The Seven-Ups

The Seven-Ups (1973)
Dir. Philip D’Antoni
Written: Albert Ruben, Alexander Jacobs
Starring Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco, Larry Haines, Richard Lynch, and Joe Spinelli

"They take the third degree of step further," says the tagline. Which i guess means car chases?

THE SEVEN-UPS is another one of those gritty crime films they had in the 70s, made by a lot of the same folks who did THE FRENCH CONNECTION, but without Gene Hackman or William Friedkin or the same writer. It has some of the same elements (over-the-line cops, grimy New York locales, fantastic high-speed chase, Roy Scheider) but not quite the artistry to reach the lofty standard set by its predecessor, which is probably why it’s less-remembered today.

It’s sort of a shame, though, because honestly it’s pretty great in its own right. Scheider plays the head of a police division that targets major criminals (whose conviction will bring a sentence of seven years and up, hence the name) using controversial methods like going undercover and having high-speed chases*. He gets his intel from his childhood friend (Tony Lo Bianco,THE FRENCH CONNECTION, GOD TOLD ME TO KILL) who never quite made it out of the hood. Everything seems to be working fine for the Seven-Ups until major Jewish mobsters begin to get kidnapped and ransomed back by a mysterious duo (Richard Lynch, also GOD TOLD ME TO KILL and stuntman Bill Hickman, who also coordinated the film’s action). Investigating these mysterious inter-underworld crimes leads to a convoluted series of complications, car chases, shootouts, etc.

Let me get that for you.

The movie’s biggest weakness is its lax first half, which is one agonizingly long setup of the various characters and parties that will eventually come together and form a plot.  Obviously there’s nothing wrong with a movie that takes its time to introduce the characters before getting to the action (in fact, I encourage it) but way too much time is spent on boring details that don’t turn out to be important anyway, such as the inner working of the Jewish mafia guys, the office politics at the police station, and the setup to the vaguely related stakeout that gets the Seven-Ups involved in the first place. It just takes what should be a stark, elegantly simple story and clutters it up with characters and plots that don’t pay off. And even with all this time spent, there’s almost no real character development for Scheider or his colleagues.

Fortunately, at about the halfway point, everything finally comes together and the plot takes off like Scheider’s 1973 Pontiac Ventura Sprint coupe. It dispenses with all the unimportant baggage from the first half and becomes the sleek revenge flick it ought to have been from the beginning. And that’s where the film’s big revered car chase scene comes in. Pursuing two suspects, Scheider recklessly drives across what seems like most of New York and New Jersey. Although Director D’Antoni (producer on BULLIT and THE FRENCH CONNECTION, with this being his sole directorial credit) was clearly hoping to top his previous work in those films, the action itself may be slightly less overwhelming here in terms of pure stunt work and setpieces. But if there’s nothing as holy-shit viscerally stunning as Hackman’s famous sprint under the subway in FRENCH CONNECTION or Bullit’s car bouncing along San Franciso’s hills, this chase may be my favorite of all of them due to it’s awesome build and the fine work of editor Jerry Greenberg. It starts out a little pedestrian, and seems to be nearing its end several times only to suddenly escalate further. Lynch and Hickman make a great villainous pair, and the added emotional charge helps ratchet up the tension as they make one narrow escape after another, just barely slipping through their pursuers’ fingers.

Epic car chars are the #1 cause of sidewalk fruit businesses failing.

The film is (rightly) famous mostly for that chase, but it has a few other fine sequences as well. There’s a money exchange in a car wash which again benefits from Greenberg’s fine editing and emerges as a tense, ingenious use of a clever gimmick. There’s a nicely morally ambiguous sequence where Joe Spinelli (scumbag lawyer in VIGILANTE, scumbag thug in EUREKA and this) demonstrates his unwillingness to cooperate with the cops even under threat of torture. And the relationship between Scheider and Lo Bianco is an interesting one, relying on Lo Bianco’s nuanced and sympathetic characterization juxtaposed with Scheider’s hard-nosed relentlessness. The film ends on a scene between these two which is emotionally complex and intense in a very different way than most of the rest of the film.

