Fuzz (1972)

There have been numerous attempts, over the years, to adapt Ed McBain's long-running 87th Precinct series of novels to the screen.  Back in the late fifties the first two were adapted into a pair of near forgotten low budget B movies, while the sixties brought a short lived TV series and no less than three film adaptations of individual novels.  These were a 1960 adaptation of The Pusher, (scripted by Harold Robbins, no less), the third novel in the series, but with all the character names and some plot details changed, Akira Kurosawa's magnificent High and Low, based on King's Ransom and relocated to Japan and a French adaptation of Ten Plus One, relocated to France, naturally.  In addition to Fuzz (1972), which I'll look at shortly, the seventies gave us Claude Chabrol's intriguing Canadian-set adaptation of Blood Relatives (1978), while in the eighties there was a series of OKish TV movies which never really caught the dynamic of the books, despite trying hard.  None of these attempts exactly set the box office alight and vary enormously in quality.  Their failure to make much impact, (with the probable exception of Kurosawa's High and Low, whose US paperback origins are usually glossed over by critics), should hardly be surprising: adapting long-running series like the 87th Precinct novels is always problematic.  How should their adaptation be approached?  

After all, while the regular characters and their back stories might be familiar to readers, the majority of the audience for any adaptation of an individual novel would never have read the source material, seeing the film as a one-off.  In practice, this means that the adaptation has to be self-contained, with apparent plot loose ends or characters' ongoing emotional journeys or prior experiences, which, in the source material, would continue across multiple volumes, have to be truncated.  Of  course, the modern method would be, rather than adapting a single novel, to mix and match highlights from several of the novels into a single movie, for the first installment, at least.  Either that or adapt it as a streaming TV series with the storylines from several of the books intertwined and running simultaneously over eight or ten episodes.  But all of the existing 87th Precinct film adaptations predate such approaches, opting instead to present self-contained stories, (with the exception of the first two, which do have some continuity between them -apart from that, even the TV series was of the traditional format with self-contained episodes), with mixed results.  While High and Low and Blood Relatives work well as stand-alone police procedurals, The Pusher suffers from having too many key plot and character details changed, teetering toward melodrama.

All of which brings us to Fuzz, based on McBain's 1968 entry in the series and adapted by the author himself, under his 'Evan Hunter' pen name, and featuring an all-star cast headed by Burt Reynolds.  With such a pedigree, one might assume that it would be the 'best', most 'accurate' adaptation of the series, yet, if anything it is the most problematic of the film versions.  The problem is that it is neither one thing nor the other.  Rather than being a straightforward adaptation of his novel, Hunter/McBain instead gives us what feels like a parody of the source material, with the novel's mainly intelligent, conscientious but very human police detectives replaced by a bunch of wisecracking, borderline incompetent, sexist cops.  Their investigation is chaotic, the film's structure episodic and any pretension of realism quickly vanishes - even the main villain, 'The Deaf Man' is transformed from the ruthless, icy manipulator of the book into a sub-Bondian supervillain, played by a miscast and uncomfortable-looking Yul Brynner.  Disconcertingly for readers of the series, the characters retain their names while being quite unrecognisable in their cinematic incarnation.  Detectives Carella and Meyer, for instance are, in the books, measured, methodical family men who rely on brains rather than brawn to get results, whereas in the film they become a pair of sterotypical film cops, full of low rent locker room humour, cracking sexist jokes and trying to humiliate a female colleague.  To be absolutely fair, Burt Reynolds' Carella does pay lip service to his more sensitive literary persona in his one scene with his deaf mute wife.  Jack Weston's Meyer, however, is, in contrast to the bald, somewhat intellectual detective of the book, an overweight, (not to mention hairy), bumbling incompetent, lacking in any subtlety or guile.

Likewise, Detective Parker (Steve Inhat) who, in the books, is the squad's resident lazy slob, here finds himself simply one amongst many inept clowns.  Dan Fraser's Lt Byrnes is a warm up for his many years as Kojak's boss, Detective Willis is at least portrayed as being competent and efficient but is given little to do, James McEachin, a pretty decent actor, is miscast as Detective Brown but is given little to work with, the film character being devoid of most of the traits that made him, in the books, interesting, while Tom Skerritt's Detective Kling is just a standard gung ho cop constantly on heat.  Particularly ill served by the script is Raquel Welsh's Detective McHenry, reduced, for the most part, to being eye candy and the object of Kling's lust.  Even her main storyline is fumbled - in the book she is on detachment to the precinct to act as a decoy for a local rapist.  The film abruptly wraps this up with her finally arresting the rapist after a struggle when she is taken by surprise, off duty, by him.  In the book, she actually is raped, with her ordeal and its effects on her, both as a woman and a cop, playing out through several subsequent novels.  But, being a one-off, the film requires a quick resolution.

The film version of Fuzz does, more or less, follow the main plot of the source novel, but with all the details of the investigation suitably slanted to recast the cops as being institutionally incompetent.  The fact is that the main plot line - a series of threats are phoned into the precinct, directed at various City officials, demanding ever escalating amounts of money in return for sparing them - has the potential to be the basis for a pretty decent thriller.  But while the main mechanism of the villain's plan, that by blowing up various officials when his demands are refused, his ultimate target - the Mayor - will settle with him directly, convinced that the cops can't protect him, it simply isn't allowed to play out properly, with too many comedic diversions and the film's episodic structure effectively preventing the build up of any tension.  Most crucially, the script changes the film's denouement.  Although, like the book, it brings together three of the film's main plots, instead of demonstrating, as the book tries to, that, no matter how meticulous an investigation, coincidence and chance can always play a major part in its resolution, the film tries to portray the collision between two of the precinct's main investigations as being the culmination of the cops' incompetence.  In the book, it is the result of the villain's over-complication of his own scheme, which lands him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The end result of this approach is film that feels unsatisfying to fans of the book series, unsatisfying to audiences looking for a thriller or police procedural move and unsatisfying for Burt Reynolds fans who might have expected an action film.  While it is possible that, in refashioning his own source material, Hunter/McBain was attempting to create a black comedy, in tune with its times, what seems more likely is that the studio wanted to emulate another recent hit: M*A*S*H.  Not only does it feature a similar episodic structure, overlapping dialogue and characters working in an institution whose rules they appear to have little respect for, but it even even features one of  M*A*S*H's stars in Tom Skerritt.  But it fails to do for cops what M*A*S*H had done for medics - despite their raucous anti-authoritarianism, the doctors of the 4077th are depicted as skilled professionals when it came to doing their jobs, whereas the cops of Fuzz are professionally inept.  Moreover, director Richard A Colla, usually to be found at the helm of TV movies and episodes, while obviously competent, is no Robert Altman.  

Yet, despite all of this, Fuzz isn't an out-and-out bad film.  Despite the script's deficiencies, most of the main players manage to deliver decent performances.  To be sure, they don't portray their characters' literary namesakes, but within the confines of the adaptation, they do an OK job.  The production values are also pretty decent, featuring some very gritty-looking location photography.  While the books are set in a nameless East Coast city, a fictionalised New York and most adaptations use New York locations, Fuzz instead sets its action fairly and squarely in Boston, painting an unflattering picture of a grimy, rub down city teetering on the edge of institutional collapse.  Just don't expect a straight adaptation of an 87th Precinct novel.  Indeed, it is best to approach the film not as an adaptation, or a police procedural, but rather as a broad satire on seventies US policing (and some of it is very broad, with cops disguised as nuns and the like), as this is, undoubtedly, its strongest suit.