Badge 373 (1973)

You know cops are always guilty until proven innocent. Especially when you throw spics off buildings.

While the 1970s may be perceived as a great time for counterculture cinema, one of the biggest hits of 1971 inspired the kind of gung-ho, cop-loving entertainment that would march right through to blockbuster status in the Reagan years. That hit was The French Connection, a gritty and utterly dynamic take on the police procedural that took a real-life bust¹ and turned it into one of the finest action movies of any decade. The heroes of that bust were NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, who were immortalized as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo respectively, and who swiftly cashed in on their celebrity status by parlaying their real-life experiences into a handful of movies that aimed to capitalize on Friedkin’s film with varied results.

While Grosso would arguably become the more successful of the two – enjoying technical adviser status on The Godfather and inspiring Philip D’Antoni’s ludicrous (but enjoyable) spin-off The Seven-Ups (1973) before becoming a TV and movie producer in his own right, Egan would be less fortunate. A month after The French Connection hit cinemas, his (some say enforced) retirement was mired in controversy – Egan was effectively fired for failing to turn up to court appearances and had allegedly withheld contraband, which lost him his pension until his inevitable appeal. It was a somewhat ignominious end for a fifteen-year career in the NYPD, but Egan already had his sights set on the big time.

Five months before Buddy Mannuci (another Grosso stand in played by Roy Schieder) tore up the asphalt in The Seven-Ups, Paramount Pictures released Badge 373, apparently “inspired by the exploits of Eddie Egan.”² On paper, it looked like a surefire hit: here was a movie based on the career of one of the most celebrated NYPD detectives of the last decade, written by legendary tabloid reporter Pete Hamill, and starring on-the-rise Robert Duvall. What could possibly go wrong?

Badge 373 is less a cop movie than it is a vigilante movie. When Eddie Ryan (Duvall) is suspended from active duty following the “accidental” death of one of his suspects, Ryan becomes a bartender to earn a crust and shacks up with Maureen (Verna Bloom). When his former partner of three years Gigi (Louis Cosentino) swings by with his new partner Diaz (Chico Martinez), Ryan’s glad to see him, but it turns out to Gigi’s last night alive. Overwhelmed by thoughts of revenge, Ryan ignores his suspension and begins to investigate, despite mild warnings from his erstwhile boss Lieutenant Scanlon (Eddie Egan) to steer clear. Pretty soon, Ryan is tearing up New York in search of Puerto Rican drug lord Sweet William (Henry Darrow), who also happens to be selling guns to Puerto Rican independentistas.

The cop vigilante movie was already a thing by 1973, with Harry Callahan paving the way, Buford Pusser speaking softly and carrying a big stick, and Charles Bronson about to take on the entire Mafia in restaurant-reviewing, stuntman-endangering, insurance-flogging Michael Winner’s The Stone Killer. What sets Badge 373 apart is that Ryan is not a cop for a vast majority of the movie. What he is – and the film goes to great lengths to confirm this – is a massive, unrepentant racist. For those – like Gene Hackman – who found Popeye Doyle’s bigotry difficult to swallow, Eddie Ryan is an even tougher sell, flinging slurs around when he isn’t choking on Hamill’s Runyonesque non-sequiturs.³ Duvall was only too happy to go Method on the character - “I can strongly relate to the character. I would walk into bars, restaurants and drug stores and call Latinos wetbacks and spics. Some would stare in horror but most found it amusing upon recognizing my face. Stupid spics.” – and he apparently ad-libbed a number of additional slurs during the shoot. While Popeye Doyle’s casual racism was delivered with the kind of self-aware gusto that made it feel like a standard bad cop routine, Eddie Ryan appears to mean every last spittle-flecked invective. He hates everyone, but especially people who don’t look like him.

This is in part due to Hackman’s discomfort with the role; according to Friedkin, Hackman “had to play Egan without comment, but he thought he was the worst villain in history.”⁴ Duvall, on the other hand, seems to revel in what Egan thought was political incorrectness, which makes Badge 373 a rough watch for anyone who isn’t a card-carrying bigot. That Duvall is playing a more accurate version of Egan is cold comfort. In a 1991 TV interview with Egan and Grosso, the two former detectives spent most of the time complaining about the state of New York, with Egan lambasting “all these associations and what-have-you that’s marching on City Hall and saying the cop is wrong, the cop is wrong, the video cameras are out there, they’re running in and challenging the authority of the cop, that leaves them no authority. They don’t fear us. They don’t fear the cops.”⁵

As a result, if Electra Glide in Blue was conservative, then Badge 373 is utterly fascist. Ryan might be suspended, but he still apparently has free rein to run his own investigation – Scanlon only briefly tries to talk him out of it – and he feels not only duty-bound but downright entitled to murdering his former partner’s killer and beating the tar out of anyone who stands in his way. And make no mistake, this is no squint-eyed look at the liberals ruining law enforcement with things like “civil rights” and “not being a fucking lunatic” – the movie refuses to engage with the idea that anything Ryan is doing is criminal in itself. Even Harry Callahan had some pushback, for crying out loud, but Ryan is A Man of Impeccable Street Justice and doesn’t need no stinking badge to enter his house justified.⁶

Perhaps if Ryan were a competent cop, this might not be as big a deal, but he isn’t. Instead, he’s a hateful, blundering, middle-aged mess of a man, saddled with action sequences that see him struggling to haul his paunch over small walls and one particular scene – clearly supposed to be a car chase to equal that of The French Connection – that sees him commandeer a city bus and endanger the lives of seven passengers, not to pursue the bad guys but to escape from them. And even that, he manages to fuck up in fine style, eventually taking a kicking from a bunch of Puerto Rican thugs who like to say things like “Come and get us, Eddie! Come and get your babies!” Even his big finale is an exercise in bathos, bellowing “I’m coming up your ass!” as he gingerly pursues his villainous quarry up a crane and looks for all the world like the kind of guy who’s more likely to fall on his keys than feel a collar. If it weren’t for Sweet William’s incessant monologuing – which triggers a series of dissolve memories in Ryan that had me humming “The Way We Were” – our flatfoot wouldn’t be able to get the drop on him.

