THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN (1974) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Stuart Rosenberg
Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, Lou Gossett,
Anthony Zerbe, Cathy Lee Crosby, Jonna Cassidy,
Matt Clark, Warren Finnerty, Leigh French
A gunman with an automatic weapon shoots up a city bus, killing half a dozen people, including the partner of a gum-chewing police detective played by Walter Matthau. Reluctantly teamed with a new partner (Bruce Dern), Matthau starts to suspect that the killings could be tied to a homicide case he failed to solve two years before. Together with "Bullitt" and "Dirty Harry", this fits nicely in the subgenre of well-crafted San Francisco cop thrillers from the '60s and '70s. The location work is excellent - the city's Greyhound terminal in its entire history has never looked this clean - and some natural-sounding, overlapping dialogue helps move the story along. What's fun is the odd-couple casting of Dern and Matthau as two guys who, if they weren't stuck working together, would have nothing to do with each other, not out of antagonism as much as indifference. It's an anti-buddy movie, and these guys know exactly how to make that work.
