The Onion Field (1979)

This is good farm country. You smell the onions?

On 9 March, 1963, two young plainclothes LAPD officers - Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger - pulled over a 1946 Ford Coupe on a routine traffic stop, which then went horribly awry: they had inadvertently stopped a couple of small-time robbers - Jimmy Smith and Greg Powell - who were armed and dangerous. The officers were disarmed and driven out to an onion field near Bakersfield, where one officer was killed and the other escaped. The story attracted Joseph Wambaugh, not because of the crime, but the aftermath: the surviving officer Karl Hettinger suffered extreme trauma, exacerbated by the LAPD’s treatment of him as a failure and the legal circus that followed, forcing Hettinger to testify, re-testify and re-enact the night of the murder repeatedly over the following seven years. Wambaugh’s stock-in-trade was empathy for the working cop; he saw Hettinger’s treatment as a prime example of how patrolmen were routinely hampered and punished by the legal system. So he decided to pursue the story as a non-fiction book, heavily inspired by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was published as The Onion Field to widespread acclaim in 1973.

The Onion Field was obvious movie material. Columbia Pictures paid $300,000 for the rights shortly after publication, but translating Wambaugh’s book to screen proved difficult and the project stalled¹. By the late ‘70s, Wambaugh had been thoroughly scarred by the adaptation process, which had resulted in a handful of flawed-to-awful movie versions, and decided to sue Columbia for the rights. He’d worked too long, too hard, and suffered too many lawsuits to let The Onion Field languish in development hell. In response, Columbia agreed that Wambaugh could produce the movie himself. The former cop had now gone full Hollywood.

The two-hundred-page script ended up in the hands of Harold Becker, who had one feature² and a bunch of TV commercials to his name. Becker was impressed by Wambaugh’s passion – “If I was born to do one thing in my life it was to write The Onion Field,” he said – and so set about whittling the screenplay over the next few months, while Wambaugh raised the $2 million-plus budget, including $750,000 of his own money. Becker chafed slightly at the low budget, but the battle-weary Wambaugh knew better: “Harold, you may not have enough money to make this film the way you want to, but you’re going to have more freedom than you’re ever going to have again in this town.” With help from Nancy Klopper, Becker pulled together a largely unknown cast including Ted Danson and Franklyn Seales (in their first film roles), James Woods and – the starriest of the unstarry – John Savage as the traumatised Hettinger. The bestseller looked like it was about to be a massive critical and commercial hit.

Unfortunately, the movie of The Onion Field struggles to make much of an impact beyond a couple of key scenes. Part of this is down to the structure of the film. Becker rightly noted in his initial discussion with Wambaugh that the story of The Onion Field is actually two stories about two separate crimes: the murder in Bakersfield and the injustice that followed, one a thriller and the other a courtroom drama. By the time the film was in production, the first story had already been loosely adapted as 1973 episode of Adam-12 (“The Killing Ground”), and the first hour of the film attempts to compare and contrast the two pairs of protagonists as it builds first to the murder and then the funeral of Ian Campbell. The problem is that neither duo is particularly interesting – the cops are thinly characterised and the criminals are a grab-bag of clichés – and only become marginally so after the defining event of the murder. The second hour then tries to pack almost a decade’s worth of trials and appeals into a coherent narrative, which means that much of the nuance (and interest) is lost.

This isn’t helped by a frankly ropey script courtesy of Wambaugh, who was clearly too close to the material to be objective, and who regularly eschews subtlety for awkward authorial commentary. Some details that may have been true to life – Powell’s introduction is all glinting tooth and scorpion bolo tie – land with an obviousness that skirts dangerously close to caricature. The dialogue veers from cod-street to grand pronouncements, whether it’s the tone-deaf jive (and borderline minstrelsy) of the black characters or those moments where the subtext lumbers into the foreground: witness the salty old patrolman (Richard Herd)³ haranguing the brass for criticising “these kids Campbell and Hettinger for doing what they had to do” or DA Phil Halpin renouncing a law career because of a broken legal system⁴.

With a script like this, the performances naturally suffer. Franklyn Seales is saddled with a catchphrase of “Jumpin’ Jesus!” that even Juilliard couldn’t train him to deliver with any conviction; Ted Danson is given nothing to play but martyrdom (Danson apparently has Scottish heritage, but apart from his genetic good looks and charm, he feels like an odd choice here); and James Woods is not, and never has been, an actor with much depth. His Powell goes from comical idiot – the self-proclaimed “sexual virtuoso” who’s being two-timed by his blowsy pregnant girlfriend – to seething psycho without ever becoming a recognisable human being. It’s a lively performance, but so is a pantomime.

