The conventional behavior of police heroes, from their maverick
attitudinizing to their ubiquitous car chases, is so well established
that it is easy to forget how dramatically it departs from
the behavior of most police officers in literature or life. Police detectives
had existed as early in prose fiction as Dickens (Inspector Bucket
in Bleak House, 1852–3) and Wilkie Collins (Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone,
1868); Georges Simenon’s indefatigable Inspector Maigret had
debuted in 1931; and Sidney Kingsley’s grindingly realistic play Detective
Story had premiered on Broadway in 1949. But the conventions
of the genre laid down by the Commander Gideon police-procedural
series of J. J. Marric (aka John Creasey) beginning in 1955, and by Cop
Hater, the first of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, the following year
were the emphasis on the daily routines of a given group of police officers,
rather than their rare dramatic breakthroughs, and on the presentation
of several overlapping cases simultaneously. Together these
two innovations conferred a soap-opera sense of endlessness on the
routines of McBain’s and Marric’s fictional police departments. These
cops struggle to bring each one of their assignments to a successful
conclusion as if the case in hand is uniquely important, even though
they know it will be followed by numberless further crimes. The emotional
keynote of literary cops is the sentiment expressed by Lt. Clancy
at the outset of Robert L. Pike’s novel Mute Witness (1963): “He was
tired and he knew it.”1 Like the soap-opera continuity of the police
squad, this tonality has been a hallmark of TV programs from Police
Story (1973–7), created by best-selling police novelist Joseph Wambaugh,
to Law and Order and NYPD Blue, but rarely of feature films.
Seldom have police films followed actual experiences of police officers
any more closely. Hollywood films regularly feature police heroes
as independent, despite their uniforms, as any private eye. When the
police outside Hollywood movies are seeking a criminal, their watchword
is routine, their most potent weapons are informants and databases,
and by far the most probable outcomes of their search are that
they will not find a likely suspect, or that they will find such a suspect,
arrest the suspect, and turn him or her over to the court system for
processing, arraignment, and trial. Both of these outcomes are highly
unlikely in most police films. Instead, loose-cannon cops from “G”
Men (1935) to The Rock (1996) typically pursue suspects in chase sequences
with guns blazing on both sides, leaving in their wake a high
body count and impressive property damage; and suspects, instead
of being taken into custody, tried, and convicted, are last seen snarling
their defiance or getting carried out in a body bag.
Most audiences’ nonmovie experiences of the police are remote
from this scenario, not only because police work is rarely as exciting
or as conclusive as Hollywood suggests, but because few citizens experience
police officers as crime-solving presences in their own lives.
Most of them encounter the police more often as minor public servants
or intimidating enforcers of traffic laws than as heroic solvers
of serious crimes. If it is true that most audiences are as afraid of the
police as Alfred Hitchcock claimed he was himself,2 then the heroic
cops Hollywood manufactures might seem designed specifically to allay
their fears. Even so, movies do not simply substitute viewers’ fear
of the police – which arises from their sense of themselves as potential
lawbreakers and their consequent hostility toward the laws they
may have broken and the justice system designed to punish them –
for these other attitudes, as Hitchcock, himself a shrewd creator of
movie cops, was the first to recognize. Instead, viewers bring to police
films a set of sharply ambivalent attitudes toward the heroes of the
law-enforcement establishment – an ambivalence on which privateeye
films capitalize by making the incompetent or corrupt police the
hero’s adversaries in the search for justice. Hollywood police officers
represent at once the human face of the law’s front lines and its most
threatening aspects, the vulnerability and the power of the justice system.
They evoke both audiences’ solicitude for the laws that make social
order possible and their skepticism about the failings of the law.
Throughout the history of the Hollywood police film, this ambivalence,
whereby audiences see themselves as both defenders and vic-
tims of law enforcement, plays out through a series of running debates
over the issues of power and justice. The peculiar status of police heroes,
who are both individuals and representatives of the social will,
makes their enabling myth social rather than psychological or transcendental:
that the police force’s institutional power coincides with
a shared ideal of social justice, so that, as in war movies, what George
N. Dove calls its “paramilitary” might makes right.3 Police films, assuming
that the power individual citizens have relinquished to all the
social institutions the police represent is moral and just despite their
potentially coercive force, endorse social conformity on the grounds
that centralized social power ultimately benefits all citizens because
the body of officers that enforce it is a representative microcosm of
the larger society. All police films take this assumption as their point
of departure, and most of them conclude by reaffirming it emphatically;
but virtually all police films call it into question sooner or later
as well by raising doubts about the efficacy of police power, the morality
of police justice, or the authority of police culture.
This ambivalence is powerfully figured by Detroit cop Alex J. Murphy
(Peter Weller), the half-man, half-machine law-enforcement hero
of RoboCop (1987). The cyborg is an especially apt figure for Hollywood
police officers because it shatters the apparent unity within
both their individual bodies and so many of the unitary metaphorical
bodies the police force as a corps of individuals and an incarnation
of social norms ideally incorporates. The ideal of professionalism, for
example, is as important a touchstone in police films as in private eye
films from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Chinatown (1974), but it is defined
in terms of a more amorphous body of work to be done. Unlike
both amateur detectives and private eyes, the police do not choose
their cases; they are powerless to turn down a case they do not like,
and behind each case loom nothing but more cases. Hence the Hollywood
cop’s professionalism, unlike the private eye’s, is not pegged to
the body of any particular case but rather to a patient dedication to
whatever cases may arise, a constant availability for tedious or dangerous
front-line duty. The ubiquity of crime for the weary police is
made most explicit in the famous closing lines of The Naked City (1948)
– “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one
of them.” – but it is acknowledged more briefly in any number of other
police films, for instance in the endings of The Big Heat (1953) and
Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), which leave their heroes just as they
are embarking on new cases. Reimagining crime in RoboCop’s terms,
as an incessant social condition rather than an aberrant intrusion into
the apparently Edenic world of Murder on the Orient Express (1974) or
Blue Velvet (1986), recasts crime-solving heroes as more stoic organization
men (or women) whose heroism depends less on their individual
initiative than on their willingness to accept the challenges of a
world they did not make and cannot control.
