On Screen

...In one scene Zito agonizes over his dead mother's grave, and despite the pseudo-expressionistic photography (complete with swirling fog that seems to have drifted in from a Dracula set) Spinell gives us a sense of what an inhabitant of hell must look like...

...We do not glimpse the murderer's face...

...One involves Murphy and a nurse at the neighborhood hospital, Isabella (Rachel Ticotin...

...Newman has been coasting for years...

...The sexual aspect of these murders is somehow the point to Joe Spinell, who wrote the screenplay with C. A. Rosenberg...

...Several other murders occur, with no detail spared: the bulging eyes of a strangling victim...

...Claiming that the murderer's madness exempts him from the bounds of recognizable patterns of behavior won't do...

...What Susskind and his screenwriter, Heywood Gould, do offer us is Patrolman Murphy (Paul Newman), who jokes about being a liberal in a way that lets us know he really is simply a lib-lab...

...Susskind is probably the only man around who could produce a film today about the City's most crime-ridden precinct and make the cops come off as pigs...

...Community protests erupt after a local militant group is swept into the dragnet, and Connolly obliviously orders his men to tear-gas and billyclub the crowd??as if New York police had learned nothing from the '60s, when knowledge of crowd control techniques became a sine qua non for urban law enforcers...

...That's Susskind and Gould's notion of irony, and also of justice: Even if the good guys have nothing to do with it, the bad guys get it in the end...

...Isabella has been around...

...He now avenges himself on attractive women, identifying each with his mother...

...Little else about this silly enterprise is even worth discussing...

...Later, the murderous hooker is killed by two pushers on pretexts that have nothing to do with the rest of the story...

...Maniacuhimaielyis disappointing, I suspect, because Spinell was torn between crafting a serious study of guilty, violent sex, and settling for a commercial horror film...

...No doubt cowed by the community protests that disrupted the location shooting, Fort Apache opens with a feeble apology for not including among the characters all those "law-abiding" individuals who are "trying to turn the Bronx around...

...The producer and the writer also manufacture totally absurd parallel love stories...

...Exploiting actresses who have been demeaned as objects in past films, of course, undermines Spinell's moral point...

...Following much resistance, Theresa, a good Catholic girl, surrenders her virginity to Corelli in her own bedroom, while her parents are asleep down the hall...

...Murphy is a nonconformist, too...

...T hat fate is unlikely ever to befall Maniac, one of the goriest thrillers I've seen in a long time??and I don't miss many...

...He was broken from detective to patrolman after ticketing a man with political pull...

...a blade piercing a woman's back and emerging through her breast, and so on at ghoulish length...

...He gets indignant when a pimp tries to bribe him, sputtering: "Son of a bitch thinks he can own meforafew bucks...

...His latest embarrassment in the name of liberalism, Fort Apache, The Bronx, tries hard to appear toughmind-ed about crime and punishment in New York City's 41 st Precinct, and winds up being simply softheaded...

...Smack is like a holiday for me," she tells an unfazed Murphy, and he obligingly volunteers to help her vacation with heroin filched from the stash of confiscated drugs at the precinct house...

...Little else in Fort Apache is much more believable...

...If there were any nice little old ladies around (there aren't, since they are presumably among the "law-abiding"), you can bet he would help them cross the street...

...Evidence of his conflict is his casting two actresses whose earlier screen appearances have been pretty much limited to hard-core porno movies??assuming, of course, the choice was not dictated by budget...

...On the other hand, it may be toomuch toexpectthiskindofmovieto have anything but a commercial raison d'etre...

...His idea, it would seem, was to have it both ways: to appeal to precisely the male urges that feminists rightly deplore by depicting the female characters as the prey of one man's murderous sexual impulses, and at the same time to condemn those desires by picturing them as sick...

...In one of the silliest tests of integrity even for a movie cop, Murphy watches a fellow officer casually throw an innocent youth of f a rooftop during a miniriot...

...Would he have been so outraged had the offer been more generous...

...Justice triumphs blindly and implausibly once again, however: Murphy (not knowing of his lover's death) shoots the dealers after they take hostages in the hospital when their trafficking setup is uncovered...

...In fact, he's a martyr...

...Zito is not totally plausible, yet he is a three-dimensional character suffering remorse and anguish, not someone possessed of any extraordinary powers...

...Wahl, after doing a fine job in The Wanderers, is wasted here as what amounts to Murphy's only true love...

...We never discover how Zito chooses his victims??a nurse, a prostitute, a girl on a date??or why he uses a gun on one, a knife on another, his bare hands on a third...

