''The Laughing Policeman'' (released in the UK as ''An Investigation of Murder'') is a 1973 American
neo-noir
Neo-noir is a revival of film noir, a genre that had originally flourished during the post-World War II era in the United Statesroughly from 1940 to 1960. The French term, ''film noir'', translates literally to English as "black film", indicating ...
thriller film loosely based on the 1968
novel of the same name by
Maj Sjöwall
Maj Sjöwall (; 25 September 1935 – 29 April 2020) was a Swedish author and translator. She is best known for her books about police detective Martin Beck. She wrote the books in collaborative work with her partner Per Wahlöö.
Biograph ...
and
Per Wahlöö
Per Fredrik Wahlöö (5 August 1926 – 22 June 1975) – in English translations often identified as Peter Wahloo – was a Swedish author. He is perhaps best known for the collaborative work with his partner Maj Sjöwall on a series of ten nove ...
. The setting of the story is transplanted from
Stockholm
Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...
to
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
. It was directed by
Stuart Rosenberg and features
Walter Matthau as Detective Jake Martin.
Plot
A busload of passengers, including off-duty
police detective
A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crimes by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads th ...
Dave Evans, are gunned down and killed. Evans, on his own time, has been following a man named Gus Niles in search of information linking businessman Henry Camarero to the murder of his wife, Teresa, two years earlier.
Evans was the partner of Detective Sergeant Jake Martin, a veteran but cynical member of the Homicide Detail working the bus massacre investigation. Jake originally investigated the Teresa Camarero case and has been obsessed with his failure to "make" Camarero for the murder. Jake returns to it after many dead-end leads (including a disastrous confrontation with a deranged amputee who takes hostages at gunpoint) in the bus investigation. Niles was killed on the bus as well, and it was Niles who provided the
alibi
An alibi (from the Latin, '' alibī'', meaning "somewhere else") is a statement by a person, who is a possible perpetrator of a crime, of where they were at the time a particular offence was committed, which is somewhere other than where the crim ...
that enabled Camarero to cover up his wife's murder.
The sullen Jake and enthusiastic but impulsive
Inspector
Inspector, also police inspector or inspector of police, is a police rank. The rank or position varies in seniority depending on the organization that uses it.
Australia
In Australian police forces, the rank of inspector is generally the ne ...
Leo Larsen are paired to interview suspects. Jake shuts out Larsen from his deductions, while Larsen, despite a loose-on-the-rules and brutal side, tries to understand and gain the confidence of his new partner. Defying the orders of their police superior Lt. Steiner, they seek, find and then smoke out Camarero, leading to a chase through the streets of San Francisco and a confrontation aboard another bus.
Cast
*
Walter Matthau as Sgt. Jake Martin (
Martin Beck
Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective and the main character in the ten novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, collectively titled ''The Story of a Crime''. Frequently referred to as the Martin Beck stories, all have been adapt ...
in the novel)
*
Bruce Dern
Bruce MacLeish Dern (born June 4, 1936) is an American actor. He has often played supporting villainous characters of unstable natures. He has received several accolades, including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and the Silver B ...
as Insp. Leo Larsen (
Gunvald Larsson in the novel)
*
Louis Gossett Jr.
Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. (born May 27, 1936) is an American actor. Born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York City, He had his stage debut at the age of 17, in a school production of '' You Can't Take It with You.'' Shortly after he successfully ...
as Insp. James Larrimore
*
Anthony Zerbe
Anthony Jared Zerbe (born May 20, 1936) is an American actor. His notable film roles include the post-apocalyptic cult leader Matthias in ''The Omega Man'', a 1971 film adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, '' I Am Legend''; as an Irish C ...
as Lt. Nat Steiner
*
Albert Paulsen
Albert Paulsen (born Albert Paulson; 13 December 1925 in Guayaquil, Ecuador – 25 April 2004 in Los Angeles, California) was an Ecuadorian-American actor who appeared in many American television series beginning in the 1960s, playing charac ...
as Henry Camerero
*
Val Avery
Val may refer to: Val-a
Film
* ''Val'' (film), an American documentary about Val Kilmer, directed by Leo Scott and Ting Poo
Military equipment
* Aichi D3A, a Japanese World War II dive bomber codenamed "Val" by the Allies
* AS Val, a So ...
as Insp. John Pappas
*
Paul Koslo
Paul Koslo (born Manfred Koslowski; June 27, 1944 – January 9, 2019) was a German-born Canadian actor.
