Hey, Did You Ever See (Either of These Movies)? HICKEY AND BOGGS / FREEBIE AND THE BEAN

HICKEY & BOGGS (1972)

For all the peace and love touted during the ‘60s, the main entertainment by-product of the era seems to be disillusionment, which didn’t become readily apparent until the decade ticked over. When Richard M. Nixon took over the Presidency in 1969, his election was primarily based on his promise to end the Vietnam War. Troop reduction was implemented during his first term, but so were secret bombings, which gave way to the “credibility gap”. By 1972, amidst disintegrating cultural values and near-complete distrust of the government—coming to a head in 1973 with the Watergate Scandal—the American people who marched and sang and protested finally hung their heads in defeat. There was no joy in “tuning in, turning on and dropping out”, and only the latter two seemed to give any escape from the corruption, Capitalism and consumerism.

At the same time, Hollywood was waging a war of its own, still competing for audiences with the rising standards and production values of television. The studio system had shattered to pieces and executives were getting job applications from weirdo types with film school degrees and crazy ideas. And it was then established that the new motto of Hollywood would be “whatever works”. War pictures, science fiction, fantasy—all the genres the film school kids had grown up with—were getting a major overhaul.

While the new Turks started concentrating on creating pictures that would speak to their generation, the older dogs, who’d gone into the ‘60s with a little perspective and came out angry and tired in the ‘70s, had a few things of their own to say about the state of the world.

Enter Hickey & Boggs. On the surface it seemed like “more of the same”—a crime-drama about a pair of wrung-dry private detectives hired to find a missing girl—starring a pair of likable actors introduced to the majority of the population due to the success of their mid-‘60s television show, I Spy. Robert Culp and comedian Bill Cosby broke new ground with the Sheldon Leonard-produced NBC series with one small decision: to make a statement without “making a statement”, by never explicitly calling attention to Cosby’s race. He was not a black sidekick to Culp’s groovy white spy. They were partners and equals, relying on each other as partners and friends would. By treating this relationship as completely normal, I Spy gave the Civil Rights movement a boost and established a team that audiences would tune into week after week. I Spy also told grittier, down-to-earth stories than their gadget-heavy, James Bond-influenced contemporaries like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which hipper audiences also responded to.

So when it was announced that the acting pair would team up again on the big screen for the first time since the show went off the air in 1968, the audiences of all ages caught in the “credibility gap” were interested. But Hickey and Boggs was not I Spy. Not even remotely.

Quickly establishing the characters as hard-luck, burned out private detectives, Al Hickey and Frank Boggs (Cosby and Culp) rely on the local police for both back-up and their private licenses. New legislation is coming down that will make private eyes little more than “process servers” and the cops are looking forward to that day coming. When their new case starts turning up bodies, Hickey and Boggs realize that they’re not the only ones searching for a Mexican woman named “Mary Ann”. The Syndicate is after her too, as she’s holding $400,000 of their money stolen by her incarcerated boyfriend. Each lead ends with either a dead body or massive property damage, and the crime fighting pair start thinking about alternate lines of work while the cops pile on the charges. Facing jail time and about to call it quits, the partners are made by the Syndicate and are sent a violent message to drop things entirely. When it’s finally personal, Hickey and Boggs upgrade their weaponry and set out to solve the problem once and for all.

Much to mainstream America’s surprise, Hickey & Boggs was not I Spy. Far from it. With Culp himself directing Walter Hill’s grim screenplay, Hickey & Boggs details the life of two very tired men who are sick of the game, sick of their lives, but see very little way out. Hickey’s relationship with his girlfriend, Nyona (Rosalind Cash), is strained to say the least, so there’s no solace there. Boggs pines for a stripper who wants nothing to do with him until she needs something. Their own relationship is primarily professional, and while they may bicker about the others’ personal shortcomings, neither plays a great part in the other’s life. They are both middle-aged, their dreams are behind them and now everyone around them wants to “burn them up”. They’re not the glamorous, playboy secret agents from I Spy. They’re the two guys you see drinking their lunch in the middle of the day in very dark bars. And the world they inhabit is ugly, violent and as angry at them as they are at it.

