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Rating:  -
I watched this on the screen when it orignally came out. In fact I sat thru it twice in one night because it was so good.
Bruce Dern and Walter were both excellent. Gripping storu and cast.
Highly recommend!
Rating:  -
The film begins in a transit station. A man makes a call from a telephone booth. [Remember them?] Another man watches and follows him. They get on a bus, a car follows them. Two more passengers get on the bus. A submachine gun sprays bullets! Then the credits show over the scenes. One passenger is barely alive. The police investigation begins. [They don't use rubber gloves.] One of the dead is police detective Dave Evans. The victims are checked and tagged. The bus is towed away. Detective Jake Martin returns home for sleep. What case was Dave Evans working on? The bodies are examined. The wounded old man said something. They find a package in Evans' desk. One is a picture of an old murder victim, Theresa a prostitute.
The detectives begin their investigation. Can they find a lead? We see scenes of Frisco life to titillate the viewers. [The film begins to drag.] Jack Martin returns home. They investigate the leads, the old case checked by Evans. Then a crime occurs with a sniper in a house. The police invade and neutralize the sniper. [Is there a hidden agenda here?] "Get a haircut." Could Detective Larson use more diplomacy? One prisoner offers information for a deal. There is another scene in a residential neighborhood. [Believable?] "Was it something I said?" Will they enter without a search warrant? Marsha won't speak to anyone. Jack asks Leo to do a favor and watch a suspect from that old case. Could a wealthy investment advisor be a crook? [Is Leo following too close? Or is that just for dramatic effect?]
More scenes of Frisco's cultural life follow to shock and amuse the viewers. Is Henry Camarero taking chances? Will Jake Martin try something? Will it work? So there is another car chase to provide action when the film begins to bog down. Would taking a bus help? Can you believe what happens next? Will lightning strike twice? There is a solution to the murders on the bus. This film shows no fog in Frisco! Films adapted from novels are simplified and seldom as good as the book. This story was modified to push its agenda. Per Wahloo wrote his series of mystery novels to document Swedish contemporary life. You can analyze this film for its purpose.
Rating:  -
Gritty naturalism and Altman-esque crosstalk amid great Bay City location work inform this 70s procedural that entertains but misses the mark of being a classic. The picture's overlong with a few too many red herrings. Things pick up for the climax. (Indeed, the ingenious plot could be due for a remake.)
Matthau is suitably low-key in the picture's admirably unsparing picture of the cop's home life. Lou and Bruce are along to jack up the energy.
Rating: -
In the 1960s the writing team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo wrote police procedural mysteries based on the cops of the Stockholm PD--a sort of Swedish 87th Precinct series without a vestige of wit or humor, hence the ironic title. Oh, very gloomily Scandinavian! The books were immensely successful in Europe and even managed the almost unprecedented feat of jumping the Atlantic to become best sellers in America. "The Laughing Policeman" was probably the best-known book of the lot. It is still very much in print and well worth reading today.
Inevitably the series was picked up on option by an American film studio. In 1973, "The Laughing Policeman" was filmed ... with a few changes.
Ingmar Bergman may have been widely admired but he was not box office. No US studio was going to risk big bucks on unknown Swedish actors, nossiree. Walter Matthau was hired to play the lead detective and a young Bruce Dern to play his sidekick. (It should be remembered that in those days Matthau was still an all-around actor, and a good one; his talent had not yet disappeared beneath his comic persona.) If no Swedish actors, than certainly not Stockholm, a town that was presumably gloomy and dull. (Who knew? Who cared?) San Francisco was neither. That was the place!
The movie starts out with a wordless sequence which begins at what was then called the Eastbay Terminal located at about First and Mission Streets. A miscellaneous lot of people board a small diesel bus decked out in the Municipal Railway's old green and cream color scheme that clearly bears the route designation "14 MISSION." The bus wends its way through the streets of San Francisco until one passenger uses an automatic assault rifle, called a "grease gun" in the script, to murder everybody else on the bus. The bus, no longer controlled by the now-dead driver, careens slowly through Chinatown, coming at last to a stop in a gentle crash. The mass murderer, face unshown, steps off and, so far as the puzzled detectives who soon arrive on the scene are concerned, vanishes into thin air.
(Now, to any San Franciscan, a major mystery immediately appears: what in tarnation was a 14 MISSION bus doing so far off course--in Chinatown, of all unlikely places?)
"The Laughing Policeman" was made in the era of the hugely successful Steve McQueen vehicle, "Bullitt," a police procedural set in San Francisco and almost dialogue-free. "The Laughing Policeman" is chattier, but not by much. I wouldn't be surprised to find that all the dialogue in the shooting script could be contained in under ten typewritten pages.
Like "Bullitt" and another famous San Francisco mystery movie, "Vertigo," "The Laughing Policeman" is both an homage to the City and a travelogue. In "Bullitt," San Francisco is an action-oriented theme park suitable for chases up and down the hilly streets. In "Vertigo," San Francisco is a place of picturesque monuments that mask old sins. But in "The Laughing Policeman" the cameras dote on the sleazy underbelly of the City, familiar places in the daily slog of the natives but effectively invisible to the tourists.
I lived in San Francisco for 31 years. I left it in 1973. This movie exactly captures the City as I remember it. (I visited San Francisco a couple of months ago. With the single exception of the Embarcadero Freeway, torn down after the big 1989 earthquake, hardly a brick or a hair has changed in any of the locations that appear on the screen.)
All in all, this is a pretty good, terse, well-acted film that offers a respectable story and is at once a travelogue and time capsule.
Give it a try. Five stars.
Rating:  -
Sgt. Jake Martin is speaking to his new partner, Insp. Leo Larsen; trying to convince him how important this investigation is. Inspector Leo Larsen is leery:
"Sgt. Jake Martin SFPD: Evans was working the Teresa thing on his own time. He's killed on the same bus with Gus Niles who's looking for a grease gun that happens to be the weapon used.
Insp. Leo Larsen SFPD: And then his girlfriend winds up dead on the floor with the needle... Jake, you realize what you just did? You do it to me all the time, now you heard what the man said upstairs.
Sgt. Jake Martin SFPD: I heard him, I was up there, he's a nice man, he shoots in the low 80s, but he plays too close to the vest.
Insp. Leo Larsen SFPD: Then what are you laying all that crap on ME FOR? WHY DON'T YOU STOP IT FOR ONCE? That's YOUR personal hang-up, it does NOT happen to be mine!
Sgt. Jake Martin SFPD: Can't you see it?
Insp. Leo Larsen SFPD: I see one thing, I see why you're such a good cop, and one reason only, because you're so screwed up otherwise. You're beyond human belief, you understand that? You've got nothing else, no personal life, nothing!
Sgt. Jake Martin SFPD: All I'm asking you to do is help me tail a guy for a few days, its routine!
Insp. Leo Larsen SFPD: IT IS NOT ROUTINE JAKE, GODDAMMIT, IF THE BOSS SAYS FORGET IT!"
Nine people in San Francisco get on a bus, one leaves alive. The
living one takes with him a "greaser", some sort of sub-machine gun that he used to kill the other eight. Why? What is this all about? That is what Sgt. Martin wants to know. One of the eight is his dead partner, who was supposed to be on vacation. Jake Martin( Walter Matthau) is obsessed with this case, and will not rest until he finds the answer. Enters (Bruce Dern)Insp. Leo Larsen, his new partner. This is Leo's break, up into the big time, but his partner doesn't talk much, and it drives him crazy.
Sgt. Jack Martin is "melancholy, bordering on depression, overwhelming him because he suspects he may have lost his partner as the result of the two-year-old case he failed to resolve." Thus "The Laughing Policeman" is a play on words. This case takes us into the underground of San Francisco in the 1970's. Fuzzy, high hair, hippies, bright suits and a tamer life than we know now. The investigation is "right on", and the clues and lack of clues bring them to many stops along the way. All of the clues are looked at carefully, and all of the leads followed up. The criminal elements are all interviewed. The loves and the outlaws are interplayed with junkies and the motorcycle mamas. These detectives are real and play the part, they are depressed and worried and sometimes hate their job. Sgt.Martin has been in this business for a long time, and the unsolved case of a few years ago has now come full tilt. There is the requisite car chase in San Francisco up the hills and around the sharp corners. Walter Matthau has stepped into his second detective role, and at times it seems as if he is reaching for this character. Bruce Dern plays his character with charm and determination. The scenery is magnificent and the city comes alive. This is the beginning of the detective series that we have seen so many times on TV. "The Streets Of San Francisco" it is not, but almost as good.. Recommended. Prisrob
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