The Laughing Policeman

The Laughing Policeman debuted in theaters in 1973, two years after The French Connection. The impact of William Friedkin's 1971 cop thriller still reverberated around Hollywood, obviously. Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern star in Laughing Policeman as two laconic, occasionally violent San Francisco cops trying to solve the messy case of a mass murder on a city bus. Their story unfolds in a variety of seemy locations awash in prostitutes, junkies, pimps, hookers and drug dealers, and methods reflect the hopeless urban decay around them. It's not a nice, happy, uplifting kind of movie. As Bruce Dern's detective complains at one point, "The nice cop on the beat has turned into a pig."

He's talking there of the public perception of police officers; they can't do their job any more because they public doesn't trust them like they once did. And maybe part of this goes back to the media's presentation of cops, which in the 50's had generally reflected admiration. 70's cop movies reflected a certain level of disdain and a recognition of the racism, sexism and overall disregard for the common man circulating throughout the police force in many urban areas. Think of Popeye Doyle's constant racial epithets and disdain for black suspects. In Laughing Policeman, we instead have Lou Gossett in an early role as a black detective attempting (with woefully poor results) to bridge the divide between the urban dwellers and the cops who move among them.

So, though in many ways Laughing Policeman works best as a procedural, a whodunnit with a surprisingly complicated backstory, it's also a fascinating touchstone in the history of police in movies. It's a hyperreal image of the tough inner-city cop - he's not just in touch with the seemy underbelly of San Francisco, he revels in it, he becomes a part of it, he's inextricably linked to the crime and perversion that go on nightly downtown.



Which makes the casting of Matthau and Dern in the lead roles so ingenious. They're both likable guys given roles that are grim, determined and most of all distant. These are funny people intentionally stripping away every ounce of good humor and charm from their personas. Dern gets a few fun scenes in away from police work (including a delightful scene in which he flirts shamelessly with a nurse whom he's interrogating), but when these guys are on the case, it's all business.

It's unexpected to see Matthau not play a lovable cad. In his previous film, the awe-inspiring Don Seigel crime classic Charley Varrick, he played a bank robber, but he was an especially clever, deft, likable bank robber who only committed heists because his crop dusting business never took off. As SFPD Detective Jack Martin, he's an empty shell, a man who amounts to nothing other than being good at his job. It's established early on in the film that he has a family only so he can ignore them. His distaste for the criminals he arrests and pursues is matched only by his distaste for his superiors down at the precinct.

Martin and his new partner Inspector Leo Larsen (Dern) are instructed to follow-up on a horrific mass murder. A man walked on to a San Francisco city bus with a high-powered machine gun and killed every person on board. One of the victims is Martin's old partner, who was supposed to be taking vacation time off from police work. Why would he have been on that bus? Could this have any connection to an unsolved case from 2 years ago that has always haunted Jack?

The film structurally resembles an episode of "Law & Order." Martin and Larsen go around the city, interviewing people connected to anyone who died on that bus. They make a few thin connections, but Laughing Policeman refuses to show only the highlights of the investigation. Jack and Leo track down several leads that go absolutely nowhere, including an extended search for a drug dealer who may or may be connected to a junkie who died in the shooting.

The plot gets extremely complicated, and though I suspect it all links up in the end somehow, I became less concerned with how the puzzle fits together by the conclusion. The movie's as much about the hopelessness inherent in police work than anything else. I was reminded of the scene in Seven in which Morgan Freeman's and Brad Pitt's characters wait for evidence overnight on a bench. They debate the utility of police - whether they really solve crimes and make the city safer, or whether they just clean up after horrible incidents and record what happened.

I was reminded of that conversation during Laughing Policeman frequently. Even Larsen and Martin seem largely unconcerned with solving the case. Martin's more hung up on working out the guilt he feels for his dead partner, and Larsen's just making time until retirement when he can collect his pension. The facts add up or they don't. Either way, everyone's still dead, and they have to come back to the office tomorrow and start again on some other case.

Additionally, I haven't mentioned director Stuart Rosenberg's terrific sense of timing and action. Like French Connection, Laughing Policeman is a taut, gripping action film as well as a cop movie. A late sequence in which Larsen and Martin tail a bus through San Francisco features one of the great car chases of the era. It's reminiscent of Bullitt, obviously, as any car chase through SF has been since that film's release, but it manages to bring some new angles to the table. Also of note: the film has a nuanced understanding of the nature of surveillance. We follow Martin and Larsen on several stakeouts, and Rosenberg constantly gives us new ways to understand their methods of following without being seen.

He had previously directed Cool Hand Luke before sliding into obscurity with a string of flops. This film announced Rosenberg's return to Hollywood. He'd go on to make notable if lackluster films including The Amityville Horror, Brubaker and The Pope of Greenwich Village.