Upon its release, Hickey & Boggs was not a financial success for all of the reasons listed above. With disillusionment the atmosphere of America, audiences didn’t want to see a pair of beloved TV buddies so worn down by life. But the era of the private detective—declared officially glossless two years later in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye—was over, summed up by an exhausted Hickey after a shootout in a slum: “It doesn’t mean anything, Frank. Nothing means anything.”

Refreshingly, the “straight” cops are not portrayed as crooked or inept. They’re doing their jobs just as the title pair, only they have stricter rules to follow and, perhaps, more to go home to every day (as illustrated by a late-night call to Woods where he is roused from bed, in his underwear, his children woken by the phone, to hear about the latest catastrophe caused by the detectives. His reaction is not only appropriate but understandable.). Those on the side of law and order are not the bad guys—they’re not “pigs” by any means—but by the end, there’s little distinguish them, even in their own eyes, from the villains.

In 1972, audiences were still too shell-shocked, still at “credibility gap” ground-level, to accept the harsh reality of the movie. Viewed through modern eyes, Hickey & Boggs is a tough, tense thriller, hard-boiled in all senses of the word and filled to the brim with now-familiar faces in supporting roles including Vincent Gardenia, Robert Mandan (later hysterical on television’s SOAP), James Woods and Michael Moriarty. But the movie still may have missed its audience for now, modern viewers may be shocked at the sight of familiar funnyman and family man Cliff Huxtable coldly blowing people away with a .44 magnum. Al Hickey is not Ghost Dad—he’s even a far-cry from the angry paramedic in Mother, Juggs and Speed—and Cosby plays him perfectly. Anyone who grew up associating the actor with The Cosby Show and Jell-O pudding is going to have a rough time—perhaps just as rough as those who did seeing the antithesis of I Spy’s “Alexander Scott”.

And that is likely the best explanation as to why Hickey & Boggs does not yet have a DVD release. An exceptional movie both ahead of and behind its time because it was, exactly, of its time.

To that end:

FREEBIE AND THE BEAN (1974) is the flip-side of Hickey & Boggs. Taking advantage of the disillusioned audience’s feeling of powerlessness, Freebie and the Bean filtered the “break all the rules” attitude into an action comedy that simultaneously defined both the “buddy cop” and the “mayhem” movie. Using the establishment for the benefit of the anti-establishment, the title characters played by James Caan and Alan Arkin, are two plainclothes detectives of the “intelligence division” of the New York police force. When we meet them, they’re sifting through the stolen garbage of a local transportation boss, who they suspect of racketeering. Finding a piece of evidence, they beat some information out of a local snitch and discover that there’s a contract out on a man who can prove the case for them. They spend the rest of the film bickering like old ladies, beating up suspects and driving recklessly through the city—at one point they fly off the freeway and into the apartment of an elderly couple watching television. “Hello, dispatch, we’re gonna need a tow,” Freebie says after asking the couple to borrow the phone. He gives the address and then, “Yeah, apartment 304. Third floor.”

Obnoxious, loud, homophobic, misanthropic, irresponsible and racist, Freebie and the Bean was, of course, a hugh hit in 1974, spawning countless imitations and a short-lived television series. Under the muddy direction of Richard Rush, who would later go on to make the exemplary The Stunt Man, the chase sequences are well-edited, but the dialogue is difficult to hear and the story nearly unnecessary. The partners scream at each other and physically assault one another all the way through the movie. Much is made of “The Bean’s” Mexican heritage, but Alan Arkin makes a less-credible Latino than Valerie Harper (who plays his wife in an extended cameo wherein he loudly accuses her of infidelity because, among other things, her “dousche-bag” is missing from the bathroom). Caan’s “Freebie” shoots first and asks questions later, maybe, if he remembers. They wound numerous bystanders during their gunfights and chase escape vehicles into crowded areas. At one point, both the heroes and the villains run over participants of a parade, wherein much hilarity ensues.