Most stories of unofficial detectives and private eyes take the form
of mysteries whose solution is withheld from both readers and heroes.
In police films, mystery plays a much more minor role. For every whodunit
like Laura (1944) starring a police detective, there are a dozen
films like RoboCop, in which the police hero knows who is responsible
for the crimes he is investigating but is powerless to make an arrest.
Criminals are more often shown at work, and their identities more often
known to the police from the beginning, as in The Untouchables
(1987), which begins with a scene that establishes Al Capone (Robert
De Niro) as not only the man behind Chicago’s crime wars but simply
the most powerful man in the city. Questions about power are more
equivocal than questions about knowledge because power relationships,
unlike individual guilt, can never be definitively discovered;
they must be continually renegotiated. An enabling convention of detective
stories from Oedipus the King to Murder on the Orient Express
is that the truth shall set you free; that is, a community that faces the
darkest truths about itself will enjoy greater freedom and happiness
than a community that suppresses those truths. But police films,
which focus on power instead of knowledge, can offer no such assurance,
since, as Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) learns in The Untouchables,
power can always be trumped by greater power without any necessary
moral sanction [Fig. 49].
The popular image of the police force is one of authoritarian power
most economically encapsulated in abbreviated references to the corporate
body of the police as “the force.” In movies like RoboCop and
The Untouchables, however, the police are frequently shown as powerless
before a greater malignant power. Jim Malone (Sean Connery),
the beat cop who takes Ness under his wing, is represented in life and
death by a talisman on his key chain, a medal depicting Saint Jude, the
patron saint of impossible causes; and on the face of it, a Hollywood
police officer’s job is indeed impossible, not only because cops are
confronted with supercriminals from Capone to Hannibal Lecter (Anthony
Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal (2001)
to John Doe (Kevin Spacey) in Se7en (1995), but because each case is
followed inevitably by an endless parade of other cases.
Nonetheless, viewers routinely assume the police will succeed.
Sometimes their confidence is justified by their knowledge of history,
as in The Untouchables, in which audiences’ awareness of how Capone
was actually brought down makes an ironic joke of the apparently
pointless efforts of Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) to prove Capone
guilty of tax evasion. Other times, audiences rely on internal foreshadowing
and narrative logic, as in One False Move (1991), in which
it is clear early on that the three criminals fleeing from Los Angeles to
faraway Star City, Arkansas, are actually running into the arms of the
law. Even when they have neither history nor any specific foreshadowing
to guide them, however, audiences’ experiences of films whose
stars are cast as police officers will be framed by their experience of
generic conventions in myriad earlier police films, which predict, with
remarkably few exceptions, the success of the police, at whatever
cost, in identifying and apprehending or destroying the criminals.
How can the job of policing be at once so hopeless and so assured
of success? This question mirrors a deeper contradiction in viewers’
attitudes toward the majesty of the law, their suspicion of the very legal
system they are counting on to protect their welfare. The opening
situation of most police films typically engages viewers’ fears of the
49. The Untouchables: Police power (Sean Connery, Kevin Costner) trumped
by the greater power of Al Capone’s bodyguards.
law’s powerlessness, the weakness of the authority that gives it moral
and legal force, and the resulting lawless chaos; the final resolution
reflects their confidence in the law and the justice of its tactics, however
violent, even lawless, they may seem. It is a primary task of police
films to mediate between these two attitudes, expressing audiences’
skeptical fears about the justice system while leaving them
ultimately confident in its workings.
The most obvious device for mediating between these two contradictory
attitudes is a plot that explains how the powerless police gain
enough power to challenge the apparently invincible criminals. This
reversal is trivialized in countless films that show that although the
bad guys have more guns, the good guys have better aim; but the moment
of reversal is often a pivotal moment in the police film. In both
versions of Scarface (1932, 1983), the criminal heroes are defeated by
the sheer numbers of the police. Since numbers alone rarely evoke
a sense of heroism, however, police films prefer to show their lawenforcement
heroes triumphing by virtue of their superior technology,
as in “G” Men and White Heat (1949), or superior teamwork, as
in The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential (1997), which sets a well-
50. L.A. Confidential: An ill-assorted police team (James Cromwell, Guy Pearce,
Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey) that has not yet begun to work as a team.
organized gang of criminals against an initially disorganized gang of
police officers [Fig. 50]. Such films emphasize from the beginning
strengths implicit in the police, and by extension the communities
they represent and the authority that empowers them, by showing
these strengths developing out of earlier weaknesses. Alternatively,
instead of showing the police growing stronger, films may show the
criminals growing weaker, as in police officers’ use of variously complicit
informers or the criminals’ confessions. Such films, which predicate
the power of the police on the weakness of criminal transgressors,
more disturbingly compromise the duality between the police
and the criminals by emphasizing the dependence of police work on
the weakness or even the active collusion of criminals like John Doe
in Se7en [Fig. 51].
