|
The title comes from a canting Nixon speech, where the promise is to "make America right again." Kansas City, MO, black community and white police station. Mugshots in rapid succession, then interviews with bewildered suspects and applicants not quite sure why they want to join the force. "Could you shoot someone if you had to?" Domestic disturbances bracket the compendium, the officers at the scene make for ineffective mediators, short on understanding or sympathy or anything other than punishment. The juvenile thief is slammed on the car hood (handcuffs can't muzzle his defiant litany of profanities), the drunkard on the lawn is rolled over and thrown into the paddy wagon. "Go ahead, resist," the young prostitute is told as she gasps for air in a headlock, the TV set secretes soap-opera music while her room is searched. Frederick Wiseman on the blue line, the Miranda rights are a new invention and the '68 riot is a fresh wound. Busts, interrogations, downtime chatter about pay and unused tear gas. One older woman gets her purloined purse returned empty, another is aided in a dispute with a cabbie that plays like back-and-forth vaudeville. In the middle of her booking, a pugnacious matron shares a laugh with the cops over a question about her weight. "Nothin' but a rookie! Flatfoot!" A lost little girl receives the best treatment, candy from a vending machine plus a playpen with toys. Riding along on the passenger seat, the camera peers through the windshield on a night patrol for smeary neon lights. The reformist's growing ambiguity still paints a bleak picture, society's guardians as hapless referees in ongoing quandaries. "It's ridiculous, sure. But there's nothing we can do about it." Fleisher's The New Centurions takes up the existential procedural. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |