If Hollywood has produced an icon for the modern American, it is the movie cop.
“Today’s cop is yesterday’s cowboy,” said Randy Jurgenson, the retired New York homicide detective who is my best authority on such subjects. “Today’s cop movie is yesterday’s western.”
I have always appreciated Jurgenson’s views on cop movies because he was one of the illustrious “Seven Ups,” made top detective grade in less than five years, worked some of New York’s highest profile cases, risked his life in some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods and killed five people in the line of duty (an emotional burden that still shows in his eyes).
He also knows movies. The 1980 cop film “Cruising” was based on a case on which he and his partner were primaries. Randy not only worked the legendary French Connection case on which the classic 1971 Gene Hackman film was based, he was a technical adviser for the movie and had a speaking role in it.
(He can tell you that Eddie Egan, the real-life French Connection detective Hackman portrayed, remembered for one of Hollywood’s most memorable car chase scenes, was in actuality such a bad driver he couldn’t pass a New York driver’s license test. Another famous cop he knows who turned to show biz was a homicide detective with a phobia that kept him from looking at dead bodies.)
Reflection of society
An actor turned director turned producer since retirement (I first met him at the Cannes Film Festival two decades ago), Jurgenson is the creator and executive producer of “Precinct Hollywood,” a documentary on cop movies that premieres on the AMC cable network at 9 p.m. Monday as part of its “Crime and Crime Again” cop movie festival.
Narrated by Frances McDormand (herself a cop in “Fargo”) and featuring Hackman, Roy Scheider, Ray Liotta, William Friedkin, Jurgenson and other luminaries from classic cop movies, it deals with the genre as a reflection of American society and its changing views of real cops and their work.
For decades, Jurgenson complained, Hollywood usually treated cops as a joke. Private detectives and even criminals were the central characters; cops were often clownish figures providing comic relief.
“In the 1930s and 1940s [movie] cops just got in the way,” he said. “You saw that in `The Maltese Falcon.’ Humphrey Bogart is leading Ward Bond [the cop] around.”
There were a few film noir exceptions, such as Dana Andrews’ “Laura,” and in the 1950s, Kirk Douglas’ “Detective Story.” But mostly the syndrome continued.
Then, amid the political and racial turmoil, crime waves and official corruption of the 1960s and early 1970s, Jurgenson said, came two landmark films that changed everything: Steve McQueen’s 1968 “Bullitt” and Clint Eastwood’s 1971 “Dirty Harry.”
McQueen played a loner cop who did right as he saw it and was willing to take on the entire San Francisco political establishment to do it. Eastwood was a gunslinger in a sport coat who worked the same turf and didn’t give a fig for “downtown” — or for anything.
“Every cop wanted to be Steve McQueen then,” Jurgenson said. “Some even started dressing like Steve McQueen. When `Dirty Harry’ came out, he did what most cops wanted to do: take on the department they worked for that was always getting in the way. Clint Eastwood didn’t give a damn what `downtown’ said. In fact, he went downtown and told them [what was right].”
Subsequent films dealt with cops as living, breathing often troubled human beings.
“In `Detective Story,’ Kirk Douglas played a straight arrow,” he said. “With `Basic Instinct’ (1992), along comes his son Michael as a divorced cop, a drug user, sleeping with witnesses.”
Walking a fine line
In more recent years and films, such as Denzel Washington’s 2001 “Training Day” and Liotta’s 2002 “Narc,” cops have become almost painfully real, their dark sides and demons showing. Audiences get an idea of the horror-filled depths of crime and evil with which they must contend, and how fine is the line they must tread, and sometimes don’t.
Real cops understand that, Jurgenson said. They did not understand the aberration that was Al Pacino’s 1973 “Serpico,” the loosely true-to-life story of a cop who went undercover to uncover corruption in the N.Y.P.D.
“When `Serpico’ came out, there was not a policeman in the city of New York that I knew who was happy with that movie,” he said. “Not one. Policemen went around saying that movie portrayed every cop in the city as crooked. If you looked at it, he was the only honest cop in the city. Boy, was that” garbage.
Superheroes?
In the ’80s and ’90s and cop films of today, a different trend has developed that Jurgenson and many other cops find almost as disturbing: the portrayal of the cop as superhero.
In blockbuster action hits such as “Die Hard” and “48 Hours” and their sequels, protagonists function far more like Batman than Popeye Doyle or even Dirty Harry.
They’re more like cartoons,” Jurgenson said. “In the `Die Hard’ movies, no matter what they were going to do to Bruce Willis — even if he was shot three times — you knew he was going to come out just fine.”
———-
mkilian@tribune.com
