Cynical Cinema

Just yesterday, after five years of trying, I got my girlfriend to finally sit down with me and watch Serpico.  It took some doing, as she has been decidedly resistant to the idea for the past five years.  For her, Serpico represented what Sex And The City represents for me.  A movie that only people of the opposite sex could possibly enjoy, and one that would drive her nuts.  Well, it turns out she was mostly wrong.  While she is not the Serpico fanatic that I am, she did not hate the film nearly as much as she thought she would.  But since I watched it again, finally, I figured it was time to write a review of this magnificent movie.  That my girlfriend can now tolerate.

The reason she was finally able to watch Serpico was that she had just watched Street Kings (review coming soon), a more modern police corruption movie that is decent.  Decent, but not really good.  And certainly not classic.  In point of fact, there is just one classic police corruption movie ever made, and that is Serpico.  Sure, there have been other movies that dealt, at least tangentially with police corruption.  And some have been magnificent.  Infernal Affairs, the movie that inspired, The Departed.  Exit Wounds.  Just kidding - that one wasn’t magnificent, so much as it was awesome.  Then there’s the other, generic stuff.  Like Street Kings.

Anyway, I want to make this review more brief that usual, because Serpico, like so many other classic movies, has been around for a long darn time.  Like, thirty-five years as of today.  And there are multiple reviews that one can obtain online, from far more respected movie critics than me.  But I love this movie, and I want to add it to my massive database of reviewed movies, so here goes. 

There are two things that make Serpico, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest cop-corruption movie of all time.  First, there is no mystery.  There is no Big Revelation at the end of the film where we finally find out - Much To Our Shock - who the good cops are and who the bad cops are.  Screw the twist endings, they are such a painful cliche of bad-cop movies that I cringe every time I see one coming.  (Street Kings, I’m looking at you.)  We know from the onset that the cops around Frank Serpico are bad cops, that they are taking money and looking the other way, and that there is an institutional acceptance of this practice.

The second thing that elevates Serpico to the level of “classic” is the fact that at many points in the movie, we identify more with the cops who are taking bribes!  At several moments, we really think “just give in!”  You can’t beat this system, either take the money and give it to charity, or quit the department!  There is no way out of this, and you will be killed fighting this fight!  This is especially relevant when his girlfriend tells him the story of the emperor whose people drank from a tainted well and became crazy.  This emperor was all of a sudden the only sane person in the kingdom, and when the people decided that he was crazy and wanted to kill him, he drank from the fountain and became as nuts as they were, which then led them to think he has all of a sudden become sane, and they no longer want to kill him.

This is the feeling his girlfriend has, and by extension it is the feeling a lot of us have while watching the movie.  If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and if you can’t join ‘em, quit.  But the fact that Serpico won’t do that, the fact that he fights an impossible fight against impossible odds to make his point and to change the institution he loves - the police force - is an incredibly powerful, bad-ass thing to do.  And by the end of the film, we respect him incredibly for doing something that we, ourselves, questioned.  It is likely we would not have made the same choices he made, and at the very least, possible.  The fact that it costs him his relationship and, for all intents and purposes, his life - makes it that much more poignant.

Also making it incredibly poignant is the fact that this is a true story.  Watch Serpico, if you’ve never seen it.  And if you’ve already seen it, watch it again.  Al Pacino gives one of the best performances of his career, in the same era that brought us such classics as Dog Day Afternoon.  As soon as I can convince my girlfriend to watch that one, I will be reviewing that one.  Look for that particular review in about five years.

I have always been a big fan of Karl Malden. I think he is one of the all-time under-rated actors in all of cinema. His performance in Patton is almost on a par with that of George C. Scott. And he holds his own with Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront. But Malden gets forgotten quickly, because Scott in Patton and Brando in Waterfront are two of the most incredible, towering performances in the history of movies. But Karl Malden managed to forge an incredible career, both in movies and in television. One of the few brilliant actors to wind down his career on the small screen, Malden was the star of The Streets of San Francisco from 1972 - 1977. He continued to work in the 80s and 90s, with small roles and TV movies and so forth, but The Streets of San Francisco was really the last great thing he did.

When it comes to Michael Douglas, I am of two minds. At times, I find him to be an absolutely brilliant actor (Wall Street, Falling Down), and at other times I find him tolerable in small doses only (A Perfect Murder, Basic Instinct, Disclosure). Thankfully, Streets of San Francisco gives us Michael Douglas in small doses only. What with it being an hour-long program. But for the most part, this show is the good Michael Douglas. Very few TV shows in history have had two actors of this caliber working together for such a long time - six full seasons. Volume One of the second season comes out on DVD tomorrow, July 1st, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The best thing about the show, other than the two lead actors, is the location filming. It’s actually filmed IN the streets of San Francisco, setting for such classic films and car chases as the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt. And those movies (and TV shows) become classic because the streets of San Fran lend themselves very much to the ol’ car chase. And there are certainly some cool car chases in this show. As far as police procedurals go, this one is pretty tight, and pretty quick, and it seems like they put a lot of thought into not just the settings but the procedure as well. It’s a little more logical and well-thought-out than other police shows of the era, and each actor, including the guest stars and the extras, knows exactly what he or she is doing in every scene.

