Joseph Wambaugh was already a former Marine by the time he joined the Los Angeles Police Department in May 1960. Ten years later, now a veteran cop, he felt compelled to write a new kind of police novel: “I had always loved war novels that combined comedy and tragedy, books that were funny and melancholy, like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. I thought that police work was the perfect job in which to indulge that approach to a novel.” Combining street-level drama with an inspired sense of the absurd, The New Centurions was an immediate hit when it appeared in January 1971; by March, it had beaten out Erich Segal’s 1970 weepie Love Story and would end up spending thirty-two weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Wambaugh’s novel follows three rookie patrolmen over the course of five years as they face the constant stresses of street policing, culminating in the 1965 Watts riots, where each cop finally becomes the veteran they were destined to be. At first glance, The New Centurions is very much an episodic novel, and one based heavily on Wambaugh’s own experiences, but there is something more subversive going on - Wambaugh contrasts the cynical, borderline fascist attitudes of veteran cops with the well-meaning rookies throughout, and ultimately portrays not only how the LAPD work the streets, but also how the streets work the individual cops, resulting in broken marriages, alcoholism, and in one particularly dramatic case, suicide. As Wambaugh put it, “death by one’s hand was always lurking in a job where young men and women see the worst of people and ordinary people at their worst and become prematurely cynical as a result.”
The novel’s bestseller status and modern take on police work naturally caught the attention of Hollywood (helped in no small part by Hollywood agent extraordinaire Swifty Lazar), specifically producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who had a first look deal at Columbia. They roped in Richard Fleischer as director and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant to adapt. With rising star Stacy Keach in the lead and George C. Scott persuaded by Fleischer to take on a secondary role as veteran beat cop Andy Kilvinski1, The New Centurions promised to be as bit a hit at the cinema as it was in the bookshop.
The New Centurions movie jettisons much of Wambaugh’s framework, partly shifting focus from the trio of rookies to Roy Fehler (Keach), a young married father who hits the streets thinking that his police work will inform his college work and potential move into law school. He’s partnered with Kilvinski (Scott), who introduces him to the realities of street policing - none of that “Hollywood crap” - in a series of vignettes that range from the lighthearted (getting a paddy wagon full of hookers too drunk to work) to the harrowing (rescuing an abused baby from its drunken mother). Roy finds himself adept at police work, craving the streets even after a getaway driver fells him with a shotgun. It becomes an addiction, destroying his marriage and driving him to drink and disorderly conduct until a kindly nurse (Rosalind Cash) makes him understand there’s more to life than the job, just in time for him to meet a tragic end during a domestic dispute.
The process of adaptation is a strange one. Screenwriters have been known to improve on mediocre or bad books (The Godfather and Jaws are the most famous examples) by divining the essence of what made them bestsellers in the first place2 as opposed to rendering them faithfully. Some faithful adaptations end up feeling redundant. The New Centurions is neither improved nor faithful. Fleischer was never a director with a firm grasp of writing – he was always a solid journeyman who trusted his screenwriter – so it’s likely that he deferred to Silliphant’s draft for the most part.
While The New Centurions represents a positive move away from the standard cop drama, it is still a superficial one. Silliphant was an in-demand writer for both television and movies, but outside of In The Heat of the Night (for which he won the Academy Award), there’s very little to suggest that he was anything but a prolific potboiler with a keen sense of structure, who apparently enjoyed calling himself a whore. That said, Silliphant manages to faithfully capture some of the novel’s magic, mostly through judicious editing: in his Backstory 3 interview, Silliphant is open about how he combed through the book and cherry-picked scenes while bringing across as much of Wambaugh’s dialogue as he could. He also manages to reflect Kilvinski’s story of the phantom intruder in Roy’s death, even if that reflection is a little muddy.