Both IMDB and wikipedia claim that the film is a spin-off of FRENCH CONNECTION (with Scheider’s Russo character “renamed” Buddy Manucci in this one, whatever that means) and it’s easy to see the link between the two films, but I actually like that this one has some subtle differences. Even though the Seven-Ups supposedly only go after high-value targets (like Fernando Rey’s character from FRENCH CONNECTION) they’re not exactly seeking international crime lords**. More like local small-scale crime bosses who have nice houses but are not exactly threatening the foundations of our society. And the guys who end up causing them the most trouble are just a pair of lowlife hoods who are actually preying on the same demographic the Seven-Ups are supposed to be targeting.

So in a way, there’s a more human street-level vibe here. New York is a big place, but this film seems to take place mostly in neighborhoods and communities where everyone knows each other -- Scheider and Lo Bianco’s shared childhood illustrates that fact especially succinctly, but we also see Scheider walking around his old haunts and being greeted warmly by literally everyone he meets. Everyone’s part of the same big, dysfunctional family. The stakes are smaller her, but they feel more intimate, more personal. D’Antoni’s use of thoroughly lived-in real New York locations helps anchor the characters in a real human landscape where they seem thoroughly organic and at home. D’Antoni might not have quite the ferocity of William Freidkin, but he’s crafted something here which has its own unique merits. Plus a really fucking boss car chase.


*obviously, the over-the-line cop trope has evolved somewhat since then. Scheider’s use of “unconventional methods” seem altogether quaint by today’s standards.


**One way this movie is unusual is that it’s sold so heavily on the “Seven-ups” gimmick of a group of detectives going after major criminals with dirty methods -- and none of those elements is really a significant part of the final film. They’re all in there, but more as background details than significant story points. We hear about the squad and what it does, but mostly it’s just Scheider in the film, and he’s mostly just trying to get revenge against these two particular guys. I guess he does use some dirty methods like threatening an old man in his own bed, but its pretty tame by modern standards and not an especially big part of the plot anyway.

Vigilante

Vigilante aka Street Gang (1983)
Dir. William Lustig
Starring Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Joe Spinelli

It works as a movie advertisement and a Ronald Reagan campaign poster!

    VIGILANTE is a particularly mean, nasty sonofabitch of a film in the DEATH WISH mold, where an average guy has to take revenge upon the no good rotten punks who run rampant in this city. What makes it more interesting to us than your average DEATH WISH ripoff is that it was directed by reliable sleazeball and former porno director William Lustig (MANIAC, MANIAC COP 1-3*) and stars badass extraordinaire Fred Williamson and stoic hardass extraordinaire Robert Forster. So you pretty much know right away that even though this film isn’t gonna reinvent the genre of anything, it’ll pack a little more punch than your average vigilante joint.

    And pack a punch it does. Everything in the DEATH WISH playbook is punched up to an inflated version of its already ridiculous levels, from the violence to the chases to the sadism of the criminals to its sociological implications. The original DEATH WISH hoodlum gang included Jeff Goldblum, so in order to top that level of villainousness Lustig and co. have to create no-goodnicks that are literally a cornucopia of anxieties for middle class America in the 80s. They’re a gang of militant, interracial, co-ed, free-loving, anarchist druggie communist hippie psycho killers. So Charles Manson, Gloria Steinem, and the Black Panthers all put together, with a smattering of those violent street punks which exist in 80s action movies but nowhere else in history. I’m not sure if it’s established that they’re atheists, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Oh my God, Archie Bunker was right!

One day, Robert Forster’s wife comes across this gang harassing an elderly gas station attendant by dousing him in his own gas, and yells at them about it. For the crime of interfering with random street harassment, they follow her back to her house where they sadistically beat her and probably rape her (though the movie is uncharacteristically discreet on this last point). So far so good, but come on, you can’t really get too mad at them just for beating up a guy’s wife; after all, this is basically her fault for getting all judgy about an innocent plot to torch an old man at his place of business. Come on VIGILANTE, that’s all you got? Hell, his worrisomely adorable little blond son even got away and hid upstairs!

Only, he didn’t really hide all that well.

