Middle Film of the 'Matthau 70's Thriller Trilogy'
...and the least of the three, but distinctive and interesting on its own terms.
Walter Matthau was a character actor for about ten years before he landed surprising middle-aged stardom with the one-two punch of "The Fortune Cookie"(for he won the 1966 Supporting Actor Oscar) and the big hit "The Odd Couple" of 1968. After picking up superstar pay opposite Barbra Streisand in "Hello, Dolly"(1969), Matthau was primed to become a 70's comedy star.
And Matthau WAS a seventies comedy star, for the most part, except for an interesting little sojourn into a one-two-three series of crime thrillers in the early seventies.
First up was Don Siegel's nifty and tough little thriller "Charley Varrick," the best of the three, which came out in the fall of 1973. A year later came the extremely well-regarded New York subway hostage thriller "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," pitting wry Matthau against a cold and calculating Robert Shaw (between "The Sting" and "Jaws") in a movie so nice they've remade it twice.
"Varrick" and "Pelham" are seventies classics of a sort. In between them came Matthau in "The Laughing Policeman," which is less than a classic, but more than a bomb.
"Policeman" came out during Christmas 1973, just a couple of months after "Charley Varrick," and (unfortunately for it) against Eastwood as Dirty Harry in "Magnum Force." Newspapers ran side-by-side photos of Eastwood brandishing his Magnum with Matthau brandishing a smallish .38(?) and there was some snickering.
Like "Dirty Harry" and "Bullitt" before it, "The Laughing Policeman" was about a cop in San Francisco. Given that the TV show "The Streets of San Francisco" was just hitting its stride, "The Laughing Policeman" had to bring something different to the table. And it did.
What the Matthau picture brought was the wholesale movement of a thriller based in Sweden(I think) over to San Francisco, with the group of characters moving with it and getting a makeover. It emphasized, in a way that McQueen's "Bullitt" and Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" could not, the TEAMWORK of policework, with Matthau giving over a fair amount of screen time to the interesting Bruce Dern and Lou Gossett Jr as his fellow officers, not to mention puffy Val Avery and odd-looking Anthony Zerbe as the cops above and below Matthau.
"The Laughing Policeman" also spent a bit more time than "Bullitt" or "Dirty Harry" on the more exotic sides of San Francisco: the gay scene, the kinky straight scene, and racial matters (with verbal references to Oakland, Richmond, and Daly City that reminded Nor Cal viewers that glamourous San Francisco was surrounded by tougher neighborhoods, and often black ones.)
This movie was important for Bruce Dern, who gave up thousands in pay to get his name over the title: "Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern track a killer in The Laughing Policeman." Dern said that he proposed this deal so as to make a bid for movie stardom after (like Matthau) toiling in the supporting ranks for many years. Dern, whose twanging, rodentoid presence had been good for Western villain parts (Hang Em High, The Cowboys), had recently made a "prestige" name for himself as Jack Nicholson's brother in "The King of Marvin Gardens" by Bob Rafelson ("Five Easy Pieces.") "The Laughing Policeman" offered Bruce Dern to us as a star...and that star career lasted about five years, with work for Hitchcock in "Family Plot," as the villain in "Black Sunday" and (Oscar-nominated) as Jane Fonda's cuckolded husband in "Coming Home."
Dern and Walter Matthau were amusingly paired: both very tall (rare for movie stars), they go toe-to-toe in having a certain sex appeal and charisma even though neither was a particularly handsome man. Women loved Matthau in the seventies (he was ranked with Newman, McQueen and Eastwood in a "women's favorite male star list), and perhaps part of the reason is that he could play such low-key regular guys.
Matthau had played mean heavies and gangsters in his early career(his tallness translated to toughness) and was in two great sixties thrillers: "Charade" and "Mirage." His return to thrillers...one/two/three of them in the 70's was a fascinating experiment in his career, and he was sufficiently serious and tough in all three of them. "The Laughing Policeman" provides him with the most realistic and depressing of the characters: he's a veteran SF cop who barely sees or connects with his tired wife and alienated children, and who hates the sewer of his work. Matthau had the chops to present us with a man who was beyond gruff, and closer to sour meanness.
Alas, the "Matthau thriller trilogy" was an experiment that didn't work for him. None of the three thrillers were hits. Soon Matthau was back in "comedy star harness," and he did well by himself with Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys" (for which he was Oscar nommed), "The Bad News Bears"(a big hit), and "House Calls"(a Tracy/Hepburn thing with Glenda Jackson.)
Me, I like those comedies but I have great regard for Walter Matthau in his thrillers: Charade and Mirage in the sixties; Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman, and Pelham One-Two-Three in the seventies.
They're real nostalgia pieces, too, all of them, for a type of movie that is long, long, gone.
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