From Book to Screen: The Laughing Policeman (1973)

Book to film adaptations are always problematic - there are numerous challenges in transferring a story from one medium to another - but are further complicated when it also involves a literal translation from one language (and culture) to another.  I recently finally got around to reading the Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo novel 'The Laughing Policeman' (part of the 'Martin Beck' series of police procedurals) and recalled that it had been filmed back in the seventies.  I had only vague memories of having seen the film on TV when I was a teenager, recalling only the opening and the fact that it had been re-located to the US.  Out of curiosity, I hunted down the film online and watched it the other day.  It turned out to be a fascinating, yet frustrating, watch - so like, yet so different, from the source novel.  It opens well, pretty much in line with the novel, with a bus load of passengers being mown down with a machine gun, but as it progresses, it starts to stray further and further from the novel.  It isn't just that the change in locale from Stockholm to San Francisco feels jarring, nor that all the characters now have American names, it is also that differences in both the police and wider cultures of Sweden and the US mean that the whole tone of the piece is different and parts of the plot have to proceed differently.  While the overall plot of both novel and film are more or less the same, with the opening bus massacre turning out to be linked to an unsolved murder previously investigated by the lead detective, the film, out of the necessity of fitting everything into a sub two hour running time, simplifies it to the point that, perversely, it hardly seems to make sense.  It also throws in some entirely irrelevant changes, most notably making the prime suspect a closet homosexual.  (I guess that gay bars and black leather were still something of a cinematic novelty in early seventies US cinema).

The core of the novel's plot is the detectives' investigation of an investigation of an investigation.   One of the victims of the bus shooting is one of their colleagues, who, it turns out had been privately re-investigating a cold case, going back over the original investigation and apparently turning up something that resulted in him following one of the other victims.  Unfortunately, he had left no notes, so Beck and the other detectives are forced both to try and piece together his investigative steps and go back over the original case files.  Eventually it all comes down to the misidentification of a car by a witness in the original case, which allowed the dead detective to break the alibi of the prime suspect and realise that the man he was following was instrumental in providing the alibi and was blackmailing the killer.  The film jettisons most of this, losing several characters in the process, not to mention several logical steps of deduction for the detectives.  The nature of the alibi is simplified to the point where it seems unlikely that it couldn't have been broken in the original investigation.  The film also bows to the requirements of English language cop movies to include action sequences at regular intervals, injecting several such sequences at various points in the film.  To some extent, these action inserts resemble the bursts of action which pepper the 'Dirty Harry' movies (the first two of which had been released by this time), their relevance to the main plot questionable, existing mainly to demonstrate the attitudes and approach to police work of the main character.  Unfortunately, in The Laughing Policeman, they don't even serve this purpose, feeling somewhat jarring and only peripherally related to the plot.

It's not that The Laughing Policeman is a bad film, it most certainly isn't, featuring a great cast headed by Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern, who all turn in excellent performances.  It is also well directed by Stuart Rosenberg, across some intereseting San Francisco locations.  It isn't as if it is totally unrecognisable to the book: the plot is more or less the same and despite the name changes, most of the characters from the book are still easily identifiable.  Many scenes do still play out in similar fashion to their equivalents in the novel.  It's just that, if you have read the book, it seems too different, a complex and intriguing look at a police investigation is transformed into something that feels much more like a standard US cop movie of the era.  The texture of the book feels as if it is missing.  Which was probably inevitable given the change in location.  One of the main choices made by the film makers when adapting the novel was to focus the script on the investigation itself and largely eliminate the home life of the detectives which feature prominently in the novel.  The result is that some characters, like the dead detective's girl friend who plays an important role in the plot's resolution, have their roles severly truncated.  Likewise, the Beck-equivalent's (played by Matthau) wife and family barely get a look-in.  Which is unfortunate, as it renders the film's title meaningless (it's notable that in the UK the film was retitled An Investigation of Murder).  In the novel 'The Laughing Policeman' is record given to the dour Beck by his daughter as a Christmas present, it eventually becomes relevant at the novel's end, when Beck discovers that the dead detective had, in fact, left some paperwork which would have provided a key to resolving the investigation far quicker, had it been found earlier, resulting in Beck laughing uproariously.  Something Matthau never does in the film, at any time.