Runtime: 121 minutes
Directed by: Daniel Petrie
Starring: Paul Newman, Ken Wahl, Edward Asner (RIP), Rachel Ticotin, Danny Aiello
From: 20th Century Fox
RIP Ed Asner
As I had planned on seeing two movies today anyhow, it afforded me the opportunity to watch something then review it the same day news came out that a famous actor had passed away. In this case, I of course saw Asner in various films and TV appearances but the one I picked for the day was one that sounded appealing to me... a gritty police drama (which apparently inspired the popular 80's police procedural TV show Hill Street Blues) set in the Crappy New York City of Old.
Yeah, there's the elephant in the room that various people now don't like law enforcement-at least in the United States-for various reasons. Well, that topic was addressed here and it shows that little has changed. It's a police precinct in The Bronx where the area around it is a safe haven for everyone as if it's a Wild West military fort... it's a last chance dead-end sort of job where hardly anyone speaks Spanish despite the fact that while it's a melting pot of different peoples, many of them are Hispanic. Two cops are murdered, Asner comes in as the new head honcho who wants more results & the killer(s) caught, the crackdown causes the melting pot to simmer then boil over, there are riots, that's handled poorly... yeah, sometimes little has changed in the past 40 years. Plus, some of the cops here ARE bastards...
Hard-drinking cop Paul Newman isn't one of those bastards, nor is his nattily-dressed partner Ken Wahl. Their personal lives are also shown among the chaos. There are conflicts among the two when it comes to their new boss... among other things--Paul doesn't like all of the tactics Asner is using. This is a character piece where there are long conversations between two characters and it was always interesting to me. At the time, some thought that this was prejudiced against minorities (which is why there's actually a disclaimer at the beginning proclaiming that this doesn't represent everyone in The Bronx); I didn't exactly think that. The leading pair are shown doing a variety of tasks on the job... from delivering a baby and stopping a pimp slapping one of his “employees” to drug busts and a hostage situation.
As it feels like a holdover from the 70's, it is not always a happy movie, yet I was always enthralled. A score that often evokes the Latin feel of the area definitely helped, but so did a cast that included Newman, Wahl, Asner, Rachel Ticotin, Pam Grier in an non-glamorous role to Danny Aiello playing a prejudiced person in the middle of a NYC riot-why does that sound familiar? There were nice performances (not just from Old Ed) and it was a good last minute decision to “track this down.”
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