I’ve lived through two periods now when the nation all at once decided to into a profound sulk. The Seventies and the late Aughts. Then and now the sulks were responses to serious economic and cultural fractures. Then and now the sulks expressed themselves in a whiny “It’s the end of the world as we know it” despair. The country was doomed, the American Dream had come to an end, there’s nothing to do but enjoy the spectacle of the collapse or join in the fun of pulling it all down.
Things fell apart and they left a big mess.
But in the word is the solution.
Mess.
It’s a mess. We’re in a mess. We made a mess. Let’s clean up this mess!
That’s the thing about messes. They can be cleaned up.
Takes some time. Takes patience. Takes a little willpower.
One of the things that’s making it hard to get to real work cleaning up the mess we’re in now is that a lot of people think that all it took to clean up after the last mess was for Ronald Reagan to stride into Washington, chuckle warmly, cut taxes, and tell the deadbeats and slackers to suck it up and get to work like the rest of us and they expected Barack Obama to fix things with similar ease.
But then Reagan got elected because a lot of people back then thought that all it took to clean up after the mess before that, the Great Depression, was for FDR to roll into the White House, lift his chin, grin, and tell folks that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.
We have a bad habit of remembering Presidents as if they were or ought to have been genies.
We can clean up a mess. But apparently we have to spend a lot of time collectively staring at it for a while and telling ourselves it’s hopeless, there’s no point in trying, might as well get used to living among the ruins, pass the ammo and the remote, please.
I watched two movies recently that expressed that feeling of staring hopelessly at the mess, The Laughing Policeman and The Choirboys.
The Choirboys may be the worst movie I’ve ever seen.
It was bad.
Not bad in the Ed Wood way of a minor talent trying to make the best out of small budget and little creative support. Not in the Plan 9 From Outer Space or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes sense of bad.
Bad in a way that can only happen when actually talented people get together and collectively make the worst possible decisions every single step of the way.
Bad, too, as in deliberately offensive, as if everybody involved hated every minute they were working on it and set out to make the audience suffer as much they were.
If there was a line that could be delivered in just the wrong tone or with an emphasis placed on just the wrong word, if there was a scene that could be paced just a little too fast or a little too slow or could be structured with just enough logic removed so it made no sense, if the camera could be placed at just the wrong angle, too close, too far away, too far off to the side, if a shot could be lit just a tad too harshly or if it could be held just a beat too long or be cut a beat too short, then that’s what was done.
The Choirboys is nasty, loud, ugly, chaotic, and dull.
It’s a movie about cops on the job in which the cops run around a lot but don’t do anything except yell and then laugh like frat boys returning empty-handed from a panty raid but congratulating themselves on making those girls scream and because one of them caught a glimpse of a cheerleader dashing out of the shower in just a towel.
It’s ostensibly a comedy, a dark, satirical look at our rotting society, but there are no real jokes and nothing truly funny happens. Apparently, director Robert Aldrich decided it would be interesting to take a weak dramatic script and see if he could save it by playing it as if it was a farce.
But not all the time.
Several scenes are played with the grittiest of gritty realism in order to let us know that, all kidding aside, this is how life is.
The Choirboys is based on the novel by Joseph Wambaugh
It’s about a few nights in the life of a precinct house in Los Angeles, a precursor to Hill Street Blues, and Charles Haid, who went on to play Hill Street’s irascible beat cop Andy Renko and gives one of the few understated and likeable performances in the film, appears as the sergeant who runs the nightly roll call. But this is a whole squad of burnouts who spend their off-duty hours boozing mightily and popping pills and harassing the women they would like to sleep with. It’s not clear how come they’ve all burned out together and all at once. It’s implied it’s a reaction to the stress from doing their difficult and dangerous jobs but we never see them have to deal with a serious crime until the last act of the movie and then it’s a crime they caused themselves.
When they do have to engage in actual police work they are to a man stunningly incompetent to the point of getting civilians killed.
You would think, then, that we’re meant not to like these guys and that the satire, such as it is, is aimed at them.
But, nope. We’re apparently meant to sympathize with their plight, which is our plight---the our of the us who were around in the Seventies and shaking our heads in dismay over the moral, spiritual, economic, and political collapse of the nation--- the world is going to hell in a hurry and there’s nothing good and decent people can do to stop it so we might as well enjoy the spectacle and even have some fun helping to hurry it along in its downward slide.
