Filmmaker Ivan Passer was a veteran of the mid-sixties Czech New Wave and a collaborator with director Milos Forman on such classics as Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen’s Ball. Eventually, he would helm the acclaimed hardboiled neo-noir Cutter’s Way (1981) starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard. 1974 saw the release of this comedy drama with Carrol O’Connor (“All in the Family”) as a cabbie and Ernest Borgnine as a Marine veteran hairdresser joining New York City’s auxiliary police to fight crime on the Lower East Side. Passer captures the grittiness of the then-current urban blight but, as the New York Times’ Vincent Canby put it, “The sense of alienation that grips the city at times seizes the film itself…always in fascinating ways. A film of less consistent intelligence would probably be destroyed by a scene so pricelessly funny it’s almost a specialty number, when the auxiliary policemen and their wives attend a lecture on rape by “the author of the best-selling book, ‘Sexual Deviations of the Seventies.'” Co-starring Karen Black, Jack Kehoe and Ann Wedgeworth.
Marc Edward Heuck discusses Law and Disorder on the New Beverly blog.
