THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Democrats had to choose what seemed at the time like So did the rest of the Democratic ticket, including the a sacrificial ticket to run for District Attorney and Con- nonentities opposing...
...In other words, they're peruneasy about the future...
...His last film released here, Money, who level with him are a black pimp and a pill-popping Money, Money, did use exactly the same plot structure hooker...
...His unfortuand respected as no other politician had been since John nate escapades beginning with the lie-detector test have F. Kennedy...
...For instance in The again, we finally figure out what the plot structure is Train Robbers, the last Wayne feature I saw, though and how events fit together...
...His constituency sagged its col- THE SCREEN lective shoulder...
...Philadelphia has a heavy Demofice in view of his close professional relationship with cratic registration majority...
...Far from make you start wondering about old John himself...
...In this film he not when a second van appears in traffic identical to the one only uses the same plot development for the third time McQ has been following, he gets all mixed up and in- in a row, but goes back to trying to develop characters stinctively goes after the wrong one...
...And as if the revelation that even for orthodox Philly politicos, and maybe not for national cops can't trust cops weren't enough, it next transpires representatives of the species either...
...McQ has a hunch that the biggest heroin rack- as the film before it...
...The guess is here that after than vice-versa...
...the force and takes his gun away, the film's director, Friends who are less dogged moviegoers than I enjoyed John Sturges, somehow contrives to get him another one, the film and thought me a bit too high-toned to be usually a bigger one...
...Rizzo wanted his own men slated...
...Camiel passed the test...
...Even by today's standards this is them," echoed through the taprooms and the pizzerias a pretty acrobatic plot so far, especially when you conof Kensington and Manayunk and South Philly...
...The White House incumbent, of Spector's to back the Spector-Gola team in November, no big sacri- party, turned off more...
...McQ must therefore learn, and learn to accept, the sordid On election day the "Lenient Four" swept to victory...
...He had broken with the party, when it suited enervated, if not destroyed, his strength with the indehis purposes, and with part of the party constituency...
...and now Frank Rizzo had failed a lie-detector test...
...I think of this structuring as the widow lady with whom Wayne flirts also turns out a mere gimmick because nothing in any of the three to be, as in McQ, a low-down crook, this aspect of her plots Lelouch has used it for requires it...
...It's a typical chain of events in these helpful when I didn't...
...All of which militated toward a GOP Camiel, the Polish beer-baron...
...The Democrats needed Rizzo more very little black support...
...For him, we feel, she could turn to crime...
...In a way surviving in this film is as big a break-through The plot is one in which we begin, unknowingly, at for John Wayne as it is for McQ...
...As for me, I'm on Kosterman's side, even if bother to go back...
...Just another politician, just like the rest of as he turns to leave...
...Nasty...
...From that point on it was all downhill...
...Big Frank exploded, and vowed of voters...
...there was a light voter turnSpector...
...And Philadelphia's Republicans don't want Frank Rizzo while Camiel was hardly free from the taint of political and won't take him...
...Teddy sider that all this happens while we're still waiting for Kennedy had his Chappaquiddick, Nixon his Watergate, the credits to end...
...Lelouch McQ, Wayne's first film in several years with a contem- might be thought of as a popularizer of Alain Resnais' porary setting and story...
...Commonweal: 13...
...He's going to have late for them to respond, the names of four judges he to be a pretty super cop just to compensate for his own considered "too lenient...
...She is a character whose life has In McQ, even though he guesses wrong about seventy- been so sheltered by elegance that bemusement is the five percent of the time, he stays as cocksure as ever only emotion she is capable of...
...But when the hunch proves groundless, poor Man and a Woman...
...In fact, all his best friends are just rotten, crooked, rotten crooks...
...The film begins with the assassination gate, and if a grand jury was investigating Pete Camiel, of two cops by a man who is afterwards revealed to be well, so what...
...But I'm not sure I feel safe having him now returned to didn't bear much developing in the first here...
...Even in the big chase scene, acters as so much window dressing...
...But the three different stories suggests by itself how without inseeds sown there are, I imagine, what have flowered in trinsic and individual style those stories are...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...When the new film begins with a McQ confusedly begins suspecting the highest echelon clip from A Man and a Woman, we can only fear, quite at the police department instead, and turns out to be rightly, that Lelouch has returned to thinking of charequally wrong about them...
...He is insulated from the corruption and conspiranounce, just prior to election day when it would be too cies of the very city he would police...
...hand...
...Milton Shapp's McQ is a film about how you just don't know whom Watergates were obscured by Richard Nixon's Water- to trust these days...
...Democrats had to choose what seemed at the time like So did the rest of the Democratic ticket, including the a sacrificial ticket to run for District Attorney and Con- nonentities opposing Arlen Spector and Tom Gola...
...He's still place, his return to them is disappointing...
...1975 you'll never hear of him again...
...Let's just say that when may be working for Kosterman, John Sturges is working you've seen one you've seen them all, and need not for McQ...
...fectly matched...
...pendent constituency he once might have claimed as his But-thus far at least-when he had broken with the own...