These guys don’t give a shit but we’re not supposed to mind that that’s a dangerous attitude for guys with badges and guns to have because there’s nothing worth giving a shit about. The city doesn’t exist in the movie except as a stage for craziness and the civilian population of Los Angeles makes the most of it, since they are all crazy and self-destructive. It’s weird that almost all the civilians are black or Hispanic while all but two of the cops are white, and one of those two is a Japanese-American with a Bela Lugosi fantasy and seems to believe he’s actually Transylvanian, and neither the script nor the directing seems to take any notice of this as being possibly part of the city’s problem.
The cops are treated as a bunch of closet rebels making the best they can of an impossible situation created by the System.
It’s almost as if we’re meant to see them as like the doctors and nurses in M*A*S*H. I guess I can imagine a movie in which cops are in the position of Hawkeye and Trapper of having to contribute their skills to an enterprise that goes against everything they stand for. You’d need cop heroes who truly believe it is their job to serve and protect the people but who’ve realized that what they’ve actually been hired to do is to keep the people in line so they don’t challenge the privileges of the powers that run the city to exploit them. The Choirboys’ cops aren’t those cops. The people of the Los Angeles in the movie wouldn’t be worth those cops’ dedication and sacrifice. And the powers that be that appear in the movie aren’t all that powerful anyway and they don’t serve any Noah Crosses. They mostly just serve their own self-interests as ambitious but bumbling careerists.
The world of The Choirboys is in a hopeless state of collapse so there doesn’t seem to be anything to do but have a good time while enjoying the show. That theme isn’t of itself the reason The Choirboys is such a nasty movie. A year later another movie came with a similarly theme but it was actually very funny. The difference, of course, is that the nihlistic rebel heroes of Animal House were a bunch of college kids who had no power to save the world from the corrupt adults who’d made a mess of things except the power to increase the mess while the cops in The Choirboys have at least some power and quite of bit of responsibility to slow the collapse if not prevent it.
Neither the director nor the screenwriters nor the actors (except for Burt Young) seem to have had a clue about how best to approach the fact that their main characters abused their power and had abdicated their responsibilities, so they tried everything and anything they could think of until they finally just said the hell with it, it’s all a big joke anyway. It being not just the movie but the world into which the movie was going to be released.
The joke, then, is a nasty one at the expense of the audience. We’re getting our noses rubbed into the absurd and ugly mess and then getting laughed at for not being able to clean it up.
The Choirboys is appalling. The Laughing Policeman is a disappointment.
The movie, which stars Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern as the lead detectives on a team trying to solve a mass murder on a city bus, is based on the Swedish detective novel by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
The Laughing Policeman starts of in the same gloomy but matter of fact, almost documentary tones as the novel, with San Francisco in the spring time looking as grim and colorless and dull as Stockholm in November. But there’s a small change in the relationships among the detectives that leads to the bigger change in the plot and the tone.
In the novel and the movie, one of the victims is a young detective and a necessary step in solving the murders is solving the apparently minor mystery of what the detective was doing on that bus. In the novel, setting out to solve that mystery reveals another one, the mystery of just who the young detective really was.
The detectives working the case, particularly the main character, Martin Beck, come to realize that they didn’t actually know their junior colleague at all. They’d tended to dismiss him or take his presence for granted because he wasn’t experienced or street smart enough to be of help to them except as a sort of glorified gopher. It turns out, ironically, that the reason he was on the bus was to prove to Beck and the others that he was worth their attention. He got it all right.
But in the movie, the young detective was Walter Matthau’s partner. Matthau’s character, Jake Martin, not only knew the kid well, he loved him as a son. Which makes this personal.
It takes a while but The Laughing Policeman eventually turns into a typical revenge fantasy, with Jake growing more and more reckless in his determination to get his partner’s killer.
In the novel, the murderer gets caught because the detectives---all of them, including Martin Beck---spend a lot of time going over the records and re-interviewing witnesses from a long unsolved murder that the young detective had decided on his own to solve at last. Justice is served through lots of old-fashioned and dull but necessary police work.