So one of the punks walks upstairs and sees the son’s head silhouetted behind the shower curtain where he’s hiding. So shit, now they’re gonna kidnap his son? Nope. The guy fucking shotguns the kid’s head right out the fucking window.

All right, you’ve got my attention.

But it gets even crueler, see? Because Robert Forster is a law-abiding, minding-his-own business type of guy, and even when approached by Fred Williamson to join his friendly neighborhood vengeance posse he politely declines and chooses to trust in our system of democratic law and justice. So the cops catch the leader of the gang, haul him into court, and... his sleazy lawyer (Joe Spinelli, giving Sean Penn in CARLITO’S WAY a run for his money) gets the judge to cut him a deal for time served. The guy assaulted a housewife and was complicit in blowing the head off an adorable blonde child, and he walks. Forster doesn’t take this news well, attacks the judge, and finds that now he is going to jail for assault while his son’s killer walks free. Obviously he’s almost gonna be raped in prison, and then when he gets out he finds that his wife is so traumatized she doesn’t want anything more to do with him. So, when life gives you lemons, you turn to Fred Williamson and enlist the help of his revenge posse to make, I guess, some revengeanade. Which is coincidentally exactly what happens here.     

If Harry Dean Stanton had told this guy to avenge his death, RED DAWN would have been like 20 minutes long.

    One thing I appreciate, though, is that unlike DEATH WISH’s Paul Kersey, our protagonist here is a blue-collar, working-class schlub, as are the other vigilantes. Yeah, the depiction of the punks panders pretty obscenely to Reagan-era fears of minorities and countercultures, but at least we’re not asked to side with some rich white guy who regains his manhood by blowing away a bunch of black teenagers in the ghetto. Forester’s character Eddie Marino works at an auto-repair shop, enjoys drinks at a blue-collar dive, doesn’t want anything to do with politics and just wants to be left alone. Where the DEATH WISH sequels explicitly plays into 1980’s right wing fears about sociological collapse, Marino isn’t interested in politics and just wants revenge against the particular guys who ruined his life. They don’t hide behind a facade of trying to make the world a safer place or anything. Fred Williamson and his group may have their own opinions about the ineffectiveness of the justice system, but even when his family gets torn apart Marino doesn’t care about their goals, he just wants their help.

    The movie is also surprisingly clear about just how ruined his life is. DEATH WISH and its ancillary movies are very much about a wimpy liberal regaining his manhood by becoming a gun-toting avenger of white people who get mugged by poor (“urban”) people. Yeah, Kersey’s family gets hurt, but its a catalyst for him becoming a righteous badass, and we’re ultimately glad he makes the transformation. VIGILANTE depicts Marino as a guy who died inside the moment he found out his son was killed, and is now just a rage-fueled walking corpse, existing only to revenge himself against the people who wronged him. It’s not very fun, and it’s clearly not a good direction for him to go, personally. Even the other vigilantes seem kinda freaked out by his grim, dead-eyed focus on vengeance.   

    So on one hand, it avoids the uncomfortable sadistic qualities of violent fantasies like DEATH WISH and KICK-ASS, but on the other hand it’s not very... you know, fun to watch. Lustig seems to be going for more of a 70s crime thriller vibe than a Fred Williamson exploitation vehicle, but the content sits a little uneasily with that milieu. The look of the film is respectably gritty, but there are just a few too many genre excesses to really work as realism. It’s ridiculous enough that it would never work as a bleak drama about a broken man turning to violence, but also problematically honest about the fact that revenge isn’t going to solve any of Marino’s problems. So even though he does get some revenge, it’s not exactly emotionally satisfying. The movie successfully gets our blood lust going, and then bums us out by giving us something closer to truth than fantasy, but still not close enough to truth to have anything really intelligent to say about life. That said, the vengeance is at least handled stylishly, with a few great chases (including a car chase obviously modeled on THE FRENCH CONNECTION) and some memorable setpieces. 