The ideal police force would be as perfect in its justice as in its power
over criminals, and a founding convention of the police movie is the
alliance of police power with social justice. But most police movies follow
victim movies like Fury (1936) and private-eye movies like Chinatown
in challenging this convention, usually by giving the police hero
a personal stake in the case at hand because the criminal has either
breached the sanctity of his domestic sphere (The Devil’s Own, 1997)
or killed his partner (The Narrow Margin, 1952) or taken his wife hostage
(Die Hard, 1988) or left him for dead (RoboCop). Such a personal
stake makes the hero’s pursuit of the villain more compelling for the
audience than the abstract conflict between social good and transgressive
evil. At the same time, however, emphasizing the officer’s personal
interest in the case unmasks the status of institutional justice
as institutionalized revenge more interested in repaying insults and injuries
than in restoring the social order. To what extent is justice anything
more than vengeance sanctioned by superior power? This question,
which has troubled Western literature at least since Aeschylus’
Oresteia nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, is at the heart of the
police film.
The most obvious challenge to the alliance of police power and institutional
justice is the figure of the corrupt cop, who has fascinated
Sidney Lumet in Serpico (1973), Prince of the City (1981), Q & A (1990),
and Night Falls on Manhattan (1996). Equally dangerous are the loosecannon
cops like fanatical Pete Davis (Ray Liotta) in Unlawful Entry
(1992), whose dedication to their mandate to serve and protect goes
too far. Human emotions of any sort, from greed to desire, threaten
to compromise the Hollywood cop’s prescribed dedication to ideals
of justice.
Police officers who embody motives above suspicion, by contrast,
are routinely cast as loners. The lonely isolation of the Hollywood cop
is the most immutable of all the genre’s conventions. Police officers
in movies never have happy, stable family lives for long. Hurricane Dixon
(Bill Paxton) in One False Move is hiding from his wife and daughter
his sexual involvement with one of the criminals he is hoping to
capture; Elliot Ness has to rush his wife and daughter out of Chicago
in The Untouchables after they are threatened by Frank Nitti (Billy
Drago); the wife of Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is killed by a car bomb
intended for him in The Big Heat; Det. Jim McLeod (Kirk Douglas) ends
up investigating his own wife in Detective Story (1951). More often, the
hero is a loner from the beginning, a man whose private life is deviant,
dysfunctional, or nonexistent. The hero of Tightrope (1984), New Orleans
Police Inspector Wes Block (Clint Eastwood), has sexual tastes
as kinky, though not as homicidal, as those of the killer he is chasing
[Fig. 52], and LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is just as
obsessive as the thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) he is paired
against in Heat (1995) [Fig. 53]. Even the more gentlemanly Mark Mc-
Pherson (Dana Andrews), the lead detective in Laura, has no better
way to spend his nights than to return to a murder scene and stare at
the painting of a dead woman. Like the western hero, the police hero
is deprived of a domestic life in order to marginalize him from the social
body he is supposed to be defending, even as his alienation reinforces
his professional dedication.
For such heroes, whose dedication often amounts to an obsession,
the ultimate isolation is estrangement from their professional colleagues,
and most police films isolate their heroes in exactly this way.
The isolation is often institutional, emphasizing the conflicts between
the executive branch of the law the police represent and the legislative
and judicial branches. Legislators, lawyers, and judges, like cops
themselves in private-eye movies, are often cast as the real enemies
of society because they will not give investigative agencies the power
they need (the FBI agents in “G” Men have to petition Congress for the
right to carry firearms) or because they are so ready to stand up for
52. Tightrope: Wes Block (Clint Eastwood), a cop whose demonstration of
handcuffs to Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold) hints at sexual tastes that
are as kinky as those of the criminal he is chasing.
the rights of suspects, rather than the conflicting rights of the larger
society, that they help obviously guilty suspects go free.
Often, the heroes’ isolation is both institutional and personal, as
when Arizona deputy sheriff Walt Coogan (Clint Eastwood) pursues a
suspect to the urban jungles of New York in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), or
when Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), the FBI-trainee heroine of The
Silence of the Lambs, feels estranged from her boss, Jack Crawford
(Scott Glenn), both because he is a full-fledged agent and because he
is a man, as he reminds her by his thoughtlessly sexist behavior at a
backwoods autopsy. Lt. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and Sgt. Wendell “Bud”
White (Russell Crowe), the two heroes of L.A. Confidential, are feuding
over the ambitious Exley’s testimony and White’s refusal to testify
against the officers who rioted during Exley’s brief stint as watch commander.
The Los Angeles cops staking out Star City, Arkansas, in One
False Move look down their noses at Hurricane Dixon, the countryboy
sheriff who dreams of hitting “the big time” by joining the LAPD.
The most radical isolation between police heroes and their world
is achieved by driving a wedge between them and the corruption of
53. Heat: A historic pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as a cop and his
equally obsessive criminal double.
untrustworthy colleagues in their own departments. In The Big Heat,
Dave Bannion runs so far afoul of his superiors in investigating the
death of a bent cop that he is driven from the force to become the dispenser
of his own brand of vigilante justice; only the timely intervention
of disillusioned gun moll Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), who
does him the service of killing blackmailing cop-widow Bertha Duncan
(Jeanette Nolan), saves him from becoming a murderer himself. Movies
like Serpico, Witness (1985), and Cop Land (1997) set their cleancut
heroes at odds with corruption on a grand scale, modeling the few
cops who are not on the take on the private eyes who would be their
enemies in The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown. Each of these three
films marks its hero’s physical body off from the body of untrustworthy
colleagues arrayed against him. Cop Land casts beefcake Sylvester
Stallone against type as paunchy and partially deaf [Fig. 54]. Serpico
shows Al Pacino, first seen in his well-pressed uniform graduating
from the police academy, growing increasingly scruffy and bearded,
looking more and more like the lowlifes he is supposed to be catching
and less and less like the well-groomed but crooked colleagues who
54. Cop Land: Sylvester Stallone as a paunchy Everyman. (Robert De Niro,
Stallone)
are supposed to be backing him up. Witness shows wounded Philadelphia
cop John Book (Harrison Ford) dressed in Amish clothing as he
preaches nonviolence to the corrupt colleague who, hearing of this
supposedly Amish farmer’s telltale fistfight, has left the big city to find
and kill him.
