Freebie and the Bean (1974)

Could you send a tow truck, please, to 618 Elm Street? Hold it. It's the third floor, apartment 304.

Floyd Mutrux is not a name that necessarily springs to mind when discussing New Hollywood, but in the early 1970s Variety put him in the same bracket as Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese and Malick. Mutrux made his bones with Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971), a docudrama about drug addiction that lasted a week in cinemas before a Time review (by Jay Cocks) accused it, alongside The Panic in Needle Park (1971), of being “too much absorbed by the mechanics of addiction” and the film was withdrawn. Mutrux went on to have a hand in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Scarecrow (1973) and – most notably – American Hot Wax (1978). According to Chuck Stephens at LA Weekly, “his films were funny, freaky, dangerous as rock & roll, and portended a potential combination of Mean Streets edginess and Badlands beauty.”

In 1972, Mutrux wrote a script¹ called Freebie and the Bean, an action-comedy about a dysfunctional duo of quarrelling SFPD detectives tasked with keeping a numbers-running kingpin alive long enough to testify. It was passed along via John Calley to director Richard Rush. Rush’s filmography was primarily exploitation at that point, whether it was the gearhead thrills of Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) or the nightmare anti-psychedelia of Psych-Out (1968), but he had recently made the jump to studio features with Getting Straight (1971), which had made a little money and enjoyed some decent reviews. Freebie and the Bean sparked some interest - “It was a good idea. It was a new one, never done before …” - but Rush set about rewriting the script with Robert Kaufman, turning it into a “Dick Rush picture” and the prototype for an entire subgenre: the buddy cop movie.

Freebie and the Bean’s plot (such as it is) almost feels like a satirical spin on Bullitt (1968): we have the witness protection angle, the hitmen, the emphasis on car stunts, but instead of a cucumber-cool, righteous Steve McQueen, we have a couple of braying idiots in the form of Freebie (James Caan) and Bean (Alan Arkin)², who we first meet stealing trash from their target’s front yard. Freebie is an unrepentant corrupt cop, the kind of guy who’ll point out fire safety violations to score a fancy new jacket; Bean is a careerist, shackling himself to overtime as he tries to make lieutenant. They plan to arrest Red Meyers (Jack Kruschen) with only a hint of evidence, enraging the DA (a typically great Alex Rocco), but when they discover that Meyers has a price on his head, they agree to protect him until they can gather evidence that will put him behind bars. Oh yeah, and there’s an entire subplot about Bean’s wife (Valerie Harper) possibly cheating on him with a neighbour³. Throw in a pile of car crashes, bellowed arguments and enough slurs to sink HMS Bernard Manning, and that’s pretty much the entire film.

Freebie and the Bean is almost clever in its rampant stupidity. The 1970s were stuffed with maverick anti-hero cops, righteous or otherwise, and Freebie and the Bean takes elements of these dramas – the corruption, the violence, the ethnic slurs, the wild car chases – and turns them up to eleven. It even has a pseudo-downer ending – not only does Bean suffer what appears to be a mortal wound, but the bad guy they’ve been chasing the entire movie dies. But the film is too in love with itself and its protagonists to be truly subversive, and has a gleeful nastiness that can be difficult to stomach. As Rush put it: “I shot the film partly in a Tom and Jerry style, with lots of car chases and car crashes, and the heroes are being indestructible. The audience is laughing and enjoying themselves and suddenly Freebie would drive around the corner into a marching band of kids, and just sloughed through them. The audience thought, ‘Wait a minute. What am I laughing at?’, and the style of the film had changed to stark realism.”⁴

This doesn’t quite track for me. It may be that the marching band is as big a cliché as the cardboard boxes and fruit stand crashes (both of which also make appearances) which were standard fixtures of the car chase, but there’s never a moment in Freebie and the Bean when the audience feels like they’re watching anything approximating real life. We’re prompted instead to think it’s all part of the same wild and crazy world the rest of the movie inhabits; the extremity feels like it’s supposed to be comic. And while this works with the aforementioned marching band scene (and, to a lesser extent, the constant manhandling of informants), it takes on a sour edge when the movie deals with ethnicity and sexuality.

