Busting

Lumet's Serpico is the mainstay, Rush's Freebie and the Bean and Parks' The Super Cops are concurrent. An eruption of the sordid into the antiseptic kicks things off, the call girl's appointment in the dentist's office gives way to rumpled vice detectives smashing through her ritzy penthouse. Elliott Gould chews gum behind Zappa fuzz while Robert Blake works a dangling cigarette, between them a continuous seedy soft-shoe, just the police Los Angeles deserves. The underworld bigwig (Allen Garfield) sizes them up: "Captain Marvel, saving the world by busting ten-dollar hookers." The vulnerable are preyed upon while the powerful remain untouchable, a graffiti-scrawled bathroom is the punitive beat, taking on the drug ring means going rogue. "We're so fucking alone in this thing, it ain't even a joke." Peter Hyams with accesses of nervous bravura to point up the hopeless situation, a razzing veneer over a sea of bleakness. A melee in the scarlet gay club yields to emerald neon glimpsed through a shattered window, a prowling tour of a hotel room's nocturnal blues reveals a nest of dope pushers behind the illuminated door and continues down the stairs and across the sidewalks. (The marketplace shootout is expanded from Lewis' The Undercover Man, and epitomizes the remarkable use of editing via swift camera movement.) Amid all the noise, a painfully touching snapshot of a cross-dressing couple facing derisive laughter in the courtroom. "I don't know, maybe we should quit." "I think you're right. We could be good bad guys, you know? Pays better... better hours... more cooperation from the police." The difference between the freeze-frame ending and that of Hyams' upbeat rehash in Running Scared is the difference between the Seventies and the Eighties. With John Lawrence, Cornelia Sharpe, William Sylvester, Antonio Fargas, Sid Haig, Logan Ramsey, Richard X. Slattery, and Michael Lerner.