These films, which fracture the unity that might be expected to prevail
among all police officers, help to explain why, unlike movies in
which cops figure only marginally, police films rarely show their heroes
in the uniforms that express their professional solidarity. More
often, they blur the distinction between the police gang and the criminal
gang in order to recast the solitary heroic cop in the mold of the
lone-wolf private eye who can be trusted precisely because he is not
part of the corrupt establishment. The ironic result is that police officers,
the very embodiment of the justice system’s threateningly monolithic
power in private-eye films, often feel hopelessly alienated from
or victimized by the system they are supposed to incarnate when they
are the heroes of their own movies.
The most common remedy for this disaffection is the camaraderie
cops conventionally share with their partners in films like Lethal Weapon
(1987) and its sequels, which show the overlapping influence of the
buddy film; but relations between partners even as close as detective
sergeants Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny
Glover) are typically marked by conflict [Fig. 55]. Quarrels between
oil-and-water cops forced into partnering each other are a staple figure
of films as different as The Laughing Policeman (1974), Dragnet
(1987), Rising Sun (1993), and Rush Hour (1998). More serious are the
moral and jurisdictional disputes between the virtuous Mexican narcotics
cop Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston) and the
high-handed American Capt. Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) in Touch of
Evil (1958), and the fights over turf and tactics between Ed Exley and
Bud White, two of the few Los Angeles cops who are not dirty, in L.A.
Confidential.
Still more disturbingly, police movies often raise questions about
police justice by presenting dedicated cops pushed to, and sometimes
over, the edge. Det. Sgt. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) spends most of
the running time of Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) trying to cover
up his accidental killing of a robbery suspect. On Dangerous Ground
(1952) shows Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) hounding a young criminal
from the city to the countryside, and ultimately to his death. As the
punch line of his seven-deadly-sins series of murders, John Doe, the
villain of Se7en, kills the wife of David Mills (Brad Pitt), one of the two
detectives on his trail, out of his envy of Mills, goading Mills into killing
Doe himself out of wrath. Even clean-cut Elliot Ness, moments after
pulling Frank Nitti to safety in The Untouchables, throws him off a rooftop
when Nitti brags that he will never do time for killing Jim Malone.
Mills and Ness, dazed with shock and grief, kill Doe and Nitti out of an
anger and hatred fostered by their job that has become too personal;
but Wilson and Dixon cause the deaths of the criminals in their films
out of professional obsessions, workaholism run amok.
The ultimate example of professional dedication gone wrong is the
police officer as vigilante killer, the conceit behind Magnum Force
(1973), in which Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) sheds his normal
quasi-vigilante role to battle an even more murderously vigilante wing
of the San Francisco Police Department. But the opposite conceit is
equally familiar: the undercover police officer whose success and survival
depend on playing a role that represents the opposite of his or
her true nature, as Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) worms his way into
the confidence of his cellmate Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White
Heat by taking over the nurturing, reassuring role of Cody’s late moth-
55. Lethal Weapon 3: Comic conflict between oil-and-water cops (Mel Gibson,
Danny Glover).
er despite his personal revulsion from Cody. The most memorable recent
portrayals of undercover cops have emphasized the destructive
conflicts between their institutional loyalties and the requirements of
their criminal roles. Donnie Brasco (1997) turns on the unwilling betrayal
by undercover cop Joe Pistone (Johnny Depp) of his trusting
mentor Lefty, played with elegiac dignity by the iconic Al Pacino [Fig.
56]. Rush (1991) plunges rookie narcotics officer Kristen Cates (Jennifer
Jason Leigh) into a nightmarishly successful masquerade when she
gets hooked not only on heroin but also on her undercover partner,
Raynor (Jason Patric). Most searing of all is Reservoir Dogs (1992),
which sets its jewel thieves’ insistent professionalism against the
growing intimacy between one of their leading figures, Mr. White (Harvey
Keitel), and the mortally wounded Mr. Orange (Tim Roth). As the
film gradually reveals, both the police and the criminals are so deeply
immersed in a culture of violence that it is only by violent actions –
playfully scrapping with each other like puppies, accusing each other
of betrayal, defending each other at gunpoint, taking hostages – that
they can establish any connection with each other.
Even police officers who stay on the right side of the law can fall
under suspicion, such as James “Brick” Davis (James Cagney), the
rookie FBI agent whose background as a lawyer educated by a mobster
patron makes his FBI superior Jeff McCord (Robert Armstrong)
constantly suspicious of him in “G” Men. One False Move’s Hurricane
Dixon is forever compromised by his long-ago seduction of African-
American shoplifter Lila Walker (Cynda Williams) and his refusal to
acknowledge her son Byron as his own – acts that fostered Lila’s criminal
rebirth as Fantasia, whose drug-dealing friends provoke a tide of
violence that challenges the self-congratulatory good-versus-evil dichotomies
on which Hurricane has built his comfortable life. “G” Men
and One False Move, like all police films, feed on audiences’ anxieties
about power and justice, which occupy the same central position in
police films as heterosexual male audiences’ psychosexual anxieties
in private-eye films. “G” Men, produced at a time when a strong executive
branch under President Franklin Roosevelt was attempting to
pull the nation out of widespread economic chaos, and released with
the imprimatur of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, mounts a spirited defense
of the recent empowerment of FBI agents and their moral authority.