And let’s talk about the bad guys for a second. As Sweet William, Henry Darrow appears to be half Ricardo Montalban, half George C. Scott’s porn director disguise in Hardcore. He’s fond of waxing lyrical about André Gide and his dirt-poor upbringing, wearing his sunglasses at night (Corey Hart would be proud), and flinging obviously fake cash at the pursuing cop. He also, like many a villain before and after, has a horrible tendency of opening fire on his own men. As an actor of Puerto Rican descent, it boggles the mind why Darrow agreed to do the movie. The same goes for Felipe Luciano, who plays the independentista Ruben Garcia: Luciano was (and as far as I know still is) a community activist and poet, and heavily involved with Puerto Rican radicalism, and while his scene at the rally is (probably inadvertently) powerful stuff, his character is little more than a gun-toting revolutionary. To be mildly fair to Ryan, he at least tells Ruben to get out of the way before he opens fire, but it’s too little too late: the Puerto Rican community in New York are broadly portrayed as thugs and hookers, trembling shopkeepers (who can make an introduction to a drug lord) and naïve rebels. It may be that Hamill attempted to give his bad guys a bit more shading, but the overwhelming presence of Eddie Egan – looking like Norman Mailer’s idiot cousin and delivering most of his lines in a monotone – negates it entirely. After all, Ryan’s big piece of detective work – presuming Gigi’s new Puerto Rican partner is behind it all, which he isn’t but he’s definitely involved – is predicated on nothing more than a thorough distaste for anyone non-white.

And let us not forget – though we may want to – Verna Bloom, a fine actor with a rich pedigree, who had already turned in the performance of a lifetime in The Hired Hand, and who is stuck with the thankless and impossible role of Ryan’s squeeze. She’s given nothing to do but moon over Ryan, whine about him spending more time with his gun than her, and end up slaughtered, which prompts Ryan to finally show some affection to her as he tries to make out with her fresh corpse. I refuse to blame Bloom for any of this – she’s desperately trying to put lipstick on a pig throughout – and every time she appears, I pray that her fee was enough to buy something meaningful.⁷

Look, I pick these movies randomly to fill gaps in my knowledge, so there was always the possibility that I would have to sit through an absolute stinker with no redeeming qualities. I thought that The Night of the Following Day would be the worst, but hoo boy. Badge 373 is possibly one of the worst films I’ve had to write up: Koch’s hamfisted direction sucks the life out of both his ill-prepared action scenes and the location work, Duvall’s performance is dead-eyed and dull when it isn’t downright offensive, and the story feels both overstuffed and completely superficial, resulting in a movie that feels like four hours instead of its two. It’s amazing that Roger Ebert put Badge 373 into the same bracket as (though one star fewer than) the far superior Friends of Eddie Coyle as “an intelligent and thoughtful crime movie,” because while that very much describes Eddie Coyle it has no business being anywhere near Eddie Egan.

Luckily, the film was a box office flop, pretty much putting the nail in the coffin of any further Egan – sorry, Ryan – adventures.⁸ Pete Hamill would apparently go on to rewrite the dialogue in French Connection II (1975), which partly explains why that movie doesn’t quite work (and Alexander Jacobs’s ghost breathes a sigh of relief). As for Egan, he would continue to do what he called acting in a number of TV movies when he wasn’t hawking Miller Lite, before dying of colon cancer in 1995. Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but if Eddie Ryan was a more accurate portrayal of Egan than Popeye Doyle, then good fucking riddance.

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Next up: “Where anything can happen and usually does!”

1. A real-life bust where the contraband went mysteriously missing.

2. There was also a pilot for ABC imaginatively titled Egan, which saw Gene Roche play the eponymous cop, transferring from New York to Los Angeles, presumably because he’d already locked up all the ethnic minorities in the Big Apple. Despite co-starring the great Dabney Coleman, the pilot never made it to series.

3. An example: when Ryan is asked if he wants a drink, he replies, “Thanks, but I’m driving to Ireland.” This is after he’s threatened to turn the place into “a fuckin’ garage.” Later on, I swear he tells a sucker-punched security guard, “Jesus, you guys go out like crullers,” but I may have misheard.

4. Popeye is now notoriously slightly less racist, thanks to the edited version of The French Connection which removes a particularly nasty slur. The movie has been the subject of some awful tinkering over the years, but nobody appears to be taking responsibility for this one.

5. Grosso also whines on about how they used to be able to search “a hundred people a day” before they got their pesky rights. More like Sonny Grouse-o, am I right? (rim shot)

6. Why yes, I did reference The Treasure of the Sierra Madre AND Ride the High Country in a single sentence. Some might call that a mixed metaphor. I say deal with it. I’m clearly in no mood for pedantry.

7. It’s worth noting that both Duvall and Bloom had much better movies come out the same year: Duvall was in the cracking Richard Stark adaptation The Outfit and Bloom was in High Plains Drifter.

8. This is only partly true - there was another stab at Egan-related material with the Popeye Doyle TV series starring Ed O’Neill, which then became a 1986 TV movie, but it’s obviously more inspired by Friedkin’s movie than Eddie Egan. Naturally, Egan appears in it.