Viewed through the eyes of the era, there is no question as to why Freebie and the Bean became such a hit. Our two inept heroes are part of the system but are accidentally destroying it from the inside. They don’t play by the rules because the rules, apparently, have never been explained to them. It’s okay to identify or even root for these assholes because they’re utterly make-believe. They’re “hero pigs” fighting people only slightly worse than they are. Indeed, everyone around them wallows in the same shit; their superiors are corrupt or ineffectual; the villains are rich and despicable; the only by-standers ever spared are a pair of hippies who escape arrest time and again when cars crash into police vehicles (they’re never seen explicitly, but the unfortunate hippie pair can be glimpsed in cuffs at the side of the road throughout). Authority is stupid, blind and violent. And so is everyone else. That seems to be the message, and that was a message people were ready to hear. In fact, Freebie and the Bean was simply preaching to the choir.

The movie even parodies the now-familiar down-beat ending of anti-establishment establishment movies like Hickey & Boggs, with the resurrection of an apparently dead character, which underscores just how nonsensical the precedings were. Al Hickey said it best: “It doesn’t mean anything, Frank,” but he said it about the wrong movie. Hickey & Boggs is very much about the death of American trust. Freebie and the Bean is a celebration of that death. And to that end, it succeeds beautifully and at the top of its chaotic lungs.

In the following years, ‘70s audiences watched as familiar genres morphed and reflected the times they were in. Dramas got heavier as more taboos were addressed, comedies became cruder and the popular genres were re-imagined to be relevant (2001: A Space Odyssey) or brightly-polished and much-needed escapism (Star Wars) (or both, ala Silent Running). During that era, very little was left unexplored, for better or worse. Movies today would not be what they were without the disillusioned of that period and you can take that for what it’s worth. Even the cynical among us may actually prefer Freebie and the Bean (which is actually easier to find on DVD thanks to TCM) to Hickey & Boggs because the former is easier to mock while the latter’s truth may still be a little too bitter to taste.

THE WAY OF THE GUN (2000)

For a while, modern audiences seem to think that the crime drama was created by Quentin Tarantino, or, at the very least, he refined it. And for a long while, his Pulp Fiction influence could be felt on everything—The Big Hit, the theatrical version of Payback, name any half-serious story about men with guns who love to talk as much as shoot, and you’ll see the Reservoir Dogs stamp on them, for good or ill. But what some people don’t realize—or even understand when Tarantino has insisted himself—that the crime/adventure/black comedy predates him by a good long time. While the “Tarantino” genre is more steeped in ‘70s exploitation than it is hardboiled films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the amoral tough-guy-with-a-gun-and-his-own-code is nearly as old as cinema itself. At the very least, the rules were written in post-WWII Hollywood when the pot-boiler was all the rage, even though we still weren’t allowed to root for the anti-hero back then, thanks to the Hays Code.

In fiction, few wrote tough-guy stories with a harder shell than Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, with his “Parker” novels. A grim, cold-blooded career criminal, Parker was the manliest anti-hero to grace popular culture in a long time. To date, Westlake’s novel The Hunter has been adapted for screen twice—Point Blank with Lee Marvin and the aforementioned Payback with Mel Gibson (albeit closer to the tone of the book in director Brian Helgeland’s original cut)—and influenced a goodly number of others. But it seems nearly impossible to capture the sheer underworld amorality for the screen and have audiences react favorably. Moviegoers like a hero. Even if he does scuzzy things, shoots people, beats up women, he still has to have some level of likability. On the page, Parker isn’t likable, nor does he want to be. Nor does he care if you hate him, are indifferent to him, or barely notice he’s there—so long as you’re not in his way.

In 1995, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for an offbeat and twisty little thriller called The Usual Suspects. A movie boiled medium-hard, it garnered a well-deserved following and injected the name “Keyser Soze” into our vernacular. Following that, McQuarrie couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood.

Adverse to being pigeonholed as a “crime guy” he finally gave in and took his friend and Suspects actor Benicio Del Toro’s advice to pen another hardboiled movie because studios not only dug those things but tended to leave the director alone provided the production stayed within budget. But McQuarrie was bitter towards Hollywood and decided to play a nasty trick on the studio that picked him up. He wrote the meanest, nastiest story about the hardest-boiled criminals to walk the streets. His anti-heroes could just as well drop the pretense and adopt the role of villain. In his opinion, what was the point of writing about criminals if you were just going to portray them as little more but wayward nonconformists?