The most problematic police films appear at times when the
police, and institutional authority generally, are under suspicion, and
especially when these suspicions are rooted in still deeper genera-
tional conflicts concerning authority and the law. The crucial period
in the Hollywood police film is the late 1960s and early 1970s, not only
because it is a period of unprecedented economic freedom and formal
experimentation in American films generally,4 but because a spate of
rioting in Watts (1965), Detroit (1967), Newark (1967), and on innumerable
college campuses – culminating in the National Guard’s killing
of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University (1970) – fed public debate
about both police tactics and the legitimacy of the government
they represented.
Three films – Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), and The French Connection
(1971) – focus this debate indelibly. All three feature rogue
cops who are at odds with judges, lawyers, politicians, and their own
bosses or colleagues. All three express skepticism about institutional
power and justice by asking when law-enforcement officers are justified
in breaking the law in order to uphold the moral law that gives
legal laws their authority, and all three conclude by endorsing the vigilante
cop over the system that has failed them and the society they
are sworn to protect. What distinguishes the three films from each
other is the strikingly different attitudes they adopt toward their rogue
heroes.
The most straightforward of the three is William Friedkin’s The
French Connection because its attitude toward its hero is the easiest
to understand. Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) is the unlikeliest
defender of the law imaginable, a nightmare vision of the modern
urban cop designed to appeal to viewers’ most paranoid fantasies
about the police. As he moves through a New York landscape Martin
Rubin aptly describes as “relentlessly drab, sordid, ugly – a virtual
wasteland,”5 it becomes obvious that Popeye, like Hank Quinlan in
Touch of Evil, is a great detective but a lousy cop, a man whose obsessively
honed skill in detective work has destroyed whatever social
instincts he may have had – instincts that may well be a luxury modern
police officers, beset alike by resourceful drug dealers and widespread
drug use even among movie audiences, can no longer afford.
Popeye’s social responsibilities are so impossible, and his single moral
imperative of chasing criminals until he catches them is so inadequate,
it is no wonder that, in the film’s most celebrated sequence, he
is nearly as heedless of the law as the killer he chases through streets
and subways crowded with innocent bystanders, many of whom become
casualties of the chase.
If Popeye is the nightmare cop hopelessly at odds with his department
and the society he is sworn to protect, Inspector Harry Callahan
(Clint Eastwood),6 in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, is a more even-handed
representation of the officer who is not afraid to take the law into his
own hands. Universally reviled by his superiors and the mayor of San
Francisco, Harry is still the cop they call on when a extortionist sniper
calling himself Scorpio (Andy Robinson) begins killing citizens virtually
at random and demands a payment of $100,000 to stop. The film’s
suggestion that Harry, though he may look no better than Scorpio at
first, is actually his opposite is developed by the shifting contexts in
which its title comes up. When Harry’s new partner, Chico Gonzalez
(Reni Santori), first asks the other cops how Harry got his nickname,
a colleague tells him, “Harry hates everyone.” Later, Chico decides
that an episode of opportunistic voyeurism – Harry interrupts their
pursuit of Scorpio to peek through a window at a lovemaking couple
– explains his nickname. Still later, after Harry has saved a would-be
suicide from jumping off a building by punching him into submission,
he tells Chico, “Now you know why they call me Dirty Harry – every
dirty job that comes along.” Finally, as Lt. Bressler (Harry Guardino)
is laying down dangerous restrictions for the blackmail payment, Chico
tells him, “No wonder they call him Dirty Harry. Always gets the
shit end of the stick.” What originally seemed like Harry’s personal
dirt becomes, on reflection, society’s dirt; he has been tarred with it
only because he is forced to shovel it every day. Especially in view
of the film’s factual basis,7 the revelation changes Harry from the “pig
bastard” Scorpio calls him to the messianic answer to real-life San
Francisco’s prayers, the one man who has the sense and the guts to
say, when he’s told that his torture of Scorpio and his unauthorized
search of his room have broken the law: “Well, then, the law is crazy!”
Though Harry and Popeye are the two best-known examples of loosecannon
cops in Hollywood history, Lt. Frank Bullitt is more problematic
than either of them, not only because he is the progenitor that
makes their films possible, but because his film, by presenting him as
the most unexceptionally heroic of the three of them, raises the most
difficult questions about the audience’s ambivalence toward the law.
No one at Warner Bros., the studio that released Bullitt, expected such
ambiguities from the film’s director, Peter Yates, a British stage veteran
making his Hollywood directorial debut, even though Yates’s subsequent
career would mark him as one of the most enduringly unpredictable
of Hollywood directors. Denied auteur status because of the lack
of thematic or stylistic unity in such commercial projects as For Pete’s
Sake (1974), Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), and The Deep (1977), or even
in the three films written by Steve Tesich – the offbeat teen comedy
Breaking Away (1979), the janitorial noir Eyewitness (1981), and the
historical docudrama Eleni (1985) – Yates has consistently subordinated
himself to his stars in the emotionally charged backstage theatrics
of The Dresser (1983), the legal thrills of Suspect (1987), and the tearjerking
generational wisdom of Roommates (1995).
