plays Philo Beddoe, a trucker and bare-knuckle brawler roaming the American West in search of a lost love while accompanied by his brother/manager Orville and his pet orangutan Clyde.
Philo encounters a wide assortment of characters, including a pair of police officers and a motorcycle gang who pursue him for revenge.
One night Philo becomes smitten with Lynn Halsey-Taylor, an aspiring country music singer he meets at the Palomino Club, a local honky-tonk.
Philo chases them down and takes their bikes (which he repaints, repairs, and resells), and every attempt they make to get even results in disaster.
However, Eastwood saw the project as a means of broadening his appeal to the public,[4] although most of his production team and his agents reportedly thought it was ill-advised.
Location filming took place in the California communities of Bakersfield, North Hollywood, San Fernando, Sun Valley, Ukiah, and Van Nuys.
The film's title refers to the Eddie Rabbitt song of the same name from the soundtrack, but the phrase had also appeared in the previous year's Smokey and the Bandit.
[9] Critical reviews were uniformly negative: Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "the slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood's recent movies.
It's overlong and virtually uneventful, even though there are half a dozen cute characters and woolly subplots competing for the viewer's attentions.
"[9] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded 2.5 stars out of 4 and wrote that the comedy "breaks new ground" for Eastwood, but the film "has been sloppily made.
"[11] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "a slapdash, slapstick comedy" that "pushes all the right buttons" for audiences but "lacks both the urgency and the emotional satisfactions of Eastwood's angrier films.
"[12] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Eastwood must have thought of his blundering new vehicle, 'Every Which Way but Loose,' as a change of pace, designed to align his career in a direction similar to that of Burt Reynolds.
Casual, knockabout farce seems to be the general idea, but perhaps Eastwood should have borrowed the director and writers who helped shape 'Smokey and the Bandit' and 'Hooper' for Reynolds.
That a star with his power in Hollywood would choose to litter the screen with this plotless junk heap of moronic gags, sour romance and fatuous fisticuffs can be taken either as an expression of contempt for his huge audience or as an act of masochism.
The website's critical consensus reads, "The inexplicable pairing of Clint Eastwood with an orangutan is the least of Every Which Way But Loose's problems—a slack action-comedy with a haphazardly assembled story.
1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in 1979: the title track "Every Which Way but Loose" by Eddie Rabbitt and "Coca-Cola Cowboy" by Mel Tillis; also included was "Behind Closed Doors" by Charlie Rich, which had reached the No.