Freebie and the Bean is essentially one big gay panic joke. The central comic premise is these two cops acting like a codependent yet bickering married couple, but in an ultra-masculine way. Freebie’s relentless bigotry towards his Mexican-American partner is supposed to be affectionate (and funny, because Arkin eschews the obvious stereotype), but this banter is harshly juxtaposed with the treatment of Christopher Morley’s character⁵. Billed simply as “Transvestite”, Morley’s cross-dressing assassin represents pure perversion, a dark echo of the cops’ relationship, and as such the movie demands he be treated as a superhuman monster deserving to have a gun emptied into him at the end of the picture. This is compounded by the (frankly horrible) subplot of Bean’s possible cuckolding, which aims to comically emasculate Bean before re-establishing the status quo with a “feminine hygiene” gag that was dubious even in 1974.

If you can put the homophobia, racism and sexism to one side (and good luck with that), there’s otherwise plenty to like in Freebie and the Bean. Caan and Arkin make a good double act (and I’m always happy to see Caan in comic roles), though Arkin’s shtick of barely suppressed rage doesn’t quite work if he spends most of the movie plugging goons. Some of the stunts are genuinely hair-raising, including the most famous crash, in which the cop duo careen off the Embarcadero Freeway into the third floor of an apartment building. Alex Rocco delivers a fine, seething performance, especially in one of the few laugh-out-loud scenes (“Take a seat”) in the movie. And a truly wasted Valerie Harper (in her first screen role) manages to pack more comic charisma in to her handful of scenes than many actors achieve in a lifetime.

And yet, Freebie and the Bean is much like The Wild Angels, in that its importance lies in its influence. Without it, we arguably wouldn’t have had the likes of 48 Hrs (1982), Running Scared (1986)⁶, Lethal Weapon (1987) or the chaotic aggro-comedy of the Bad Boys franchise - all of which managed to build on or tinker with the central cop dynamic - or even the pure vehicular mayhem of The Blues Brothers (1980). Contemporary reviews were particularly scathing - Vincent Canby called it “serio-comic trash”, Newsweek said the movie “represents the cretinization of the Butch Cassidy-Sundance vogue for male romances”, and Richard Schickel noted the “persistent and nasty strain of sadism” - but audiences didn’t care, turning Freebie and the Bean into a success at the box office. And yes, apparently Stanley Kubrick said it was his favourite film of 1974, but that particular nugget of trivia has the whiff of myth about it (seeing as it comes from Richard Rush).

A TV version starring Tom Mason and Héctor Elizondo⁷ failed to hit the ten-episode mark, but after a brief attachment to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rush would go on to write and direct the quintessential “Dick Rush picture”, The Stunt Man (1980), which would take Freebie and the Bean’s stunts and sinister comedy to a new level, until 1994’s Color of Night essentially ended his career. As for Mutrux, he kept plugging away, working largely uncredited on movies like The Untouchables (1987) and (for his sins) The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990), before turning to the stage and winning a Tony for the jukebox musical Million Dollar Quartet in 2010. Sometimes survival in the business outweighs the potential.

---

Next Up: “He has exactly seven minutes to get rich quick!”

1. Depending on whether you ask Mutrux or Rush, it was either a full script or a long treatment. I’m inclined (as usual) to believe the writer on this point.

2. Arkin was a go-to “ethnic” for a while, thanks to his breakout performance as Yuri in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), which led to an ill-advised turn as Inspector Clouseau in 1968 and his role as a Puerto Rican widower in Popi (1969). To be fair, he doesn’t attempt an accent in this one.

3. This subplot was added by Rush. Apparently the “confrontation scene” is a favourite among many fans of the film. I hate pretty much everything about it.

4. The quote comes from an extensive interview with Rush over at Money Into Light - well worth a read.

5. I’m very aware that I’m not best placed to discuss the representation here, so any misuse of terminology is entirely my ignorance showing.

6. I say “arguably” here because Running Scared’s director Peter Hyams had already essayed a kind of buddy cop movie in Busting (1974), which came out shortly before Freebie and the Bean. No doubt I’ll get around to covering it at some point.

7. Elizondo was the go-to “Arkin” on television, not only taking on the part of Bean, but also Arkin’s role in the TV version of Popi, which lasted only eleven episodes. And yes, he’s also a great Columbo murderer.