Robert Duvall is one of my favorite people to watch on screen. He doesn't have a tremendously deep bag of tricks, but he's serious and earnest and I hope he keeps working for a long, long time. I say this partly because he's good and he has some more penance to do to make up for Badge 373, a perfect zero of a cops and robbers flick.
What was Duvall thinking when he made this clichéd glob of TVish trash? He was coming off the glory of The Godfather. Did he just sign anything he could get his hands on thinking that with his stellar performance as Tom Hagen, people would flock to see him in anything? There's absolutely nothing likable about this movie. I enjoyed the big, muscular cars of the early 70's, but that's not enough to keep one's attention span from snapping pretty darn quickly. The cinematography was lifeless, the color was garish, the pacing and plotting and canned music were all dull, and there wasn't a single person, plot device, or line of dialogue that was the slightest bit interesting.
I didn't care about Duvall's Eddie Ryan. The only character who even showed up on my radar was Verna Bloom, Ryan's girlfriend. She's a big, painted zoftig woman who looks utterly different in High Plains Drifter and Animal House. I liked her, but all she can do is squeal her Brooklyn accent, get hurt by Eddie, and die dramatically.
The rest of the movie is just so much clichéd nonsense with one scene stacked on top another, giving Duvall a chance to spurt racial epithets, threaten revenge for his murdered partner (Oh, you didn't see it coming that Ryan's partner gets killed early on? Duh!), get thumped in a ludicrous bus/Puerto Rican gangster chase scene, practice to shoot with his left hand, drive some really cool Dodges and Plymouths, and have the worst case of thought bubble flashbacks to remind him and us why he's just going to have to blast the head bad guy when he corners him on some sort of crane.
Howard Koch did some really good work in his career; here he directs an astonishingly bad mixture of R-rated cop movie and TV drama. The whole thing just looks so cheap and silly and you have to wonder just how many good movies Duvall will still need to make to cleanse his soul of the sin of Badge 373.
What was Duvall thinking when he made this clichéd glob of TVish trash? He was coming off the glory of The Godfather. Did he just sign anything he could get his hands on thinking that with his stellar performance as Tom Hagen, people would flock to see him in anything? There's absolutely nothing likable about this movie. I enjoyed the big, muscular cars of the early 70's, but that's not enough to keep one's attention span from snapping pretty darn quickly. The cinematography was lifeless, the color was garish, the pacing and plotting and canned music were all dull, and there wasn't a single person, plot device, or line of dialogue that was the slightest bit interesting.
I didn't care about Duvall's Eddie Ryan. The only character who even showed up on my radar was Verna Bloom, Ryan's girlfriend. She's a big, painted zoftig woman who looks utterly different in High Plains Drifter and Animal House. I liked her, but all she can do is squeal her Brooklyn accent, get hurt by Eddie, and die dramatically.
The rest of the movie is just so much clichéd nonsense with one scene stacked on top another, giving Duvall a chance to spurt racial epithets, threaten revenge for his murdered partner (Oh, you didn't see it coming that Ryan's partner gets killed early on? Duh!), get thumped in a ludicrous bus/Puerto Rican gangster chase scene, practice to shoot with his left hand, drive some really cool Dodges and Plymouths, and have the worst case of thought bubble flashbacks to remind him and us why he's just going to have to blast the head bad guy when he corners him on some sort of crane.
Howard Koch did some really good work in his career; here he directs an astonishingly bad mixture of R-rated cop movie and TV drama. The whole thing just looks so cheap and silly and you have to wonder just how many good movies Duvall will still need to make to cleanse his soul of the sin of Badge 373.