By the late 1960s urban crime was rampant. In 1969, in Harlem, I had a pistol shoved in my face by two twelve-year-old kids who demanded my money, as if I had any. Nobody in Hollywood knew exactly how to deal with it. "Dirty Harry" in 1971 finally broke the ice, if only by addressing the problem in a paradisiacal setting and by turning the perp into a whining serial killer. "Serpico" was dirtier than Harry and dealt with corruption in the police hierarchy. That was 1972. This is 1974 and Ron Liebman and David Selby are two cops who are impatient with the bureaucratic rules, just as Dirty Harry was, and who face racial problems, which neither Harry nor Serpico did.
In its essence, it's a more textured film. It's one thing to fight a serial killer or against determined police corruption. The good guy is good and the bad guys are bad. It's another to fight bureaucratic inertia. The enemy is established but nebulous. How do you begin? Liebman and Selby are cocky young rebels even when they are rookies in the NYPD and on probation. They bust drug dealers when they're off duty, and although the number of their collars grows, so does the paperwork, both for them and for the others in their precinct. Nobody likes a rate buster. They make everyone else look slow and lazy.
The mad sociologist Max Weber described the transfer of labor from small businesses like farming and shoe making to large bureaucratic organizations like Standard Oil at the turn of the century. Bureaucracies worked very well because it was, ideally, a meritocracy and the lines of authority were strictly drawn. But forty years later, another sociologist, Robert K. Merton, observed that there was a major flaw in bureaucracies. If you stick your neck out by taking risks, you get your head chopped off.
If you want promotions, smooth sailing, and a comfortable retirement, you keep your head down and do no more than what the formal rules require. You lose sight of the bureaucracy's goals and concentrate instead on doing what everyone else does -- avoiding responsibility in case something goes wrong. There is a character in "The Good Soldier Schweik" who follows army rules to the letter and by doing so almost brings the war to a complete halt. Merton called it bureaucratic ritualism but we can call it covering your arse or CYA.
No ritualist becomes a rate buster. It's bad news for the bureaucracy and what's bad news for the institution soon becomes bad news for the rate buster. The senior cops assign Liebman and Selby to menial tasks like directing traffic and typing office memos.
However, they prevail in the face of precinct conspiracies to degrade them and in the end they get a promotion with an ironic footnote attached.
I don't mean to ramble on about bureaucracies but although they sound dull -- pathological even -- they're a fascinating subject because all of us have to deal with them in one way or another. Liebman and Selby don't break any of the rules but they demonstrate how informal customs come to be more important than the rules themselves. They may be super cops but others in their department report them to internal affairs for wearing sneakers instead of regulation shoes while chasing crooks.
As for the movie itself, Serpico's story had obviously been shaped to add commercial appeal, but this one appears mostly made up. I believe the two super cops ran into problems with their colleagues. I don't believe they hid themselves in an empty cardboard box, began singing a Pepsi-Cola commercial, and then leaped out, guns drawn, and cornered a gang of drug dealers.
This is a precursor to the kinds of action movies we commonly see today, in which, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger breaks somebody's neck while making a wisecrack. Of course, it has its serious moments and some scenes are packed with dramatic tension. But the overall emotional tonus is light-hearted.
Liebman is great. He's always great, and always Jewish in the most appealing way. It's his movie. Selby is more of a sidekick than a partner. He has an odd face too, something like an owl's, with large eyes, an oversized beak, and a tiny mouth beneath.
I enjoyed it, wisecracks and all, and I salute it for addressing a problem that is so shadowy that many of us can't even define it.
