The Laughing Policeman (1973)

This film is based on one of an excellent series of detective stories set in the authors' native Sweden. Much of the interest of the books is their setting. Although they have the usual virtues of good detective stories, they are also a commentary on modern life in Sweden. I was therefore eager to see this film when it came out.Unfortunately, for inexplicable reasons the setting has been changed to San Francisco. This completely spoils it. Sometimes such a change is interesting or has no real effect, but in this case it destroys much of the interest of the film. We are left with a rather dull American police story.

I just got back from San Francisco and decided to watch this again. To my surprise, I liked it much more the second time.Make no mistake, this is not a great flick, but it is an interesting one. There are a ton of false leads in the beginning of the movie and we don't even get to the meat of the plot - the killer, for instance - until way into the running time. If you like logical and linear plots, this one will disappoint.But there a couple of very good points. First, the ensemble cast is great. The range of characters keeps things interesting. Lou Gossett, Jr. gets a very meaty part before disappearing. Joanna Cassidy is also good in a brief role.The highlight of the film is the relationship between Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern. Dern gets to play an early non-psycho but he is a total jerk. Yet by the end of the film you wind up liking him. Matthau is worse - he never smiles and is totally cut off from his fellow officers and his family. He can't even confront his teenage son. Watching these two make an uneasy truce and develop a relationship is what the movie really is about.The bad news is that, except for the opening sequence, the action scenes are flat - not terrible, just flat. There are a lot of loose ends floating through the plot and characters disappear at random.Perhaps most interesting is the parallel between this film's style and the Italian Giallo genre going on a the same time. The black gloved killer, the grim detective, even the plot holes would be right at place in an Argento movie from 1973, not a Hollywood film.Worth two looks.

One terrible night in San Francisco in the mid seventies, a man who had a terrible secret to hide and a high position from which to tumble from took a machine gun and massacred everyone on a city bus. Of course this gets all the SFPD Homicide Squad working on it.Partnered together for convenience are Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern. Matthau's partner is one of the dead passengers and he's single minded in his pursuit. Dern and he don't really get along. I've a feeling they wouldn't have under normal circumstances, but they do manage to work together.The Laughing Policeman is as one reviewer said is a nice view of San Francisco in the early seventies. All that seemed to be missing was Candlestick Park. I was in San Francisco in 2000 and I recognized a lot of it myself.Matthau and Dern fill their roles well. Matthau is somewhat against type, a lot of the laconic humor that characterized him on screen is missing here. Dern is not the most admirable character in the world. He's a harbinger of what we later got on NYPD Blue with Andy Sipowicz. One would hope he might have grown in character over the years as Sipowicz did.Anthony Zerbe heads the Homicide Squad and Lou Gossett, Jr. and Val Avery are also detectives working on this. They fit the police roles well.Funny how life does imitate art. In just a few years Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone would be assassinated, there would be riots with verdict of that trial, and Jim Jones who had his operation in San Francisco before moving to Guiana and mass suicide. The real happenings for San Francisco made this bus shooting seem like nothing.

Eight people are killed on a San Francisco bus by a greasegun-toting maniac, and one of the victims happens to be a cop who was supposed to be somewhere else. The combination of mass murder and losing one of their own sends the SFPD scrambling for quick answers, so they send out Bruce Dern and the dead policeman's former partner (Walter Matthau) to piece it all together.OK, that covers the first 10-15 minutes of film, and it's the only part of this 2 hour fiasco that makes any bit of sense.From this point on, the film turns into a jumbled, boring mess, filled with endless red herrings involving deviant sex, pimps, hookers, drug addicts and weirdos in general. No matter how closely you follow things and everything appears to lead nowhere, somehow the two detectives pull clues (and not very good ones at that) seemingly out of the air. This cyclical nonsense keeps rolling almost to the end, when finally, the policemen kinda/sorta/maybe think they have their man. In following the tone of all that's come before, the suspect conveniently makes a quick succession of unbelievably stupid moves to bring this impossible-to-follow disaster to a shoehorned-in conclusion. As if all that's not bad enough, we get to see what would normally be a solid cast looking pretty weak. Matthau seems as utterly bored as the rest of us, Dern's usual maniacal glee gets twisted into goofiness, and everybody else ends up stuck being colorless backdrop.I normally enjoy just about any gritty 70's police flick, but "The Laughing Policeman" doesn't even come close to making the grade. Please- Don't waste your time.