Calling Howard Hawks

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

COPS AND ROBBERS

Directed by ARAM AVAKIAN Screenplay by DONALD E. WESTLAKE

"It only takes one good idea ..." So runs the old American saw about the old American dream of overnight wealth. Cops and Robbers is about a pair of the former (attractively played by Joseph Bologna and Cliff Gorman) who turn into the latter in order to lift themselves out of their installment-plan lives as neighbors in a Queens culdesac. Although they fail to score on their prime target, a vaultful of bearer bonds in a Wall Street brokerage house, they finally lay a solid hit on a secondary target of opportunity--the Mafia--and walk off chortling.

The viewer is less fortunate. It may still be possible to get rich off a single idea, but it has never been possible to get a feature's worth of laughs out of one. Indeed, it is doubtful that the cop-crook reversal even qualifies, at this late date, as a genuinely good idea. Even if it did, it would require the support of dozens more--plot twists, character revelations, surprising situations and, above all, gags, gags, gags--to make it work.

In all of these areas, Director Avakian and Writer Westlake (adapting his own novel) are too lazy.

In fact, Cops and Robbers would hardly be worth mentioning were it not so drearily typical of what passes for humor on the screen these days. It is true that we lack clowns of legendary status, but that is not really the problem; given something to do, actors like Bologna and Gorman would do it very nicely. The trouble is a lack of literate lunatics like, say, Hecht and MacArthur among the screenwriters; a lack of directors like, say, Howard Hawks, who can get to the point and then stick to it until the last laugh has been squeezed out. Sometimes such people tried to cram too much into too small a space. But it is far easier --and more fun--for the moviegoer to try to absorb too much than to try to keep his spirit up while hiking through a blank space.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.