The Seven-Ups: More Than a Great Car Chase

Roy Scheider as Manucci.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a banner period for gritty, urban cop pictures. Philip D'Antoni produced three of the best, which all incidentally featured nail-biting chase sequences: Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups. The least famous of that trio is The Seven-Ups (1973), which serves as a sort of follow-up to The French Connection (1971) and also stars Roy Scheider.

He plays Buddy Manucci, a single-minded detective who heads a secret police unit called the Seven-Ups. He and his three team members focus on mobsters who commit major crimes...and earn sentences of seven years or more. Buddy's success hinges in large part on his childhood friend Vito (Tony Lo Bianco), an undertaker with mob connections who serves as an informant.

Tony Lo Bianco and Scheider.

Vito needs money--a lot of it. His wife may have tuberculosis and his day job isn't paying all the bills. He gleans information from Buddy to hatch a scheme to kidnap notable mob bosses and hold them for ransom. It's a profitable venture until one of the kidnappings results in the death of one of the Seven-Ups and Buddy makes it a personal vendetta to find the killer.

The character of Buddy Manucci is based on real-life NYPD detective Sonny Grosso, who also served as the inspiration for Scheider's character in The French Connection. In a 1971 interview in The New York Times, producer D'Antoni stated that Grosso told him a "weird and fascinating story" that became the basic plot of The Seven-Ups.

Roy Scheider, who always excelled at playing obsessive characters, is convincing as a driven cop willing to cross the line to get the job done (e.g., he withholds oxygen from a severely injured criminal to get information). However, Tony Lo Bianco nearly steals the film as the too-smooth-for-his-own-good Vito. When he uses his wife's illness as justification for his crimes, it's unclear whether he's sincere or just using his family tragedy as an excuse.

A shotgun blasts removes the hood from Scheider's car.

The famous car chase occurs almost an hour into the film and lasts for ten minutes. Unlike Bullitt, there are no muscle cars involved, as Scheider drives a Pontiac Ventura Sprint coupe and the bad guys are in a Pontiac Grand Ville sedan. That doesn't mean there is any less suspense as the cars careen through crowded streets at high-octane speeds. In my opinion, it's the best car chase in movie history. Much of its impact can be attributed to the facial expressions of Scheider and Richard Lynch (as one of the villains). There's a great sequence showing a group of kids playing in the street who scream and scatter as the first car zips through them. They reconvene in the street only to go running for the sidewalks again as Scheider zooms past.

Richard Lynch and Bill Hickman.

Stunt driver extraordinaire Bill Hickman helped choreograph the car chase and also plays the unflappable baddie behind the wheel of the speeding sedan. Hickman also served as a stunt driver in Bullitt and The French Connection. Jerry Greenberg, who won an Oscar for editing The French Connection, likely had a hand in the editing though he's listed solely as an associate producer for The Seven-Ups.

In addition to his producer duties, Philip D'Antoni also directed The Seven-Ups--it was his only directing job. He obviously learned a lot from watching William Friedkin (French Connection) as he makes superb use of his New York locales. The snowy streets, whistling winds, and frosty breaths all contribute to the film's realism. It's a shame that D'Antoni didn't make more gritty action pictures. Instead, he moved to television where he co-created the 1974-76 TV series Movin' On, with Claude Akins and Frank Converse as truckers. He also produced a TV series pilot movie called Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside starring Tony Lo Bianco (again) and Hal Linden as big city cops.

Incidentally, if one of Scheider's Seven-Ups team members looks familiar, then you must have recognized the late Ken Kercheval. He would achieve his biggest success five years later as Cliff Barnes in the long-running Dallas TV series.

Marathon Man: "Is it safe?"

Memory is a funny thing. Prior to a recent viewing of Marathon Man, the only things I could remember about this 1976 thriller were the unnerving tooth-drilling scene and Roy Scheider doing push-ups with his feet on the bed and hands on the floor.

Although it's an atypical John Schlesinger film, the opening sequence showcases the director at his best. An elderly German man removes a metal band-aid box from a safety deposit box and slips it discreetly to another man. As he drives away in his Mercedes, the German has a run-in with a Jewish man that escalates quickly from a shouting match to a dangerous car chase along the narrow confines of New York city streets. The conflict ends when the two men crash their cars into a fuel truck--the safety deposit key falling to the asphalt as flames engulf it.

Hoffman as the graduate...student.

The importance of this scene doesn't become apparent until later as the plot shifts to Thomas Babington "Babe" Levy (Dustin Hoffman). Babe is a graduate student at Columbia University whose dissertation has the uninviting title of "The Use of Tyranny in American Political Life." Babe still keeps the gun that his father, a famous academic accused of Communist sympathies, used to commit suicide. It's an odd thing to do, but then Babe is a social misfit with no friends other than his frequently absent brother Doc (Roy Scheider).