    Overall, it has the pleasing aroma of a genre film with a little extra effort and thought, but in this case the rewards are somewhat minor. In fact, the most memorable part of the film is the pre-credit introduction, a genuinely propulsive and well-edited sequence where Fred Williamson lays out his philosophy as an army of grim-faced concerned citizens makes prodigious use of a firing range. Williamson can always be counted on for a good badass turn, and even though he mostly stays out of the spotlight here, he probably best conveys the best that VIGILANTE has to offer with his pleasing blend of outsized machismo and real-world grit. Like the movie, he’s a straightforward, mean, and efficient sonofabitch. But he’s a lot more fun to watch.

*The guy made 9 total non-porno film, and four of those have the word “Maniac” in the title. Which in my opinion deserves some sort of special congressional medal of valor.

God Told Me To

God Told Me To aka God Told Me to Kill (1976)
Dir. Larry Cohen
Starring Tony Lo Bianco, Sandy Dennis, Richard Lynch

Man, you gotta hand it to Larry Cohen. The guy is just endlessly ambitious, never satisfied that it's enough, even when maybe he ought to be. It's not enough to make a police procedural/horror flick, it's also got to be a sci-fi, AND a serial killer flick, AND a secret-identity story, AND a domestic drama, AND challenge everything you take for granted about religion. So yeah, God Told Me To is an overstuffed film, but it kind of works. It's so wild and ambitious that you forgive its occasional awkward bits and simply sit back and wonder where in God's name Cohen is going with this.

Cohen's MO, as you are no doubt aware, is taking schlocky genre stuff (THE-BLOB-Meets-SOYLENT-GREEN in THE STUFF, WOLFEN-from-above in Q: THE WINGED SERPENT) and stubbornly cramming that framework full of interesting ideas, detail, and performances. He has fun with his genre conventions, but absolutely never treats them as jokes, even when its something as inherently hilarious as the evil killer baby in IT'S ALIVE! Treating the subject seriously means that it's even funnier, but can also win you over into legitimately invested territory with his inventive horror sequences and solid cinematic construction. GOD TOLD ME TO is less of a fun ride than some of his other fare, but that's due to its intentionally serious subject matter. Not everyone is going to be able to accept something this crazy as a serious philosophical horror film, but to the film's credit it strives for and generally earns a heavier tone for anyone who can suspend disbelief enough to follow it where it wants to go.

Tony Lo Bianco (THE FRENCH CONNECTION, THE SEVEN-UPS) stars as detective Peter Nicholas, who arrives on the scene of several apparently unmotivated random killings to hear the perpetrator explain that "God told me to." The cops try to surpress this information because they (rightly, as it turns out) think releasing it to the public will create a crisis of faith which leads to widespread anarchy, but Nicholas thinks it may be the only way to figure out what's really happening. Turns out, all the killers had come into contact with a mysterious young man (Richard Lynch, who would also portray a scary messianic figure in BAD DREAMS) who holds the key to the mystery and may just be the return of Jesus Christ. Into this respectably ballsy premise enter a secret society, a mysterious virgin birth, an inexplicable subplot about Nicholas' wife and girlfriend, another inexplicable subplot about a corrupt coworker, and a whole bunch of crazy twists that you have to see for yourself.

As wild as the thing gets, Cohen deserves credit for keeping things serious and surprisingly emotionally weighty. Lo Bianco gives a painful and nuanced performance as the Catholic Nicholas, who finds himself pushed to the brink of his beliefs as it appears that a returned Jesus is engaged in mass killings. He's believable as a tough, skeptical detective, but allows the horror of his shattered worldview to simmer just below the surface. It's unusual to see a guy who is so emotionally destroyed but can still get on with his job, but Lo Bianco sells it beautifully and as such adds real depth to Nicholas' journey down the rabbit hole. Even when things get pulpy, Cohen forces us to see the emotional damage it's doing to the people involved and as such never gets swept away in the pulpier aspects of the story. There's an old lady (Sylvia Sidney) who appears in the final act to tell this absurd story (complemented by some not-so-fantastic special effects) which strains credulity even in this movie -- and then, just as you're about to be forced to transition into ironic enjoyment, she breaks down and starts crying pitiably. The more Lo Bianco tries to comfort her, the more hysterical she gets. This could turn into a complete disaster, but the two actors sell it with such conviction that its genuinely upsetting. They make stock footage of a rubber-legged lady getting sucked into the sky believable as a genuinely traumatic experience which left deep emotional scars.