And that is really my only, minor, complaint about the show. With talents like Malden and Douglas, there was a little more leeway to let them do their own thing, I would think. But Malden gets a little typecast as the crotchety ornery older cop. And every time we start to forget that he’s sour, they throw him a line so he can make the point again. The relationship between the two, while it’s generally solid, is constantly being pigeonholed into a father-son dynamic, even when it’s kind of unnecessary. And Malden’s insistence on constantly calling Douglas “buddy boy” really dates things. It all makes the show feel focus-grouped. But it’s “1970s” focus-grouped, so it isn’t all that bad. Like, it isn’t Tila Tequila or anything.

Season Two, Volume One, features some impressive guest stars, like James Wainwright, several episodes with Leslie Nielsen, and one with Martin Sheen as a bank robber. This was the first time Sheen and Malden appeared on screen together - the second time was twenty-seven years later when Malden did a guest spot as Father Cavanaugh on The West Wing in 2000. I don’t know if anyone will care about that. But I researched it because I cared, so I figured I may as well write it down. This is no good reason to watch Streets of San Francisco. But there are many other reasons. Malden, Douglas, and that incredible city with it’s incredible streets that lead to some incredible car chases.

          When watching The Odd Couple, it strikes me that Tony Randall’s character, Felix (the tidy one), suffers from some kind of debilitating personality disorder.  Jack Klugman’s character Oscar (the messy one) is just sloppy and crass.  But Felix is desperately in need of a psychiatrist.  He’s the kind of guy you now see on Dr. Phil or Oprah, crying about how his family left him because of his germophobia and his obsessive compulsive antics.  And then Dr. Phil would send him to some boot camp for weirdos where he would have to lick a garbage can lid and bathe in maggots and miraculously emerge a cured man.  In the show, however, his life with his slovenly roommate Oscar is his only exposure to squalor, and he’s NEVER going to get better that way! 

          The premise of the show is that Oscar is a slob, and Felix is a neat-freak and a snobby sissy, a prototypical Niles Crane.  This was enough of a comedic premise to carry Neil Simon’s stage play for two hours in 1965.  It was enough to hold up the terrific Walter Matthau - Jack Lemmon movie in 1968 for an hour and forty-six minutes.  And apparently, it was enough to sustain the TV series for six seasons, beginning in 1970.  Even after the series was over, the premise lived on, as though spurred by some kind of never-ending desire the world over for sequels.  But by then, the idea had run its course.  In 1982, there was a “New Odd Couple” show that aired on ABC for less than four months.  Apparently, at the time, the humour from the Odd Couple concept had been completely used up, because this new show, in the 13 episodes it aired, actually used EIGHT scripts recycled from the show in the 70s. 

          Then there was that disastrous Odd Couple II, a truly dreadful 1998 sequel to the original movie, thirty years later, that saw Matthau and Lemmon in their last role together.  Apparently, whatever I’m-neat-and-you’re-sloppy jokes hadn’t been used up in the movie and the original TV series had been used up to make Grumpy Old Men.  Anyway, that doesn’t matter, because I’m talking about the DVD box set of Season Four of the Odd Couple here, and the joke well had not yet run dry.  It comes out tomorrow, June 10th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it’s still funny.  Klugman and Randall are terrific together, they have great chemistry, and the guest stars respond easily to the timing of the lead actors.  But the episodes are interchangeable, each one follows the exact same story arc as the last, and it really is one of the early cookie-cutter TV comedies.  You see, Felix is uptight and obnoxious, and we laugh at him.  The end.  

          The best episode on Season Four of The Odd Couple is the one with Bobby Riggs, the tennis star.  Riggs was very famous at the time (1973) as a chauvinist, who challenged female tennis players to games.  His match against Billie Jean King in 1973 is still one of the most famous tennis matches of all time.  (For those of you who are not aware of the match, Riggs lost to King in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.)  Riggs was also famous as a hustler and a gambler, and when he shows up in The Odd Couple, he plays himself as…a hustler, a gambler, and a chauvinist.  And he sucks in Oscar and Felix in the best episode of the season.  Other guest stars this season include Dick Clark, Jaye P. Morgan, Hugh Hefner and Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall.