My self-curated L.A.-on-film festival continued this week with Hickey & Boggs, an obscure 1972 neo-noir buddy-detective vehicle for I Spy stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp (Culp directed). I added this one to my Netflix queue after noticing that the Aero would be showing it -- the Aero's a great theatre for sure, but it's not always so easy for me to trek over to Santa Monica on a Sunday night. At any rate, the movie is an interesting curiosity but ultimately kind of a dud. The pacing is slllowww even by '70s standards, but this feeling was probably heightened by the fact that I watched it after getting home from a long, tiring day and had to pause it halfway through because I couldn't keep my eyes open. The principal characters go about their lives with an air of joylessness, and Culp as director gives the film that same sense of grim futility. It could be a great, gripping meditation, but here the realism just comes across as dull.
The shootout scenes in particular are interminable -- what makes them worth it is that a couple of them were filmed in the Coliseum. Fight on!
There wasn't as much geographical trainspotting as I would have liked. I watched The Hidden a couple of weeks ago and THERE'S a movie that loves its setting -- downtown, Lincoln Heights, the pre-redevelopment Hollywood/Highland area, and Melrose Avenue are all prominently, proudly displayed on camera, and if you listen to the DVD's commentary track, director Jack Sholder's affection for L.A. becomes even more evident. Hickey & Boggs was good for generic gritty "urban" shots (check out that opening copter shot of early '70s smog blanketing the basin), and there's a Bel Air mansion and some beachfront property along the PCH.
In movies from that period, it's common to see easy digs at the youth subculture. In the dour Hickey & Boggs' livelier scenes, we see a hippie-slash-Black-Panther sort of commune, where lanky blondes dance with sullen, feline black men as "groovy" music plays (this is probably what's known as library music, a/k/a "stock" instrumentals recorded by hack session players and available for use in commercials, TV shows, and low-budget films).
I'm glad I watched through to the end, because there's a payoff. OK, so Walter Hill wrote the screenplay, and if you know your film history you'll probably know that he also directed the 1979 cult classic The Warriors. The scene from that that everyone remembers is the final one where the camera watches the gang members, exhausted, walk along the beach, disappearing into the early dawn as Joe Walsh's "In The City" plays over the closing credits. The final scene of Hickey & Boggs is surprisingly similar: Cosby and Culp, ready to drop dead after their long and arduous pursuit, walk slowly along the beach into the distance while the camera watches them and the credits roll over a country-folk song. Now I'm dying to know if this happens in any other Walter Hill films!
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