So it’s no surprise that, when released in 2000, The Way of the Gun wound up on nobody’s Top Ten List. There’s no amiable banter in the movie and certainly nobody dances as Jack-Rabbit Slim’s. The main characters of the movie, Parker and Longbaugh (nicknamed after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (aka Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longbaugh respectively) and not from Westlake’s character, though the parallels remain), are decidedly not nice. Introduced before the main credits, they’re seen wasting time in a parking lot, leaning against a car. When they’re harassed by the car’s owner and his foul-mouthed girlfriend, the first course of action they take is to punch out the woman. They’re besieged by the outraged crowd and beaten down but they wind up laughing at their own defeat. These guys are losers, pure and simple, but they’re not guys to be fucked with.

Drifting from town to town, committing crime and larceny for survival, the pair wind up in a fertility clinic and sperm bank, hoping to rub out enough for a hotel room and a meal. Overhearing that one of the clinic’s patients is a surrogate for a rich and powerful but childless couple, and that her million-dollar pay day is due on arrival in just a few days. With practiced and almost military precision, the pair kidnap the young mother-for-hire and ease their way out of the building, keeping her armed body guards at bay.

This, of course, sits not at all with the powerful father and his equally-powerful and shadier friends, particularly the underworld-savvy Sarno. Tracking the kidnappers down, he first tries to pay them off but Longbaugh doesn’t bite. Sarno tries to reason with him—they’re both older guys, not like the younger, hotheaded Parker, so they both understand how the world works and how things can get worse for everyone. For whatever reason, Longbaugh opts for worse. The plot drags the viewer over broken glass towards a climax in a Mexican town right out of The Wild Bunch. The final act involves brutal torture, a bloody gun-point caesarian section and a violent shoot-out between the pair of two-bit hoods and Sarno’s aged, and therefore very experienced, bagmen. A happy ending can’t be seen for miles, not even for the survivors.

Filled to overflowing with terrific actors, The Way of the Gun possesses an impressive pedigree. You not only get Del Toro as Longbaugh and James Caan as Sarno, but Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt as the bodyguards, and the great Geoffrey Lewis (The Devil’s Rejects) as Sarno’s suicidal gunsal who proves to be one of the toughest eggs in the film. On the downside you also have a glum Ryan Phillippe with his mouthful of marbles delivery and the dog-whistle-voiced Juliette Lewis, who nonetheless evokes sympathy as the desperate pregnant woman.

But if you’re looking for someone to root for, good luck. Not only does every character in the film have his or her own agenda but they come with closest stuffed full of more skeletons than a Romanian necropolis. The closest you get to a traditional hero comes in the form of Lewis’ gynecologist, Dr. Painter, played by Dylan Kussman, who spends the majority of the film terrified—and who has a few things in his own past that are fairly ill-advised. From a narrative point of view, The Way of the Gun is a cinematic ass-kicking, and not in a “kick-ass” sense. The action is exciting and the tension builds nearly to the point where you can’t take it any more.

Miraculously, the script is so tightly-written and the characters so perfectly played that you can’t quite hate anyone in the film. Which isn’t to say you ever like anyone either. Casting actors at the crest of middle age (and careening down the other side) as the experienced mobsters was a wise move on McQuarrie’s part—how tough do you have to be to make it to that age in this particular business? Pretty fucking tough, that’s how tough!

While the movie gives you no one to root for, it hands you no one to root against either. By making both sides cold and misanthropic, The Way of the Gun plays out on neutral ground. Lewis’s character is so vulnerable, trapped in such an unwinnable situation, you don’t care who wins, so long as it ends and she and the baby are out of the middle.

Marketed as another action-charged black comedy, with commercials of Phillippe and Del Toro changing places as they drive, momentary snippets of dialogue that can be humorous when out of context, and lots of guns firing to a borrowed score (Joe Kraemer’s music is as moody and indifferent as the characters), audiences were appalled at the movie they got. Expecting a scrimmage game, they got a dog fight. Not what they bought at all.

By no means light entertainment, if you’re in the mood for a tough guy movie, noir doesn’t get any darker than The Way of the Gun, despite it’s sunny locations and bright photography. It’s a gritty, ugly experience that will stick with you for a good long while. Watch it back-to-back with some over-the-top action nonsense and think about these characters as the digital explosions and Dolby Digital audio something like Terminator: Salvation toss you around the room. You’ll wonder if the human race is really worth saving.