Only John Savage manages to emerge with some dignity intact, mostly because his finest moments come without much dialogue, and even then he’s beset by lurid flashbacks and a hopelessly underwritten relationship with his wife (Dianne Hull), most of whose lines start with some variation of “I’m not very smart, but …”. His finest scene – in which a spiralling Hettinger appears to strike his crying infant son and then contemplate suicide – is genuinely affecting, but it comes five minutes after an essentially comic scene (in which Powell’s attorney dumbly insists that the DA be arrested for threatening to “knock me on my ass”), which is so tonally jarring that it looks incompetent rather than considered.

Adding to the tonal inconsistency is Wambaugh’s cop attitude. The movie seems to insist that the only just punishment for Powell and Smith is capital; the fact that both men spend much of the rest of their lives in prison doesn’t seem to be enough. While he clearly has a point about the never-ending trials and their horrific effect on Hettinger’s mental health, and he would later articulate a different view on capital punishment (he felt it should be reserved for inmates who kill other inmates), arguably too much is made about the appeals process as a fundamentally unjust one. Similarly, the film has a streak of sentimentality you could land a plane on. Officer Ian Campbell is the one who initiates the traffic stop over an illegal U-turn and a busted brake light; he’s the one who makes a mistake that endangers his life; he compounds that mistake by telling Hettinger to relinquish his weapon. At best, he made a series of unfortunate and unforced errors. And yet the film – much like the department – insists that Campbell did no wrong; more than that, it martyrs Campbell to almost William Wallace levels, complete with recurring bagpipes and lingering shots of his bereaved mother.⁵ Wambaugh typically seasons his sentimentality with a sprinkle of cynicism; it doesn’t happen here, presumably because it’s based on a true story and he has a more pressing message to deliver, even if it comes with a narrative cost.

And this is the main issue: while it’s based on a true story, The Onion Field isn’t particularly truthful. This is partly down to the limits of adaptation – it was only ever going to be a catalogue of events rather than a deep dive⁶ – but it’s also because the key message of the film is blunted and simplified by Wambaugh’s righteous indignation. He isn’t interested in either the cops or the criminals as anything other than pawns in a larger, broken game, and his attempts to cover as much ground as the book ultimately result in a lack of characterisation – an audience needs to care about Hettinger’s plight, but they’re given no real reason to do so because Hettinger himself is something of a cypher.

Nevertheless, The Onion Field was a commercial success and fared well critically, though those critics who had read the book were mildly disappointed in the adaptation. It proved to be the first major win of Wambaugh’s movie career and his own personal favourite of the adaptations. Becker became Wambaugh's director of choice for the follow-up, a movie that both men felt was even more commercial than The Onion Field, a dark comedy called The Black Marble. What could possibly go wrong?

---

Next Up: “A Wild, Wicked Detective Story as only Joseph Wambaugh could tell it!”

1. Eric Roth, who was the screenwriter on the initial project: “After I did my version of Onion Field, they were unable to go forward for various reasons – there was a problem with the producers and the director – then Joe Wambaugh came back in and he, with the producers, was able to move it to another director and writer. At that point, I don’t know why, I didn’t fight for credit.”

2. The Ragman’s Daughter (1972), based apparently on an Alan Sillitoe short story, so I have to seek this one out, not least because of the casting of Victoria Tennant. Can’t wait to hear her Nottinghamshire accent. I’m sure it’s a real treat.

3. A part that is essentially the same role played by Clifton James in The New Centurions and Charles Durning in The Choirboys, right down to the cigar.

4. The real-life Halpin didn’t do anything of the sort - he went on to have an illustrious career as a prosecutor, most notably in the Richard Ramirez trial. So to have him jack it all in because he’s sick of the carnival is disingenuous at best.

5. Okay, your mileage may vary on this. Like many Scots, I am handsome and charming, but I have a general distaste for the bagpipes, which are usually a signifier of shortbread-tin tourism or military maudlin, and represent the Scottish people about as much as Harry Lauder or Oor Wullie.

6. Not helped by the structure - had the murder and funeral taken place within the first half-hour, the rest of the movie would have had room to breathe.