Warners hired Yates to turn Robert L. Pike’s novel Mute Witness into
an action vehicle for its star, Steve McQueen, whose company, Solar
Productions, produced the film. A familiar presence on American
screens ever since The Blob (1958) and the television series Wanted:
Dead or Alive, which began its run the same year, McQueen had shot
to stardom as the action heroes of The Magnificent Seven (1960) and
The Great Escape (1963). Coolly charismatic onscreen and off, Mc-
Queen charmed fans in the 1960s and 1970s as a loner of preternatural
silence and bodily repose, even in the most strenuous action sequences,
who filled his holidays by racing cars and motorcycles and
did his own stunt work in The Great Escape. In Bullitt, which sent Mc-
Queen to the top of the Hollywood box-office list, he is cast in his most
enduringly popular role, the thinking man’s (and woman’s) action star,
but one whose body, like those of so many of his other roles, incarnates
a world of contradictions.
McQueen’s star persona demanded that the lead role be radically
reshaped for him. Pike’s hero, Lt. Clancy, is a lonely, weary New York
cop already on the outs with his nemesis, Assistant District Attorney
Chalmers, who got him transferred out of his old precinct after Clancy
shot a prosecution witness who came at him with a gun. Burdened
with a reputation as “trigger-happy,”8 Clancy is still detailed to protect
a West Coast mobster who has agreed to come east and testify for
Chalmers. The hero Pike created would have been perfectly suited for
Gene Hackman or Clint Eastwood; veteran screenwriter Harry Kleiner
and newcomer Alan R. Trustman retooled the character, now renamed
Lt. Frank Bullitt, for McQueen by giving him an understated heroism
that first brings him to Chalmers’s attention. Clancy and his world are
as ordinary as possible; Bullitt and his world are both ordinary and
subtly glamorized. In shifting the scene from New York to San Francisco,
Kleiner and Trustman provided a surprisingly large number of
roles for African Americans but deracinated the ethnically shaded colleagues
Pike had given his hero and created a more romantic setting
for him, memorably photographed by William A. Fraker – a setting
with the potential for a chase sequence as unforgettable as Popeye
Doyle’s.
The film begins with a dark screen, a visual homage to noir that is
soon filled with a nocturnal cityscape whose neon lights prominently
feature the word “Chicago.” The credit sequence, which shows a mob
break-in at the offices of John and Peter Ross, is edited so elliptically
that it is nearly impossible to tell what is happening until the sequence’s
only line of dialogue: “He’s your brother, Pete. If you can’t
find him, we have people who will. And you’re paying for the contract.”
But a cut to a high overhead shot of San Francisco establishes
another world. The California exteriors are routinely sun-drenched
and saturated in color, and shadows uniformly crisp, unlike those in
the city’s foggy, smoggy real-life prototype. Even when the film treats
the streets of San Francisco as a maze of urban canyons, as it frequently
does, they look picturesque rather than claustrophobic. The noirish
world of Chicago mobsters the credit sequence so economically
evoked is nothing but a tease – and so is that threatening remark
about Pete Ross’s brother, and indeed the following sequence, in
which a man enters a hotel asking for Johnny Ross’s mail.
Immediately thereafter, Bullitt is sought by Walter Chalmers (Robert
Vaughn) to protect Johnny Ross (Felice Orlandi), a witness who is testifying
in a Senate subcommittee hearing against the Chicago mob because,
as Bullitt’s boss, Capt. Sam Bennett (Simon Oakland), tells him,
“You make good copy, Frank. The papers love you,” and Chalmers
wants to associate himself with a popular and successful officer in his
political plans. Though he disapproves of Chalmers’s arrangements to
safeguard Ross by installing him in a room at the seedy Hotel Reynolds,
whose big windows open to a freeway outside, Bullitt accepts
the job. But Stanton (Carl Reindel), the officer on the graveyard shift,
is gunned down and Ross critically wounded by a pair of assassins
Ross has just let into the room himself by surreptitiously slipping the
chain lock, setting Bullitt at odds with Chalmers, his true adversary,
for the rest of the film.
The clash between the two men is presented as a battle of ideologies.
Chalmers’s top priority is clear: to get Ross’s testimony. He presents
the image of the law enforcer as politician, sensitive only to
public opinion and his own chances for publicity and power. Bullitt’s
priorities are more personal and mutable. His first priority, Stanton’s
survival, switches to a second as soon as doctors assure him that
Stanton is out of danger: waiting for Ross to regain consciousness so
that he can ask him why he unlatched the door to his hotel room. In
both cases, Bullitt’s underlying concern is for the welfare of his own
men, who have been betrayed by the man they were supposed to protect,
a concern that emerges starkly in his confrontation with Chalmers
at the hospital. Their argument swiftly degenerates into a battle
over who was responsible for the attack, the officers who let down
their guard or the informer who knew where to send the killers.
What is most remarkable about this confrontation is a question that
haunts the whole film. Given the diametrically opposed views of the
law’s responsibilities it presents, why do audiences invariably take
Bullitt’s side? On the face of it, Chalmers’s view seems more generous
and unselfish: If Ross testifies, the Organization and its criminal activities
will collapse. By contrast, Bullitt is interested only in looking after
the welfare of his own colleague, finding out who had him shot, and,
after Ross dies without regaining consciousness, switching to a third
priority: pretending Ross is still alive and in hiding in order to draw
the killers out into the open instead of letting Chalmers shut down the
case. Although Bullitt’s view seems both narrower and more punitive,
viewers never fail to adopt it as their own, treating Chalmers throughout
the film as a thorn in the side of Bullitt’s more high-minded idealism.