The major issue with the adaptation is that it doesn’t trust its audience. Wambaugh doesn’t directly question his characters or their morality; instead, he puts them in compromised situations reflecting a wider issue, that of a police force that is understaffed, overstretched, stressed out and aggressive. The film has a little of this, but without the structure of rookies becoming hard-bitten veterans during the Watts riots, it fails to interrogate the wider themes. Robert Towne, who was brought in to punch up Scott’s role, took his name off the movie, pronouncing it “dogshit” in his interview with John Brady3: “That’s what was exciting about [Wambaugh’s] book: the progressive exacerbation between the Occupying Army, which was the blue suits and the Occupied, which was the blacks. The whole situation forced them into conflict, then riot … It was the corruption of people who had moral certitude. That’s why The New Centurions was such a good title. The cop was so certain that he was above any kind of reproach that he couldn’t understand that the riots were not simple law-breaking, but the results of social forces that finally exploded and were beyond anything he was aware of.”
I don’t wholly agree with this – the “moral certitude” point speaks more to Towne’s beliefs than Wambaugh’s – but Towne’s point around the wider situation stands: apart from the grace notes of gallows humour and institutional rank, there’s little to distinguish Roy Fehler from any number of anti-hero cop protagonists. Wambaugh’s characters exist as part of a society; they may have their own stories, but those stories form part of a larger tapestry. Focusing on one of those stories ultimately diminishes the whole.
The other major issue with The New Centurions is George C. Scott. According to Erik Estrada4, Sergio was originally the character who commits suicide, but Scott’s addition to the cast meant substantial rewrites: “Now it was my role that took a backseat to Scott’s character and instead of starring in The New Centurions, I was co-starring with an actor who could really draw at the box office.” And while Scott is genuinely great in the role – his rage is rarely used better than the scene where he confronts a slumlord and his melancholy is rarely more touching than his retirement scene and subsequent suicide – The New Centurions is not the story of a twenty-forty5 beat cop killing himself because he has nothing outside of the job. And because Scott’s performance is so strong, his absence hurts the rest of the movie. Stacy Keach, a fine theatrical actor who had just played Hamlet in Central Park alongside James Earl Jones and Colleen Dewhurst, struggles to transfer that powerful stage presence to the screen6, especially when the Scott-less portion of the film requires him to test the audience’s sympathy for Roy. Scott Wilson is given little to do as Gus (who is arguably one of the more interesting characters in the book) and Erik Estrada’s big breakdown moment is essentially a bathetic non-sequitur, mostly because he’s barely registered as a character.
Faring better are happy-to-see-them character actors like Clifton James as the slobby Whitey, Isabel Sandford as the blowsiest hooker you’ve ever seen, Hill Street Blues’s James Sikking as a pipe-smoking Vice sergeant who orders Roy to “swish” his way into entrapment, and Roger E. Mosley as a uncooperative truck driver. Even the great Anne “You don’t have a Cousin Patty”7 Ramsey makes a late appearance as the woman who gets Roy killed. These mostly one-scene performances give The New Centurions a (mostly) comic verisimilitude without diminishing the inherent danger and overall grit of the situation, and give flashes of what the movie could have been - a sharp comic drama - before the “Hollywood crap” took over. Wambaugh largely took it on the chin, helped in no small part by the television mini-series adaptation of his second novel The Blue Knight, but the worst was yet to come. Paging Mr Aldrich, paging Mr Robert Aldrich …
Next Up: “Don’t look for these guys in church.”
It’s “Kilvinsky” in the novel, but Kilvinski in the film. I’m sure there’s a reason for this change, and I’m even more sure that someone out there will tell me what that reason is.
Or, in both of the examples cited, simply cutting out the weird sex stuff.
In Brady’s excellent collection of interviews, The Craft of Screenwriting.
In his autobiography My Road from Harlem to Hollywood. Never let it be said that I don’t do my reading.
Kilvinski: “So you do your twenty, take your forty percent. Relax.”
From Keach’s autobiography All in All: “Around this time, John Huston was generous enough to say of me, ‘Stacy is not just a star, he is a constellation. The audience will come to see whatever characters he portrays.’ John was a smart man, but he was dead wrong on that one.”
Another name question here - I’ve always thought it was Cousin Patty, but there are some out there who believe it’s “Cousin Paddy”? Hive mind, assemble!