Hence, it seems a bit odd when a pretty Swiss student (Marthe Keller) responds to Babe's awkward advances. When Doc--the sharp-dressed opposite of his brother--meets Babe's girlfriend, he immediately spots a fraud. But then, nothing is as it seems in Marathon Man and that includes Doc, too.

The most interesting aspect of Marathon Man is that Hoffman seems to be playing an older version of Ben Braddock from The Graduate (1967). Perhaps, this is what happened to Ben when things didn't work out with Elaine after their escape on the bus! (I never expected the couple to find true happiness, did you?) And, of course, the obvious irony is that Hoffman is a playing a graduate in one film and a grad student in the other.

Laurence Olivier as the villain.

As for Marathon Man, after a quick start (the car chase), it lumbers along until Scheider and Laurence Olivier show up. The latter earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination as a Nazi war criminal who is forced to come out of seclusion to secure his investment in diamonds. I don't think the role was a difficult one for Olivier, but somehow he manages to exude pure evil as he interrogates Babe by repeating the single line: "Is it safe?" In fact, that line ranked #70 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Quotes.

Roy Scheider, one of the 1970s most reliable leading men, excelled in playing edgy roles (The French Connection, Sorcerer, All That Jazz). He makes Doc the film's most interesting character--a sleek professional who is willing to help war criminals for the right price, but also an affectionate brother to the socially-challenged Babe.

The well-dressed Scheider.

Scheider and Olivier make Marathon Man easy to watch, though I wish both of them had more screen time. Frankly, Hoffman's protagonist is pretty boring. Director Schlesinger compensates somewhat by capturing the pulse of New York City, giving the film a much-needed vibrancy. He also book-ends the film with two fine scenes: the aforementioned chase and a sequence in which a concentration camp survivor recognizes Olivier's villain and follows him on the city's busy streets, shouting out his name.

I rarely mention continuity gaffes in movies because...well...anyone can make a mistake. However, I was amused by Babe's changing footwear during his kidnap scene. He appears to be barefoot when initially nabbed. Later, I could swear he's wearing socks. Finally, when he escapes and is running away from the baddies, he sports shoes on his feet. Maybe I just missed the scene where he finds his shoes. Or maybe he's just not as tough as some of those Olympic athletes that run in their bare feet.

William Friedkin's Sorcerer Warrants a Second Look

Remakes face the inevitable fate of being compared to the original version--even when they're not a remake, but rather another interpretation of an existing novel, play, or factual incident. Therefore, it is unfortunate for William Friedkin that Henri-Georges Clouzot adapted the novel The Wages of Fear into a 1952 international film success and almost-instant classic. Sorcerer can't stack up to Clouzot's masterpiece, but it deserves a second look. Once Friedkin overcomes a disjointed first half, he transforms his film into an astounding rollercoaster ride where death stands in plain sight around every corner and across every bridge.

Roy Scheider.

The film can be divided into two parts. The first half traces how three men--a French business executive, a terrorist, and an insignificant gangster--wind up down on their luck in a squalid Latin American town. Desperate for money, they agree to drive two trucks, each loaded with three boxes of nitroglycerin-leaking dynamite, over 200 miles of jungle, bumpy roads, sharp ravines, and temporary bridges. An oil company needs the explosives to "blow out" a raging oil fire. The men need the $40,000, of course.

The second half of the film focuses on the gripping, tension-filled journey--the highlight being the crossing of a dilapidated swinging bridge during a savage storm. Friedkin brilliantly combines visual and aural elements to create a chaotic mixture of howling winds, booming thunder, creaking timbers, and slashing torrents of rain. The trucks look like bizarre wingless dragons, with their grills for teeth, hood vents for nostrils, and headlights for eyes. However, in terms of visual power, nothing can match the mesmerizing image of Roy Scheider's truck tilted at an uncanny 45-degree angle as it inches across the crumbling bridge.

The edge-of-the-seat bridge sequence.

The film's only American star, Scheider, plays a man with no meaning in his life. He wants the money--to the point that he gets excited about his share increasing if the other drivers die on a swinging bridge. But the money really means nothing, for Scheider's character has nowhere to go and no one who cares about him. He already is dead emotionally, so his eventual destiny is just a formality.

With its downbeat tone and unlikable characters, Sorcerer looks as if it was made in the late 1960s or early 1970s when films like Easy Rider dominated the theaters. It's easy to see why it did not appeal to the same moviegoers who made Star Wars the biggest hit of 1977. It was pronounced dead on arrival on its original release as critics labeled it a disappointing remake. But it has since found a second life with movie buffs who admire Friedkin's virtuosic direction of the explosive truck trek and are drawn to his existential approach to the tale.