Career
Koslo started his career in such 1970s films as '' Nam's Angels'' a.k.a. ''The Losers'', ''Vanishing Point'' and '' The Stone K ...
as Duane Haygood
*
Cathy Lee Crosby
Cathy Lee Crosby (born December 2, 1944) is an American actress and former professional tennis player. She achieved TV and film success in the 1980s and was a co-host of the television series ''That's Incredible!''
Early life
Crosby was born i ...
as Kay Butler
*
Joanna Cassidy
Joanna Cassidy (born Joanna Virginia Caskey, August 2, 1945 Brady, James"In Step With: Joanna Cassidy" ''Miami Herald'', November 25, 1990. Accessed March 14, 2022, via Newspapers.com. "Born: Aug.2, 1944, in Camden, N.J.") is an American actress. ...
as Monica
*
Clifton James
George Clifton James (May 29, 1920 – April 15, 2017) was an American actor known for roles as a prison floorwalker in ''Cool Hand Luke'' (1967), Sheriff J.W. Pepper alongside Roger Moore in the James Bond films '' Live and Let Die'' (19 ...
as Maloney
*
Gregory Sierra
Gregory Joseph Sierra (January 25, 1937 – January 4, 2021) was an American actor known for his roles as Detective Sergeant Chano Amengual on ''Barney Miller'', Julio Fuentes, the Puerto Rican neighbor of Fred G. Sanford on ''Sanford and Son'' ...
as Ken Vickery
*
Matt Clark as Coroner
Reception
On
review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...
website
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
the film has a score of 57% based on reviews from 14 critics, with an
average rating
In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7 ...
of 5.5/10.
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
of the ''
Chicago Sun-Times
The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the ''Chicago T ...
'' said,
''The Laughing Policeman'' is an awfully good police movie: taut, off-key, filled with laconic performances. It provides the special delight we get from gradually unraveling a complicated case... The direction is by Stuart Rosenberg, and marks a comeback of sorts... With ''The Laughing Policeman'', he takes a labyrinthine plot and leads us through it at a gallop; he respects our intelligence and doesn't bother to throw in a lot of scenes where everything is explained. All the pieces in the puzzle do fit together, you realize after the movie is over, and part of the fun is assembling them yourself. And there are a couple of scenes that are really stunning, like the bus shooting, and an emergency room operation, and scenes where the partners try to shake up street people to get a lead out of them. Police movies so often depend on sheer escapist action that it's fun to find a good one.
''
Variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
'' praised the film saying that "After an extremely overdone prolog of violent mass murder on a bus, ''The Laughing Policeman'' becomes a handsomely made manhunt actioner, starring Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern in excellent performances as two San Francisco detectives".
According to Chris Petit of ''
Time Out'', "By the end, complete with car chase and split-second shooting, the film has become indistinguishable from all those movies it's trying so hard to disown".
''The Laughing Policeman'' was released on
Blu-ray
The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of sto ...
on November 15, 2016. Matthew Hartman of High-Def Digest, who reviewed it, wrote "
he film
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...
could have been a great and gritty 70s thriller, unfortunately, it's primary story doesn't live up to the potential of the opening scene".
See also
*
List of American films of 1973
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laughing Policeman, The
Films directed by Stuart Rosenberg
Martin Beck films
20th Century Fox films
1970s thriller films
American police detective films
Films scored by Charles Fox
Films set in San Francisco
Films set in the San Francisco Bay Area
Films shot in San Francisco
Films based on mystery novels
1970s police procedural films
Films based on Swedish novels
1970s English-language films
1970s American films
1970s Swedish films