Conference bookie::movies

51.0. "Fuzz" by RNDHSE::WALL (Show me, don't tell me) Wed Feb 24 1993 12:44

            
    Fuzz is based on the novel by Ed McBain, and he wrote the screenplay. 
    Stars Burt Renyolds, a very young Tom Skerritt, Raquel Welch,
    and Yul Brynner as the Deaf Man.
    
    The 87th Precinct novels are probably among my favorite series of books
    ever, and I was decidedly leary about watching anything based on any of
    them, particularly one featuring the Deaf Man, working under the theory
    that the book is usually better than the movie.  When I saw that the
    screenplay was done by Evan Hunter (real name of Ed McBain) I got a
    little more hopeful.  I finally broke down and decided to watch it
    because they decided to set the movie in Boston and I have a thing
    about movies in Boston, even though this was set in the early '70s.
    
    It's a very good treatment of the story in the novel.  There are some
    nits -- Bert Kling isn't blond, Meyer isn't bald, Artie Brown isn't
    quite as imposing as I imagined him; little details like that. 
    Everyones acting is good enough to overcome that, though.  The
    very end was changed in a classic Hollywood manner in an attempt to tie
    every major plot line together, and although under Hunter's hand it was
    well written it still looked a bit forced.  In fact, it's almost too good a
    treatment of the story, because there are plotlines that are supposed
    to come together at the very end but up until then it's hard to see
    where things are going and I suspect these days people would find it
    harder to suspend their disbelief and swallow it.
    
    And of course, you can't get quite the same familiarity out of a single
    movie that you can out of reading forty books about the same
    characters.  But it's not a bad cop story.  There are some pretty funny
    moments.  It doesn't do quite the job of capturing the feeling of being
    policemen that the books do -- the example I think of is that the cops
    don't look tired enough.  And, in keeping with McBain's style, there
    aren't a lot of shootups.  There's action and humor (the scene set in
    the Public Garden is hilarious), but not in the volume you
    get in a Lethal Weapon kind of movie.
    
    If you like cop stories, I'd recommend it.