The simultaneous hits of The French Connection and Dirty Harry (1971), and the former film’s Oscar-garlanded prestige, sparked a small tsunami of similarly gritty cop thrillers. These dramas, like the concurrent but seemingly oppositional Blaxploitation genre, which had its birth pangs the same year with Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song, confronted American urban life as it began to decay rapidly in the grouchy and cynical ‘70s, as old social truces were called off, and drug culture found fertile soil in that decay as well as unpleasant synergy with counterculture. Among the glut of cop flicks was one official sequel to The French Connection, in 1975, but there had already been two unofficial continuations. Badge 373 (1973) detailed further adventure of Eddie Egan, the real-life avatar of Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, whilst Egan’s former partner Sonny Grosso, on whom Roy Scheider’s Buddy Russo was based, penned the story for The Seven-Ups, which marked the sole directorial outing of Philip D’Antoni, who had produced both Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection. D’Antoni also employed much of the same crew, including a similarly jangly, eerie score by Don Ellis, and mimicked Friedkin’s touch. Long wordless sequences of setting up stake-outs and sting operations maintain the brand, as do strong similarities in style and location shooting, full of inquisitive zooms and forced-perspective shots of giant ‘70s cars cruising tight, dim New York streets, and fringe wastelands where rubbish and human refuse collect. The Seven-Ups isn’t a classic, but it stands on its own two feet as a flavourful, entertaining exemplar of the period, and after an awkward first half-hour begins to hum.
The title refers to the small unit of detectives who have been given a certain amount of leeway by their superiors because they’re gifted at inventive takedowns of major criminals. Hence the team’s name, which refers to the “seven years and up” sentences they chase. The Grosso stand-in, again called Buddy and played by Scheider, leads three others in the team, Barilli (Victor Arnold), Mingo (Ken Kercheval), and Ansel (Jerry Leon). At the outset, the team bust a counterfeiting ring operating through an effete antique store. This op proves to have been enabled by Buddy’s childhood pal Vito Lucia (Tony LoBianco), who’s now a mid-level wiseguy, eager apparently to sell information to Buddy because his wife’s illness has left him cash-strapped. At the same time, a pair of brutally effective hoods, Moon (Richard Lynch) and Bo (Bill Hickman), kidnap a mob money-lender, Max Kalish (Larry Haines), and shake him down for $100,000. The duo forestall attempts by the ransom couriers to confront them via a witty expedient of ordering the bagmen to drive through a carwash, where they lurk amidst the spinning brushes and shooting jets of water. They handcuff the car door handles, and then jimmy open the boot to remove the cash, the mob soldiers reduced to slapstick buffoons as they try to crawl out the windows only to get spraying soap in the face. As in The French Connection, and surely reaped with a sense of authenticity from Grosso’s experience, there’s a fascination for method and process on both the cop and criminal sides here, the interplay of ingenious devices and ruses involved in such action, which fleshes out the film’s bare-boned approach to crime fighting with an element of systemic analysis. One salty touch is the sign written, jokingly we hope, on the inside of a blind in the Seven-Ups’ offices, warning to keep the blinds down in case of snipers.
D’Antoni’s direction doesn’t quite stack up against Friedkin’s, and some of the other major filmmakers who helped codify this style. The circumlocutory method acting and fuzz-tongued dialogue are more mannered and less biting, and the pacing less compulsive. The filming lacks the same sense of storytelling savvy, the vivid edge derived from Friedkin’s New Wave-accented technique with layered sound and hand-held photography that helped keep Friedkin’s sense of environmental and moral straits in constant volatility. Whereas Barry Shear’s Across 110th Street (1972) constructed a superlative cross-breeding of the neo-realist cop thriller with elements from Blaxploitation, The Seven-Ups is much more conventional in dramatic stakes and worldview. Grosso’s story, worked into a screenplay by Albert Ruben and Alexander Jacobs, maintains a sociological edge, insofar as it deals with the zone where organised justice and organised crime via shared roots and shared emotions of their all-too-human members: Buddy and Vito circle each-other with the wary amity of men who know the other’s pain and problems, as well as sharing fond and not-so-fond connections, as when the pair overlook their old school, now sitting under the shadow of two alien spaceship-like towers blocks, and recall old beatings by nuns. Time-honoured gangster movie cliché is acknowledged as Buddy returns to his old neighbourhood, as he sprang from the same soil as many of the Mafia types he’s after, and gets information from an old barber (Frank Macetta).
