The New Centurions

You can't teach new tricks to an old dog. Richard Fleischer was a film giant, a representative of old classic Hollywood, who wanted to catch up with the fresh wave of New Hollywood. He chose a topical theme that resonated in society and about which he had no idea, and it didn't work. It's such a succession of episodes, without any unifying storyline, George C. Scott, the main attraction, is on the sidelines, the motivation for his fatal move is very poor. The whole thing has a terribly soporific pace, even though it shows everyday police work, deals with crime, drugs and violence against women. And when it comes to the intimate scenes, Stacy Keach can't sell them as an actor, with some shallow elevator music playing in the background. It's historically interesting from perhaps the only two perspectives that would absolutely not pass today as they are racist and socially objectionable: blacks are here as the despicable dregs of society who only make trouble, as are gays when a cop tells his wife that he and his colleagues were hunting fags in the park. (26.01.2024)

An unadorned night routine of ordinary police officers in the form of a raw police procedure, which is in many respects ahead of its time (this style will be followed by the Fort Apache the Bronx a decade later. Most similar movies are devoted to detectives and not to patrol / cavalry policemen). The plot is absent, these are purely stories from night shifts in a neglected neighborhood from a time when no one considered inappropriate that the LAPD was not being diplomatic, rules and regulations rather loose (or non-existent) and the role of Hispanics and African Americans in society was view by the police as not that important. Naturalistic, truly in the style of seventies, brilliant acting, with a love for the profession and the city, and in the second half, after all, noticeably lacking gradation or at least some development. (09.02.2017)