...taking any steps forward, in fact, Lelouch seems to be Though McQ never seems to notice it, the only people regressing in this film...
...A city inured to dirty politics stupidity in these matters...
...truth about his partner, to say nothing of his partner's 8 March 1974: 12 sweet, bereft wife...
...But it also seemed to make at least eteer in town is responsible for his partner's death...
...The fact that nature isn't revealed until the last scene when it can he could use so rigid a formal device independently for have only slight, retroactive effect on the plot...
...He, on the other hand, that he knows what he's doing...
...In the Big Frank was still a prospective mayoral candidate, that white ethnic blue-collar wards, Frank Rizzo was loved "that fella (Rizzo) will ruin your party...
...The usual assortment of "usually"deals," smoke-filled back rooms, and machine politics, reliable well-placed sources" quoted "a prominent local Rizzo was a political novice, a straight-talking, straight- GOP leader" as telling a Democratic counterpart, while shooting ex-cop who was as good as his word...
...Perhaps because we find him living Still Big Frank didn't give up...
...Spector and Gola looked like sure winners...
...But what could be that this Cain among Abels, this two-timing old timer, forgiven Milton Shapp and Pete Camiel could not be doesn't have any idea whom he can trust either...
...defeat...
...A Lelouch film is entertaining, films where the star is also the producer...
...I would be the last person to bring up guilt by has had no new ideas lately, as his most recent release, association, but the whole business is really enough to Happy New Year, demonstrates all too clearly...
...The people McQ is closest to gen- he is supposed to be the villain of the piece...
...erally end up being proven rotten...
...Then came the turning point...
...superior, Kosterman (Eddie Albert), suspends him from But maybe I'm being too hard on Lelouch's work...
...That's not far from par for the course, a veteran cop himself...
...The question blazes is going on at any given moment, whenevet his is which one will sacrifice what for the other, when...
...Confident of his staying alone on a cabin cruiser, we sense at once that McQ is power, he proclaimed with fanfare that he would an- at sea...
...No one gets killed as a is a character so jaded by experience that bemusement result, this time, but the whole performance leaves me is the only emotion, etc...
...His White Knight image evaporated like a mid-July shower on a Philadelphia sidewalk...
...In the midst of an exchange of charges and counter-charges between himself and Pete Camiel, Rizzo agreed to take a lie-detector WAYNING TALENTS test about who had offered whom a "deal" about patronage...
...If the Democrats ever run him again for anything, party he and not they had proved correct, and he had it will be completely without liberal support and with his own constituency...
...The Rizzo backing still hurt the favored but Until August, the Mayor seemed to have the upper defeated Spector-Gola ticket...
...Party Chairman tion as a springboard for higher office, turned off a lot Pete Camiel said no...
...years Wayne's directors and scriptwriters have been The shift of gears from present to past is accompanied gently trying to suggest to him that there may be more by a change from black and white to color, though duplicity in the world than his films admit...
...Having forgiven Frank Rizzo, who came as a sort of secular ditched the murder weapon with an accomplice waiting savior to resurrect Philadelphia from its own political to receive it, the killer is shotgunned in the back as soon Hades...
...assassinated assassin...
...True, Wayne's otherwise it goes unacknowledged until near the end of courtiers have been timid about introducing the big the film when, at last catching up with the beginning fellow to such au courant ideas...
...There Now into this maelstrom of betrayal drops John Wayne no longer was a Rizzo constituency, at least not as there as McQ, a Seattle super-cop who is the partner of the had been...
...The fact is that he remains unreformed...
...This time it's the same lovable, dangerous bully that he's been in all a couple of jewel thieves (Lino Venturi and Charles those Westerns Nixon likes so much-the ones where Gerard) and a shopkeeper (Francoise Fabian) whom Wayne can always tell the good guys from the bad and one of them romances in aid of a plan to rob Van Cleef right from wrong just by his intuition for such things...
...Big Frank stood exposed as just another politician...
...work in Hiroshima Mon Amour or Last Year at MarienI guess I'm glad that Wayne would now like to join bad, except that Resnais' work has already achieved the rest of us here in the second half of the twentieth popularity enough not to need any vulgar versions...
...Over the course of the film behind-the-scenes revolted at dirty politics in-the-open...
...Unlike John Wayne, French director Claude Lelouch Rotten...
...and Arpels next door...
...who date from even earlier in his career...
...After some comic advance on the sort of magazine-fiction all, the guy is a Puerto Rican or Mexican or something characters that had dominated Lelouch's films since A like that...
...Though McQ I admit-any Lelouch film...
...Despite McQ's inability to figure out what in blue For her, we wonder, could he give it up...
...For the past several the end of the story, and then flashback to the beginning...
...The stage was set for a vicious intra-party brawl out, and most of the Democratic regulars obviously made between Frank Rizzo, the Italian ex-cop, and Pete it to the polls...
...Rizzo didn't...
...troller (of Philadelphia) against Arlen Spector and Tom Spector, a shopworn candidate cynically using the elecGola...
...century, and I don't doubt that he sincerely wants to Similarly, since the type of characters Lelouch has help us cope...
Vol. 100 • March 1974 • No. 1
