Title Origin
The film's title refers to the eponymous Eddie Rabbitt song from the soundtrack, in which the singer complains that his girlfriend turns him "every which way but loose", i.e. he cannot bring himself to leave her although he is more of a freewheeling character. The film title is also out of the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston where the main character Janie's husband Tea Cake tells her about a fight he had with a man who had a knife, where in the fight Tea Cake "turned him every way but loose", i.e. fought him but did not let the man stab him.
Read more about this topic: Every Which Way But Loose (film)
Famous quotes containing the words title and/or origin:
“A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)