Welcome back for my offering to this week's Tuesday's Forgotten Film/TV/audio-visual treat. This week I discuss the 1973 crime comedy Cops and Robbers.
The film stars Cliff Gorman and Joseph Bologna as two NYC policeman who are burnt out on the job and are tired of seeing heartless crooks benefit from their crimes while honest joes like them struggle. They therefore decide to become criminals themselves. They don't want to make a lifelong committment to it, however. They want to make one huge score that will set them for life, deciding to steal $10 million in untraceable bonds for a mafioso. As is always the case with these sorts of things, plans go awry. What becomes of our two antiheroes?
I'm not sure you'll be able to find out. According to Amazon, the last DVD release was in 2003, and I'm not certain it's still in print, but I'm sure you can get a used copy in the usual places. I only saw the film once a few years ago, and it was throroughly entertaining, and mixes comedy with tension well. I was surprised to learn in my research that the script was written by Todd Mason favorite Donald E. Westlake, adapted from his own novel.
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6 comments:
Yes, it's hard to wrong with a Westlake script that hasn't been messed over...in fact, even the adaptations of Westlake's fiction, sometimes with relatively weak scripts by others, usually turn out better than might be expected...
Oddly enough, home video versions released of the film are allegedly the edited for TV version rather than the theatrical version.
The film I was thinking of specifically was CRACKERS (1984), a Louis Malle-directed film that feels so much like it was an adaptation of a Dortmunder-series novel or story (and pays homage by naming its Dortmunderesque figure "Weslake"), that I assumed it was...but apparently no.
That's some lazy work at the studio! "Why bother transferring/remastering the film to video, when we already have a tv print master?"
This sucker sounds fun.
Evan: it is indeed.
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