The horror is surprisingly effective too. As fun as IT'S ALIVE is, I don't know that its ever genuinely scary. GOD TOLD ME TO is only intermittently a horror film, but its moments of horror are unique and genuinely spooky. There's a knife attack early on as frighteningly savage and shocking as anything comparable I've seem, and a great sequence with one of the secret society guys which takes place in a creepy apartment which would not look out of place in a David Lynch film. And who can fault a film which makes Jesus into a genuinely unsettling apparition without cheating and changing his appearance? And as well as those sequences and images work, the film's concepts are in themselves fraught with dread which lingers over everything. Even when the film lurches into exposition or melodrama, there's an unsettling feeling that random violence could erupt at any moment. Unfathomable and merciless forces are always lurking just below the surface of the ordinary, and Cohen makes you feel that tension even when he's not drowning you in blood.

Not all of it works, of course; the film was shot for cheap and it frequently looks cheap, the sound is poorly recorded (even on the DVD its quite difficult to hear the dialogue at times), the shifts between genres are sometimes a little clunky, and unless I missed some key dialogue I'm not 100% the film entirely explains everything it raises. A mystery this wild can almost never have a satisfying explanation -- this one makes a valiant and fascinating attempt, but of course the mystery is always going to be more enjoyable. The truth isn't exactly a letdown, it just changes the tone of the film somewhat (it has a pretty great climax, though).

As a side note, I know that Cohen is deeply concerned with civil rights and makes a special effort to include good roles for African-Americans in his films (in fact, he started his career with some classic blaxploitation with strong black heroes) -- but its hard not to notice in this one that all the black characters are villainous criminals. There's a sequence near the end which is a little uncomfortable as major protagonist murders a bunch of admittedly assholish Black gangsters basically to test a theory. I think at the time he was trying to actively include roles for black actors but in hindsight their incorporation into this film might not be quite as progressive as one might hope (I'm not implying Cohen is a racist, just that this film and its idea of roles for black actors are products of its time).  

Those complaints aside, however, this is a devilishly impressive and bold creation which may well represent Cohen's definitive vision of marrying genre exploitation with serious philosophical musings. This cheapie horror film asks no less than what our responsibility to the divine is. If Jesus returns and he's an asshole, are we still morally obligated to commit murder for him? Can a balance of power as great as  the one between the creator of the universe and his myriad of mortal children ever resist the potential for abuse? And if Jesus became mortal as a reflection of our mortal fallibilities, could he also come to represent our darkest follies as well as our loftiest aspirations? Power is the basis of God's ability to represent the ultimate moral authority -- if we can become powerful enough to rival God, does that authority erode? Do we perhaps even have a responsibility to challenge him(/her)?

These are powerful questions, and Cohen asks them firmly but with subtlety. Even when the film doesn't quite live up to its lofty goals, you've got to be kind of awed at his steadfast belief that these things are worthy of inclusion in an exploitation film, as well as his faith in an audience which can appreciate both. Cohen hasn't directed much in the past decade, and although he continues to write sharp, enjoyable genre stuff like 2002's PHONE BOOTH, this one may represent the peak of his ambition to merge pulp thrills with genuine substance. I'd love to see him try something this ambitious again (he did return to the director's chair with a Master of Horror episode in 2006) but even if he doesn't, this stands as a landmark of his particular vision which I doubt anyone else will top anytime soon.

PS: Oh yeah, watch for Andy Fucking Kaufman in his first film role as one of the killers. IMBD says he antagonized the St. Patrick's Day crowd in his police costume and Cohen had to physically restrain the crowd. Awesome. Also Bernard Herrmann was going to score it (as he did with ITS ALIVE) but died hours after watching it. They should have played that up, promoted it as "The Film That Killed Bernard Herrmann!" or something. Opportunity missed, but not as cheekily as the opportunity missed by the second composer Cohen approached, who quipped "God told me not to."