In the movie the crime is solved because Jake identifies a suspect, decides he’s guilty, and then harasses the guy in the hope of spooking him into making a fatal mistake.
Emphasis on fatal.
The novel ends with an arrest. The movie ends with a shootout. Which is disappointing if you liked the book, which I did, but even more disappointing if you’ve seen another Seventies crime thriller starring Walter Matthau recently, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a movie that ends with a sneeze.
What makes the movie The Laughing Policeman different from a typical revenge fantasy in which a good cop goes rogue to revenge One Of Our Own, besides the intelligence and dryness provided by its otherwise faithfulness to the novel, is that like The Choirboys it also has as its theme the world’s going to hell and there’s nothing we can do about except watch the spectacle or join in the destruction.
Jake Martin, and through him the movie, is watching the spectacle. But he’s not enjoying it.
In the novel, Martin Beck is sort of vaguely unhappy and disappointed with life. He finds it hard to pay attention or even care about anything outside work and that includes his family. He’s become a withdrawn and irritable observer of life inside his own home. There’s no specific cause for his malaise, unless it’s just that he’s Swedish.
Jake Martin is unhappy and disappointed too, but it’s apparently with life in general. The world is falling apart and the resulting mess is reaching into his own home and this makes him mad. Jake’s teenage son is drinking, smoking pot, and going to strip joints, and Jake can’t bring himself to confront the kid over it. He might be a bit of a moral coward, but it’s more the case that he can’t see what good it would do. He’s already lost. Besides, it’s not the kid himself, it’s the world.
The Stockholm of the novel is a gloomy, dull, dispiriting but essentially orderly place to live. There are signs of approaching disorder in the approaching cultural and political upheavals of the Sixties, but Martin Beck and his colleagues can still do their jobs and expect that in doing them they’ve done some good.
The Sixties have come and gone in the movie and left behind a great big mess. Martin Beck stoically goes about his job in the cold and the rain. Jake Martin slouches grumpily through a shit storm of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Unlike The Choirboys, The Laughing Policeman knows who to blame for the general collapse and shows us.
The gays, the dopers, the blacks, the sex peddlers, and the hippies.
There’s a horrifically ugly scene in which Jake slaps the girlfriend of his murdered partner because she’d posed for nude snapshots took of her and it’s clear that if the partner was still alive Jake would have given him worse. What’s not at all clear is that we’re supposed to think the worse of Jake for this.
His rage is given a fatherly righteousness.
When I first began to notice this I thought the filmmakers must want us to see this as Jake Martin projecting. No movie that reactionary could have been made in the Seventies, I told myself, forgetting for the moment that this was the era of the first Dirty Harry movies and Death Wish.
Jake goes too far in hitting the girl. His own marriage is both joyless and sexless. He’s probably eaten up with jealousy at the happiness his partner and his beautiful girlfriend shared. He’s also taking out on her the anger he wants to take out on his son.
But there isn’t any follow up to this possibility. What there is is more confirmation that Jake’s view of the world as a corrupt, degraded, and degrading dystopia is the view we’re supposed to take.
That confirmation is provided through the point of view of Jake’s new partner, Leo Larsen, who is played by Bruce Dern, as a loutish but basically good-natured cynic who sees the world for it is but manages enough of a sense of humor and detachment not to let it get to him. Larsen knows the world is falling apart, and he knows who to blame, but he’s decided to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.
Part of the enjoying, though, is taking satisfaction in doing your job in spite of the absurdity of trying to protect and to serve a civilian population that doesn’t deserve the time or the sacrifice. His guiding philosophy, lazily and haphazardly applied---Dern’s cheeky contribution to the character, I suspect. A more conventional young leading man type might have worked in the role but his Larsen wouldn’t have seemed simultaneously sleazy and noble---is that if you can’t solve the problem, at least you can avoid being one of its causes or one of its casualties.
This is Larsen’s main contribution to the partnership. He’s there to save Jake from becoming a casualty.
