Film
Maim!
Lucy’s lame Mame and other copamamie movies. Only The Conversation tells it like it is.
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The Conversation is a true horror film; all the more so because Coppola doesn’t resort to the supernatural to create his effect. Reality is more than ample material here: the sinister power of even legitimate microphones, the impossibility of safety in privacy, the paranoia of total awareness. Harry finally has to confront the atrocity he is responsible for, like The Picture of Dorian Gray. He can no longer cringe under the bedcovers like a child or drown out the reality with a blaring television cartoon show. And when the final shocking epiphany scene floods the screen, it floods our psyches as well; it’s a scene I’ll remember as long as I see films.
The only emotion a cop movie can wring out of me anymore is a sinking sense of deja phooey. No amount of spurting blood, screeching chase scenes, or either-sided brutality can shock or amaze me. During screenings of the three cop films reviewed here, I found myself jotting down notes with all the jaded disinterest of a police reporter covering his umpteenth Saturday night stabbing. And when going to the movies gets to be like pounding a beat, the time has come to ignore this strip-mined genre until it erodes itself away.
Busting
Busting is what Keneely (Elliott Gould) and his partner Farell (Robert Blake) like to do best. In fact, it’s all they like to do. Peter Hyams, the director and scenarist of this mildly ambitious tale of two vice-squad detectives, deserves credit for offering us the most multi-sided version of cops and robbers yet to come out of this motion picture crime wave.
You don’t know which side to be on. And if Hyams knows, he isn’t saying. My personal favorite is the villain, Rizzo, because he best exemplifies the hard-headed pragmatism that makes America grate; he considers his mobster tactics free enterprise with a flair. He manages enough strippers, whores, and dope runners to start his own Las Vegas, but he also gives to United Fund and takes his family to church every Sunday.
Rizzo gloats about the miserable life-styles of the cops compared to his and he’s right. Keneely has only a hide-a-bed to call his own. His only joy in life is entrapping whores, busting fags, and cracking down on porno stores. Though these crimes are largely victimless, the innocent bystanders who get killed during two public shoot-outs might consider themselves victims, and the cops the criminals. Keneely doesn’t seem to get quite that far in his thinking. But he does begin to wonder about his one-time rookie enthusiasm for being the best lock-checker and museum-guarder in the department.
These novel viewpoints give Busting a certain freshness. But there are many cop movie leftovers too. The action itself is Dick-and-Jane predictable; even someone who never figures out whodunit will have no trouble predicting the final flimsy twist. We serve the usual compulsory time up and down back stairways, in dark bars, and in and out of alleys, and what humor there is seems pasted on. In one particularly gratuitous scene, two fags arraigned by a judge, who look like Flip Wilson’s Geraldine and Tiny Tim, are represented by a lawyer who lisps like Capote. This is the kind of laugh-getter you expect to find in a second-rate nightclub somewhere in Sticksville.
The heroes give second-rate performances. Blake plays Farell much as he played Perry in In Cold Blood. His dangling cigarette and Vitalis hairdo are more likely on a hood than a police detective. Gould is even less ambitious. Freshly transplanted to Busting from Robert Altman’s fine film, The Long Goodbye, he seems aware that he’s just gone from potting soil to bare rock. So he simply rehashes his dopey, disheveled Philip Marlowe routine, shuffling along fighting the good fight with a scratch of the head and a shrug of the shoulder. The partners’ light-hearted cop-and-robber glee is occasionally contagious, but when they pull stunts like burning Rizzo’s car in front of him, verisimilitude takes a nosedive. Any decent mobster would gun them down for that.
Hyams’ dialogue and his fleshing out of previously stereotyped characters deserve some recognition. But he sticks too close to the old money-making formula to earn a gold badge.
The Super Cops
The Super Cops is based on yet another factual story about two of New York’s finest. Nicknamed Batman and Robin by the grateful, honest folk in Bedford-Stuyvesant, they spend every waking moment scouring the slums for illegal weapons to confiscate and evil pushers to bust. They don’t lose any sleep over due process—something disturbingly common to the cop film genre —or over any stupid girls either. Even the sexy black hooker who teaches Batman the ropes and becomes a part-time informant doesn’t have to worry about Batman trying any funny business. I hope the story selectively edited a few things out of their lives; if not, Batman and Robin are no more real than their comic book namesakes.
Directed by Gordon Parks (Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score), Super Cops has plenty of POW! SHAZAM! action in it, and a welcome dose of humor: some of it from the script, and the rest from Ron Leibman (Batman), the comic actor who played George Segal’s brother in Where’s Poppa? David Selby, his partner, usually just stands around looking stoned.
But mostly it’s just more of the same: seamy-side violence disguised as justice being served so we won’t feel bad about liking it. Or, in my case, not liking it.
Man On A Swing
The fastest-moving movie gimmick these days, outside of lunatic law enforcement, is any form of supernaturabilia. So director Frank Perry, always one to capitalize on a current trend while pretending to buck it, pits cop against clarivoyant in his newest Sominex of a film, Man on a Swing.
Cliff Robertson is a police chief who investigates the mysterious strangling death of a young girl. He goes about it with all of Paul Drake’s precision and none of his style. I never have understood what Robertson has that makes him star material. The only expressions I’ve ever seen cross his highly cosmeticized face have a local little theater self-consciousness that I find distracting. Perhaps agreeing with me, Perry adds song and dance man Joel Grey for pizzazz.
He’s the man from ESP who offers to help find the killer. Grey’s performance is flashy and flawless, but it’s still a little much to believe that every time a mystic gets a message from beyond he either hits the floor like an air raid target, works his jaw like a man about to hang, or leaps cat-like onto furniture.
The story Perry offers is supposedly based on fact. And it certainly has a bland, subplotless step-by-step realism to it. But Perry doesn’t have the imagination even to establish audience empathy for the girl by having her say a few words on screen before she gets murdered. This somewhat dulls our lust for revenge. As for the suspects, they are all either too obvious or too inconspicuous to be taken seriously.
There are a few good moments of suspense, but the questions that pop up never die down. I felt especially cheated after suffering through several minutes of anonymous knockings at the Chief’s door one rainy night, never to know for sure who was out there. My guess is The Monkey’s Paw. The real-life case this is based on must be filed under Baffling. Maybe Perry thinks that to be inscrutable is to be profound. Whatever his motives, Man on a Swing leaves everything up in the air, at the risk of leaving its audience up in arms.
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