In a sentencePaul Newman walks the beat for two hours and the story never turns up to be arrested
The South Bronx, 1981. The 41st Precinct is so far behind enemy lines that the men who work there call it Fort Apache. Two rookie officers sit in a patrol car; a woman in a red dress, Charlotte (Pam Grier), walks up, smiles, and shoots them both dead. Murphy (Paul Newman), a veteran patrolman past being surprised by anything, and his partner Corelli (Ken Wahl) answer the call. A new commander, Connolly (Ed Asner), means to clean up the precinct and the streets with it, starting with mass arrests. Murphy, who knows the neighbourhood, thinks that will set it alight. Between shifts he delivers a baby in a tenement flat and starts seeing Isabella (Rachel Ticotin), a hospital nurse. Morgan (Danny Aiello) watches from the squad room.
Daniel Petrie sets Paul Newman loose in the burnt-out South Bronx and gets a fine, tired, decent performance out of him. What he does not get is a story: the film is a string of shifts, some of them shocking, none of them adding up to a case.
Fort Apache, the Bronx has a place, a man and no plot, and it takes about half an hour to notice that the third thing is missing. Daniel Petrie directs from a script by Heywood Gould, working from a story by Pete Tessitore and Thomas Mulhearn, and what they have made is a week in the life of a precinct rather than a film about anything that happens in it. The opening tells you otherwise. Two rookies in a patrol car, a woman in a red dress, two shots, and the camera does not flinch. We were shaken by it, and we were ready for a picture that would be about those two dead boys. It is not, or not for long.
Paul Newman is the reason to sit through the rest. He plays Murphy as a man who has stopped expecting the job to make sense and keeps himself upright with jokes, most of them at his own expense. He is best when the film gives him a room and a problem: a flat with no electricity and a girl in labour on the floor, a man with a knife on a tenement stair who needs talking down rather than shooting. Newman does these scenes quietly, with his hands, and he never once asks us to admire him. It is a performance built out of fatigue, and it is one of the least vain things he did.
Pam Grier gets the other great piece of acting and about ten minutes to do it in. Her Charlotte kills with a kind of lightness, humming, half-smiling, and the film is at its most frightening whenever she drifts into frame. Then it loses interest in her. The murders that open the picture should be its spine; instead they float to the edge and are dealt with almost as an afterthought.
John Alcott shoots the Bronx in flat winter light, grey sky over empty lots, bricks and burnt timber where streets used to be, and he resists making any of it beautiful. That is the right choice and it holds the film together more than the script does. Ben Edwards gives the station house chipped green paint, a wire cage and a desk sergeant buried in paper, and John Boxer keeps Newman in a windcheater that looks slept in. Jonathan Tunick scores it sparingly, and most of the time the sirens do the work.
The trouble is shape. Rita Roland cuts the film as a sequence of shifts: a call, an incident, a drink, another call. Gould keeps starting threads, Connolly’s crackdown, Morgan’s temper, the romance with Isabella, and lets them run alongside one another without ever pulling on them. Ed Asner is given one note, the by-the-book commander, and plays it well enough, but he is a position rather than a person. Ken Wahl is a sidekick with a grin. Rachel Ticotin is good in a part written in shorthand; she and Newman have an ease together that the film notices and then neglects.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe. This is the real material, and it is handled as one more incident on the roster. By then we were cross, because the film had shown us, in its first scene, that it could make us feel something, and had spent the following ninety minutes declining to try again.
The title borrows from John Ford’s 1948 Western, and the borrowing is the film’s one big idea. A garrison in hostile country, a tired sergeant, no cavalry coming: it opens with a card insisting it is about the police and not the people they police, and that is honest, because the neighbourhood is mostly scenery here. Against Serpico, which knew what its cop wanted, this feels like a photograph of a precinct with a story pinned on afterwards.
Worth an evening if Newman on a bad week in a worse place is enough for you, and for a while it nearly is. At 125 minutes there are three or four shifts more than it needs, and the 15 certificate covers one opening and one later scene that still land hard.
With only 5 reviews in so far, the lean is negative, and where the critics agree it is on the acting, Paul Newman in particular. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael calls his work vivid and assured and argues the film keeps holding him back, which is roughly the complaint elsewhere: good people in a weak story. Variety finds the plot patchy and the characters thinly motivated. The one firm supporter is Radio Times, which calls it a highly exciting thriller and singles out Pam Grier rather than Newman. The spread is wide, from a strong recommendation to a verdict of a fine chance wasted.
Jones gives the film a strong recommendation, calling it a highly exciting thriller. He singles out Pam Grier’s electric performance for praise.
Read the full review →The page did not expose the critic’s verdict. Its praise or criticism cannot be determined from the available text.
Read the full review →The review appears critical despite acknowledging Newman’s diligent performance. The available description singles out his performance for praise, but the rest of the verdict is truncated.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film patchy, with a weak story undermining its points. They praise the dialogue and acting, while faulting the film’s thinly motivated characters.
Read the full review →Kael finds the film a near-great opportunity squandered by weak storytelling and a lack of dramatic depth. She praises Paul Newman’s vivid, assured performance, which she says the movie repeatedly holds back.
Read the full review →
Serpico · not reviewed yetThe honest-cop picture this one keeps gesturing at, with a story that actually goes somewhere.
Hill Street BluesThe same crumbling precinct idea, given seven years to grow its people properly.
PolicePialat and Depardieu make the French version: tired, brutal, and interested in everyone.
Fort Apache · not reviewed yetFord’s original garrison in hostile country, and a sharper film about who the enemy is.
The Wire · not reviewed yetIf you wanted the neighbourhood to be people rather than scenery, here they are.
Free account
Two lists that know where things are streaming, collections you can share, your own score beside ours, and Discover that remembers what you have seen.