This problem does not arise in The French Connection because
Friedkin’s film makes such a clear distinction between Popeye’s finely
honed detective intuitions and his lack of conscience that audiences
have no trouble distinguishing between his professional heroism and
his social bankruptcy. The problem is central to Dirty Harry, but it is
more simply resolved by the film’s contention that laws arising from
the Miranda ruling have unfairly hamstrung law-enforcement officials
who, whatever their excesses, deserve better laws to enforce. Dirty
Harry may load its cop’s case against a dangerously liberal judiciary,
but it is essentially a logical case.
Bullitt, by contrast, establishes its police hero’s moral credentials
more indirectly, for example, by reserving to him the role of detective
along with the customary role of avenger. Although the film shows the
faces of the hit men early on, it does not reveal who hired them, or
how their employer knew where to find Johnny Ross. Keeping this
information secret is crucial to the film’s sympathetic presentation
of Bullitt, for it makes him, like Hercule Poirot and J. J. Gittes, the only
character who is committed to finding out the truth the film tantalizingly
withholds from the audience.
More pervasively, the film invites audiences to side with Bullitt
through a visual logic that builds on the contrast between darkly deceptive
Chicago and sunny, scenic, but equally violent San Francisco.
Even in his first, and his only cordial, scene with Chalmers, Bullitt is
set against the oily political climber and his equally well-dressed party
guests by his informal black turtleneck, nondescript jacket, and rumpled
raincoat. If Chalmers is clearly identified with a sanctimonious
upper class, however, Bullitt’s proletarian status is far more ambiguous
than that of his fictional prototype, Lt. Clancy. The film gives him
an improbably beautiful and exotic girlfriend as a mark of his sophistication.
Just before the attack on Johnny Ross, Bullitt and Cathy
(Jacqueline Bisset) enjoy an evening at the Coffee Cantata in a sublimely
1960s dinner-date sequence that showcases Bullitt as a man
who, despite his proletarian job, can appreciate the finer things in life.
Clearly he is a political outsider by choice and temperamental inclination,
not by maladjustment, inadequacy, or social deprivation.
A closer look at Bullitt’s body (one the film is happy to provide
through a much greater number of full shots than any other character
gets) shows that he is not Chalmers’s opposite but rather a uniquely
pansocial figure who alone can mediate between the untrustworthy
world of political power Chalmers represents and the equally treacherous
lowlife world of Johnny Ross, the fleabag hotel where Chalmers
stashes him, and the unnamed hit men (the only characters in the film
even more laconic than Bullitt) who come after him. Straddling the
space between equally dangerous enemies above and below him on
the social scale would seem to be a perilous activity, yet Bullitt seems
completely at home in his job, largely because he seems so completely
at home in his body. After introducing him in bed, the film shows him
in the first of many full shots, sleepy but eminently self-contained,
wearing camouflage pajamas that identify him with American soldiers
dutifully fighting the politicians’ war in Vietnam while erasing any specific
marks of his own social class. Bullitt might seem scarcely more
civilized than Popeye Doyle when he purchases a pile of frozen TV
dinners at a local grocery store, ignoring a produce sign that says
“fresh today.” But his purposeful movements in stacking the dinners,
reflected later in the rows of sweaters neatly arranged in his apartment,
are so graceful and economical that he avoids the specifically
proletarian associations of Popeye’s primitive home life or Harry Callahan’s
Robert Hall outfits.
The narrow line Bullitt walks between proletarianism and saintly
purity is challenged most sharply not by Chalmers, whose attempts
to seize the moral high ground are undermined by his own transparently
self-serving hypocrisy, but by Cathy, whose pointed questions
to her lover after she has stumbled over a female corpse Bullitt has
found in San Mateo in his investigation of Ross’s movements (“Do you
let anything reach you – really reach you? Or are you so used to it by
now that nothing really touches you? . . . How can you be part of it
without becoming more and more callous? Your world is so far from
the one I know. What will happen to us in time?”) mark the only time
anyone ever penetrates Bullitt’s still façade even momentarily. Often
gruff but never raising his voice, he keeps his distance from other
characters by maintaining a self-contained silence. Building on Mc-
Queen’s legendary screen persona of stoic understatement, the film,
for all the excitement of its action sequences, presents Bullitt’s normal
mode as the Zenlike repose of the tightrope walker, so that his silence,
which resonates throughout several long sequences without dialogue,
again seems to express deliberate choice rather than inarticulateness
or social incapacity. When his partner Det. Sgt. Delgetti (Don Gordon)
first arrives at Bullitt’s apartment with his assignment, the two men
exchange hardly a word because they do not need to talk. Later, Bullitt
looks steadily into the eyes of Stanton’s wife over his hospital bed,
but he says nothing because there is nothing to say. Stanton was betrayed,
but not by Bullitt, who is committed to doing everything he
can, even if it means breaking the law, to find and punish the killers.
The complex nature of the audience’s attachment to Bullitt – the
combination of admiration for his dedication, acceptance of his hooded
emotional remoteness, dependence on his detective powers, hatred
of his enemies, and respect for his physical self-possession that
the film invites – is essential to the success of the film’s most famous
addition to Pike’s novel, a car chase over the hills of San Francisco.
Although this chase both lacks the kinetic intensity and the moral
complexity of the chase sequence in The French Connection, it illustrates
even better than William Friedkin’s sequence why car chases
have been staples of police films from “G” Men to RoboCop, from White
Heat to Heat.