The Mafia dons themselves are irate but intriguingly ineffectual, far from the usual portrait of them as ruthlessly efficient and omnipotent avengers: several of them tell Kalish not to bother trying to hunt down his tormentors. But the actual plot only involves action between tough men, without the wider socio-economic problems Friedkin’s film invoked: the idea of cops and gangsters both chasing wild card villains could have fit neatly into a Starsky and Hutch episode. The kidnapping duo prove to actually work for Vito, who’s been sending them after each mob name Buddy gives him to investigate, as this lets him know they’ve got the cash to pay up big. Things go south quickly when Moon and Bo take another boss hostage against Vito’s advice, using their favourite device of pretending to be cops. Kalish, furious and hell-bent, uses a funeral to argue over a course of action with other mob bosses, some of whom have suffered the same treatment. The Seven-Ups stake out the funeral, unaware that the mobsters believe their persecutors are detectives: when Ansel, who’s posing as a chauffeur, is made as a cop, Kalish assumes he’s gathering information for the kidnappers, so he’s tricked inside, beaten, and bundled into a car trunk. The mobsters hope to swap him for the current hostage, but these colliding elements combust as the kidnappers shoot and wound Ansel’s courier, Coltello (Lou Polan), thinking he’s pulling a cross, and blast the hapless cop in the trunk. Buddy and Mingo arrive at the bloody scene, and Buddy gives chase to the two fleeing hoods.
Here the film erupts into its raison d’etre, a car chase sequence that obviously tries to top all previous examples. It is a breathtaking example of that variety of action scene, the shooting and editing emphasising lateral lines of movement and cutaways only motived by obstacles and manoeuvrings, as opposed to the collage-like form preferred today, exemplified by Paul Greengrass’s work on the Bourne movies. Buddy pursues the murderous duo across the city, over the George Washington Bridge, and into the leafy, wintry highway landscape, as Moon tries to blast him with a sawed-off shotgun. The chase ends with Buddy almost being turned to raspberry jam as his car rams the back of a truck, only his reflexes in ducking down saving his life. The detail of such an epic chase ending in humiliation and near-death for the hero is a bit of a twist. Buddy returns to the hospital to find his friend dead and superiors delivering frustrating new that the Seven-Up unit’s going to be shut down until investigated. Buddy refuses to listen to this, and embarks on a campaign of coercive force to wring suspects for the location of Moon and Bo.
Here the French Connection‘s model of mixing in some unpleasant and critical aspects of policing in with the action is maintained for some real substance, as the question of how far Buddy and his team will go for payback is raised. This aspect is presented with a matter-of-fact attitude, one that suggests less political outrage than a pervasive sense of gruelling, mentally and physically manifesting weltschmerz. Perhaps the film’s most bleakly affecting moment comes when a petty criminal Toredano (Joe Spinell), who seems connected to the kidnappers, shows off his knobbly, distorted fingers as the Seven-Ups prepare to give him the third degree, reporting, with a hint of resigned bravado, “I been here before. Do what you gotta do.” Buddy and Barilli steal into Kalish’s house at night and terrify both the mobster and his wife into coughing up details of the crimes, and Buddy torments Coltello into giving details by repeatedly yanking loose his oxygen feeder. In context, this stuff is gruelling and not worked for sadistic thrills, but it does follow Dirty Harry in laying out a trope of modern thrillers in which supposedly righteous heroes so often engage in forms of torture and humiliation to work their ends. All Buddy learns from this, eventually, is that he’s been made a fool of by Vito, as he realises the list of kidnapped gangsters matches his own wallet’s load of mug shots. The scene is set for Buddy to manipulate Vito into accidentally delivering his men into a shoot-out.
This plays out, as was practically de rigeur in the ‘70s crime thriller, in a location of urban and industrial detritus, here a peerlessly squalid patch of ground where it feels like all the city’s junk and shit have been left to slowly rot in the rain and sun. Lynch, in his second movie, laid down the groundwork here for a career playing villains in films and TV, for which his blonde hair and peculiar looks, which might have once been good but seemed to have been gnarled to a feral glaze by bad luck or sad life, and, made him a sneakily charismatic representative; as Moon is caught in a maze of detritus he turns from confident rascal to trapped rat, in the great Harry Lime tradition, genuinely scared for his life and expiring under a hail of Buddy’s bullets, Ellis’ music droning in stark communication of his death throes and Buddy’s nausea. Here, as in the rest of the film, a hazy, mostly unspoken yet unavoidably pungent melancholia pervades the landscape, a miasma only dispersed by hard action. Perhaps, indeed, that’s why Buddy and others like him keep doing their job, for the same reason the audience was presumed to want to such grim films: now and then, something gets the blood pumping, the soul kick-started, in the face of a scummy universe. Buddy early in the film is reduced, by contrast, to inertia and depression by mild criticism of his methods, and at the end, his confrontation of Vito sees D’Antoni pulling off his last and best directorial touch: with Buddy pledging artful revenge, he turns his back on his pal. Vito’s pleadings fade to nothing, street noise rises up, the camera retreats before Buddy, creating a dragging, druggy sensation, making each step away feel like a decisive but painful severance from Buddy’s past amities and last sentiments. Whilst the film as a whole is more generic than the best examples of its type and style, it nonetheless represents that style quintessentially.