Sour Notes

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE CHOIRBOYS Directed by Robert Aldrich Screenplay by Christopher Knopf

Choir practice, according to Policeman turned Novelist Joseph Wambaugh, is a harness-bull euphemism for what cops do together off duty to relieve the tensions of their enervating jobs. It appears to consist mainly of boozing, wenching and venting gripes against their superiors and the semimilitary system in which they toil. It follows that the participants in these raunchy revels are The Choirboys. The movie of the same title just got in under the New Year's Day wire as 1977's most repulsive release, but Hollywood will have to go some to top it in '78.

Wambaugh has dissociated himself from Robert Aldrich's film, but its spirit is really not that far from his novel's.

The intention in both cases is to demonstrate that cops are human too -- vulgar, shady, resentful of authority, un feeling at precisely those moments when they need to show some sensitivity. But, of course, there is more to being human than that, and the interrelated short sto ries of the book had about them the air of artless anecdote. They were tales that might have been funny if you'd been there, but that turned flat and ugly in the retelling.

The movie is even farther removed from its realistic sources. It amounts to a lot of stupid dirty jokes among a group of men who demonstrate not a single redeeming, or even contrasting characteristic. An exception might be Charles Durning playing a weary, overweight cop fighting to keep a rebellious tongue in check until he can collect his pension.

The rest are sadists, masochists, sneaks, morons, arrested adolescents, vile companions for a two-hour journey. Aldrich has shot them all in a harsh, flat light that matches his essentially pornographic spirit, and he has directed without nu ance, jerking the movie to fitful life with occasional shocks -- a beating here, a mur der there, over in the corner some sick, sad sex.

Howard Hawks, the director who made a distinguished subgenre about the affectionate feelings of men functioning in groups to perform dangerous tasks, died a few days after this film's release.

One trusts that he did not see how, in the '70s, his great and characteristically American movie theme has been debased in this film.

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