Of all the different kinds of crime film, police films depend most on
establishing ongoing moral tensions that need to be periodically dissipated.
Pitting good cops against evil killers allows the audience to take
sides unreflectively, waiving for the moment the more complex problems
that are raised, for instance, by the conflict between Bullitt’s and
Chalmers’s views of the law. Moreover, police films feature a hero who
is always potentially in danger, so that the dangers of the chase express
the dangers implicit in every move the hero makes, as in the
suspenseful earlier episode in which Bullitt chases one of the killers
through the hospital basement while trying to avoid getting killed himself
[Fig. 57]. Police films can use chases to remind the audience of
the closeness between the police heroes and the world they are protecting,
from the nightscapes of Chicago to the hills of San Francisco,
even as they exploit that world’s potential as an exotic mise-en-scène.
Police films, emphasizing questions of power over questions of knowledge,
can use chases to dramatize the difficulties of catching identifiable
criminals, or to transform the question of whodunit into the
question of “howcatchem”9 by having the chase reveal the criminals’
identities. Police films permit extended chases between criminals who
cannot afford to be captured and police pursuers who will take thrill-
ing risks to capture them because they are all too used to cutting legal
corners in the course of their job.
Yates controls the tension of Bullitt’s chase sequence not only by
prolonging it to ten minutes without dialogue but by dividing it into
four distinct segments: (1) the two minutes during which the killers
tail Bullitt’s car to a menacing saxophone cue; (2) the one minute of
cat-and-mouse reversal after Bullitt shakes them and turns up behind
them; (3) the three minutes, signaled by the cutting off of the music
in a roar of revving engines, of Bullitt’s high-speed pursuit of the hit
57. Bullitt: The athletic hero (Steve McQueen) chases his ostensible enemy
through the hospital.
men through city streets, accompanied only by diegetic sound effects
that emphasize the physical immediacy of the chase without telling
viewers how to feel about it; and (4) the four minutes after the two
cars leave the city’s hills for a highway on which they must swerve to
avoid oncoming cars while trading shots and trying to run each other
off the road. The sequence depends throughout on the contrast
between the hit men’s anonymous black sedan and Bullitt’s stylish
Mustang, which functions as an extension of his body – tenacious, vulnerable
to gunfire, but as triumphantly youthful, individual, and charismatic
as James Bond’s Aston Martin.
The effect of this sequence is express and relieve through a physical
catharsis the moral and psychological tension of the film’s conflict
between Bullitt and the absent Chalmers and to dispel the threat
posed by the two killers, but at the same time to preserve and intensify
the mystery of who hired them and how they knew where to find
Ross. From beginning to end, the chase is structured by a progressive
simplification, as the deceptively subtle tailing of each party by the
other yields to the no-holds-barred chase that rejects deception for
lethal force.10 This progression tells audiences it is time, and suggests
that it is morally appropriate, to exchange the ethical subtleties of Bullitt’s
argument with Chalmers about moral responsibility for the simpler
satisfactions of rooting for the good guy against the bad guys,
even as the final image of the burning gunmen preserves the mystery
of how they got to Johnny Ross. The chase sequence transforms viewers’
experience from the ideational commitment of rooting for Bullitt
to the kinesthetic sensation of holding their breath on his account
without resolving the moral problems implicit in identifying with law
enforcers rather than lawmakers.
Although the film will provide Bullitt with still another extended
chase after his ultimate prey – the wily Johnny Ross, who paid a double
he intended to have killed at the Hotel Reynolds to throw both the
mob and the law off his trail – the film’s unsettlingly wordless epilogue,
its most audacious addition to (or subtraction from) the crime genre,
deprives the film of its obligatory conclusion, the detective hero’s explanation
of the evidence. The closest to such an explanation the film
comes is Bullitt’s earlier riposte to Chalmers’s demand for a public
statement from him that Ross died in Bullitt’s custody: “You sent us
to guard the wrong man, Mr. Chalmers.”
The film’s true climax is not Bullitt’s killing of Johnny Ross or his
nonexplanation of the mystery, but his final confrontation with the
unapologetic Chalmers, who attempts to press his claim on the tarnished
Ross’s testimony by telling Bullitt that even though his star witness
has now been proved a killer who faked his own death, he is still
determined to get him to testify [Fig. 58]. “The Organization – several
murders – could all do us both a great deal of good,” he adds. “We both
know how careers are made. Integrity is something you sell the public.
. . . We must all compromise,” with a scorchingly quiet reply: “Bullshit.
Get the hell out of here now.” By this time, Bullitt’s emphatic rhetoric
(the word “bullshit” was rarely heard in 1968 movies) on behalf
of the pancultural cachet of law enforcement over the rule of law the
film reserves to the gratingly upper-class Chalmers and his minions is
backed by the dangerous physical actions that gives his words their
authority.
Why should viewers trust such an enduringly laconic and selfcontained
hero rather than his superiors and counterparts in the legislature
and judiciary? The film gives him an integrity it denies his superiors,
a personal concern for his professional colleagues, and just
enough proletarian markers to establish him as a working stiff doing
his job even as it glamorizes the hero, his hometown, and his job at
58. Bullitt: The self-contained hero (Steve McQueen) confronts his real enemy,
the hypocritical prosecutor (Robert Vaughn), at the airport.
any number of strategic moments. Like films from “G” Men to One
False Move, Bullitt, with its hero who is both emphatically middle-class
and essentially classless, links the contrary drives toward individual
empowerment and communal welfare it is the work of the police film
to unite.
Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org
+crime+films+film+noir.jpg)
