Police Brutality

By J.C.

FUZZ

Directed by RICHARD COLLA

Screenplay by EVAN HUNTER

As any devotee of detective fiction knows, the most famous police station in the country is Author Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, where the cops are gruff, sentimental and occasionally fallible, but almost always good at their jobs. Fuzz is based on a blotter full of their exploits, but if the boys at the 87th ever see it, they'll have an open and shut case of criminal impersonation on their hands.

The cops in Fuzz are the Keystone variety: louts and lovable fumblers who succeed at their work mostly out of dumb luck. The precinct has been transplanted from McBain's unnamed megalopolis to Boston for reasons that have little to do with milieu; the producers found it too expensive to shoot the film in New York. The shabby station house is cluttered with a couple of painters from whom Director Colla is grimly determined to wring laughs. As the cops struggle to do their duty, the painters contrive to get in the way whenever possible, straddling desks with stepladders and dropping green globules of paint on whoever happens to be passing below.

Most of the comedy stays at this slapdash level. Raquel Welch, looking as ever like a performer hired to entertain visiting conventioneers, plays a policewoman assigned to bag a rapist who is prowling the parks. There is a dizzying number of other subplots, most of which revolve clumsily around the 87th's efforts to bring to justice a sinister saboteur (Yul Brynner) who threatens to extinguish the mayor.

One is grateful for the presence of actors who can make all this at least momentarily diverting. Tom Skerritt, as a young but already jaded detective, looks like a stoned-out combination of Jack Nicholson and Elisha Cook Jr. The late Steve Ihnat (TIME, May 29), a cop down to his white socks and rumpled plaid shirt, is required at one point to shoot himself in the foot with his police special, an ancient bit of business that he contrives to make fresh. The hero of the film, if there is one, is Burt Reynolds, who displays an enviable sense of comic timing and a shrewd sense of self-parody. One scene in which Reynolds and his partner (Jack Weston) attempt a cross-examination while dressed in nuns' habits is so funny that it be longs in another movie.

The real culprit behind Fuzz is Screenwriter Hunter. He should have known better. After all, he has written some good books under the name of Ed McBain.

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