Post by Eddie Love on Apr 5, 2011 19:47:48 GMT -5
The landmark Oscar-winning classic THE FRENCH CONNECTION told, in an near documentary style, the story of “Popeye” Doyle the Brooklyn cop who brought down an international dope-peddling syndicate. Doyle was based on real-life cop Eddie Eagan, and Eagan himself appeared in the film as one of “Popeye’s” superiors. Although Gene Hackman was to reprieve his Oscar-winning turn in a sequel some years later, in the first film’s more immediate aftermath was a curious, now forgotten little policier that explicitly chronicled the exploits of Eddie Eagan himself. No longer sporting a nom-de-cop, BADGE 373 recounts the adventures of the actual cop Eddie Eagan, here played by Robert Duvall. The film has none of CONNECTION’s artful, audacious touches. It’s a blunt thriller more in the style of a TV pilot than a first-rate feature.
The picture begins with Eagan busting a crowd of crooks as part of a large sting operation. When a Hispanic collar slips free and takes a powder, Eagan has a scuffle with him on a rooftop, which ends with the perp nose-diving into the street below. The guy was Hispanic and, along with Jews, they’re a group who’ve earned Eagan’s enmity. (“They all look alike.”) Drummed off the force and working as a bartender (where he’s tapping the stacked hat-check girl), Eddie gets word his ex-partner’s been killed. With no badge, Eddie takes to the streets to track the killer himself and tangles with dope pushers and some gunrunning Puerto Rican nationalists.
The movie fails to achieve the naturalism of the Freidkin’s classic; indeed, it doesn’t even seem to emulate it at all. Instead, this feels more like a dodgy Mike Hammer adaptation, and if you pretend that’s what it is, the movie can work on a certain level. Duvall is a bantamweight, but he has the appropriate Spillane-ian intensity, he would have been a good Hammer. But the filmmaking here is so tinny, that Duvall doesn’t get much of a purchase on the material. He sounds like he’s always yelling to simply be heard on the soundtrack, which was hard to even make out at times.
The real star of this picture, for me, is the 70s New York location shooting; there are lots of great scenes in that respect. Otherwise it’s uninvolving and a little absurd. For instance, the Hispanic gang members ambush Eagan at one point and, while evading them, he commandeers a city bus that he then takes careening out-of-control through the streets at night. When eventually the gang catches up with Eagan, after repeatedly taking shots at him, they…beat him up? Why the Hell they don’t simply kill him is unclear. This sequence is followed by a long, boring section where Duvall recuperates at a cabin in the mountains with his girlfriend with whom he bickers constantly.
The picture was (over) written by Pete Hamil and he shows up in one scene possibly playing himself. Also in the cast is the real Eddie Eagan as the film Eagan’s former superior on the force, and his performance here is much better than his short, stilted turn in FRENCH CONNECTION was. The main villain of the piece, when he finally shows up, offers these long, pretentious speeches that slow the pace of the already draggy picture. This guy, by the way, looks exactly like Andy Kaufman’s Tony Clifton character.
And as this movie lumbers towards the two-hour mark you keep waiting for Eddie to come to some kind of realization that his racist bents are small and wrong-headed, but that moment never arrives. In fact, when the low-rent action steps up and the jazzy score blares, this may feel like something approaching whitesploitation.
If you can stick it out that long, the movie’s a dull bummer.