...Although the homicidal patrolman has already been clumsily sketched in as a bullying bigot, for almost half the film we're supposed to believe that Murphy is agonizing over whether to "inform" on the miscreant...

...The film opens with the slaughter of a young couple innocently spending the night on a beach...

...Spinell also served as executive producer of the film and stars as the homicidal maniac Frank Zito, a superintendent who lives in a tiny room crowded with baby toys, candles, religious kitsch, and department store mannequins that he dresses up with the clothes and severed scalps of his victims...

...From the very beginning, it's clear that the film is not going to have the courage of its espoused convictions...

...she's a nice Puerto Rican girl with a drug habit...

...Directed by Daniel Petrie, Fort Apache is about as exciting and interesting as a made-for-television movie...

...The last scene shows the rug that conceals her body lying in an empty lot strewn with rubble??ignored by all, including Murphy, as he busily chases another criminal...

...And you know he is a real man of the people by the way he pronounces "thing" as "ting" and "three" as "tree...

...Rocking back and forth on his haunches, tormented by voices from the past emerging from the fog, he grimaces and moans fearfully, his scarred and pitted face exuding sweat as his soul exudes guilt...

...a torso twitching after its head has been blown of f by a shotgun...

...It didn't help matters that Murphy, while writing the citation, devoured the offender's driver's license to show what he thought of those City Hall "contacts...

...But we do see his hands sliding a straight razor across the throat of the girl and strangling the guy with a loop of wire, thus producing great quantities of gushing blood in both cases...

...his asthmatic wheezing is all we hear...

...Poor Zito had a rough time growing up: His beautiful mother was always locking him in thecloset whileshe was out "dating," and apparently this childhood trauma has soured into a mysogynistic psychosis...

...Although he stands for law and order, Murphy positively oozes decency and compassion...

...When feminists are railing against the link between the violence directed at women apparent in thrillers like Maniac and pornography, such a casting decision has an irony that surely was not lost on someone as sharp as Spinell...

...Bad as this story is, the acting is worse...

...the other is between his partner, Corelli (Ken Wahl), and a local girl, Theresa (Kathleen Bel-ler...

...You can tell that from the way he leaves his cap off during roll call...

...It is dubious that the photographer would even let him pick her up when the newspaper headlines are screaming of a mad killer on the loose...

...But Spinell and Rosenberg have attempted something much more difficult...

...He futilely chases after a felon, refusing to shoot...

...The incident that begins the story, for example, the random murder of two rookie cops by a drug-crazed prostitute (Pam Grier), incredibly arouses only jokes from the other patrolmen...

...Connolly (Ed Asner), the by-the-book veteran who has become the new commander of the 41st Precinct, does order a general crackdown on criminals in the area...

...His reasons for masquerading (unbelievably) as a painter to meet a beautiful fashion photographer (Caroline Munro), and then killing one of her models instead of her, are also a mystery...

...in Fori Apache, the weary cynicism Murphy displays seems occasioned less by the horrors he witnesses daily than the actor's own attitude toward a part that was probably undertaken for the money...

...On Screen COPS AND KILLERS by robert asahina A JL JL s long as David Susskind is around there will always be at least one heart that bleeds, one knee that jerks to the rhythm of predictable progressive pieties...

...When it comes to rooting out evil in his own backyard, Murphy is the reincarnation of Frank Serpico...

...Spinell, who has been a good actor in previous films (in Rocky and, most recently, in The First Deadly Sin), manages to provide this chaotic mess with a curious dignity...

...But the killings continue, for the run-of-the-mill pimps, hustlers, muggers, and drug dealers the cops round up can't provide any leads...

...I'd go upagainst the Department and the whole goddamn world for you," Corelli tells him...

...Nothing much comes of the Corelli-Theresa liaison, but theMurphy Isabella affair grinds to its predictably downbeat ending when she is given a hot shot by??who else??the very same dope dealers who killed Pam Grier...

...Still, his obvious talent as an actor and his interesting conflicts as a writer/producer make Maniac a shade better than most films in its admittedly limited genre...

...The writing, albeit confused, does show more than a glimmer of intelligence...

...Asner scowls and grumbles a lot, but Connolly is for the most part undistin-guishable from Lou Grant...

...In a bloody thriller it is easy to settle for psychopaths who are simply superhuman or supernatural (as in Halloween...

...Unfortunately, Gould borrows this episode from Joseph Wam-baugh without explaining why a detective would be handing out moving violations in the first place...

...There is little logic, though, to the film's wanderings...

...Since all of its violence, foul language and (minimal) sex can be easily edited out, I expect it will be on the tube before too many months pass...