One of the very best things about The Laughing Policeman is the interplay between Matthau and Dern. Larsen enters the story in the worst possible position, as the unwanted replacement for Jake’s murdered partner. Movie logic dictates that after first rubbing each other the wrong way, the two cops will learn to work together and come to admire and respect each other if not become best friends. But Matthau and Dern never let their characters stop rubbing each other the wrong way. Larsen never goes soft on Jake and learns to sympathize with the man’s grief. Jake is unfairly treating him as a nuisance and not as a fellow cop with a job to do and Larsen doesn’t ever back down from letting Jake know it. And Jake never changes his opinion that Larsen is obnoxious and his jokes are crude and his manner and habits are unbecoming of a good policeman.
What changes between them isn’t the degree of affection but the amount they know about each other’s abilities. Dern and Matthau don’t show their characters getting all soppy about each other. Leo is not about to become another second son to Jake, Jake is not somebody Leo wants or needs as a father figure. What changes is that they learn that they can work together, despite irritating the hell out of each other, and they like the results.
The Martin Beck books are at the top of my detective series list-- they are all terrific, although I'm told that the English translations are not particularly faithful.
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 09:01 AM
Bill, do you mean the translations veer from the original plots? I'm working my way through the series, about to finish The Man on the Balcony and jump over The Laughing Policeman, which was the first one I read, to The Fire Engine That Disappeared, and each of them so far has had a different translator. Five books, five different translators, but what they have in common is a matter of fact, almost official report style prose, functional but clunky. Maybe the Swedish originals are much better written?
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 09:52 AM
Since you used a phrase I haven't heard in nearly two decades, just how was a "panty raid" supposed to work? What, exactly, were the raiders supposed to do and what were they supposed to get out of it?
Posted by: CJColucci | Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 12:37 PM
The originals are darker. The plots are the same, and most of the details, but it is made more clear that Beck is miserable in his marriage, and has been for a long time. Or so I'm informed. I have always found them plenty dark.
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 03:14 PM
I'll have to see Laughing Policeman again. My only memory is the relationship between Matthau and Dern and thinking they should do that in another movie.
Have you seen Man On The Roof?
Posted by: Tom Mason | Friday, September 17, 2010 at 02:40 AM
I don't know if you've read Wambaugh's book, but I don't think he should be let off the hook for the movie version's awfulness just because he didn't like it. The novel is largely black comedy, an attempt at a sort of urban warrior's "Catch-22", and though the cops behave stupidly and swinishly, the reader is supposed to understand that their environment has gotten so bad that, like the surgeons in "MASH", they have to behave like lunatics to keep from really going insane. Overall, it isn't as repulsive as Aldrich's movie, but it has a fake tragic ending, asking us to weep for these good men who abuse their badges and act like pigs, after somebody gets killed and the mean old bosses are so unfair as to hold some of them accountable. I suspect that Wambaugh was enraged that the movie substituted a happy ending that was less sentimental than his own, but the worst thing Aldrich did to him was capture the core of the material faithfully enough to expose the self-pity and ugliness that was already ingrained in the book.
I remember that when Wambaugh first appeared on the scene in the '70s, he was a pop culture hero for awhile, first because of his cop-turned-writer's sympathetic depiction of police officers and then for his daring to complain about how his books were filmed. But "The Choirboys" is tainted by something that was always present in his work and that he subsequently let all hang out: the kind of cop's mentality that applies a forgiving, boys-will-be-boys attitude towards anything cops do, while looking on anyone out of uniform as a potential arrest. It ultimately led him to the mess of the case he wrote about in the book and TV miniseries "Echoes in the Darkness", where he went to town painting a high school principal who'd been convicted of murder as a true son of Satan, only to have the man's conviction overturned for prosecutorial misconduct, including the news that Wambaugh had paid one of the cops $50,000 on condition that the guy he liked best for the villain of the piece be arrested.
Posted by: Phil Nugent | Monday, September 20, 2010 at 02:51 PM
Phil, I haven't read Choirboys. I think the only books by Wambaugh I've read are The Onion Field and Echoes in the Darkness and The New Centurions (back when I was a kid and thought I was being grown up by reading it). I put Choirboys on reserve at the library and it just came in. But you think I shouldn't bother?
Didn't know that about Echoes in the Darkness. That school is near where my wife grew up and the story was big news around there, of course. The principal was widely despised before it came out. Wambaugh wasn't the only one who wanted him for the murderer.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 08:50 PM