Rainbow
with Egg
Underneath and an Elephant
Q & A
Reviews
Premiere
Monthly Film Bulletin
Roger Ebert
Pauline Kael
Princes of the City
by Sidney Lumet
PREMIERE
May 1990
Sidney Lumet's new film, Q & A, is a testimony to his lifelong - and
60-year-career-long - fascination with cops: the whistle-blowing Serpicos
as well as the brutal and corrupt ones.
FRANK SERPICO TOLD ME THAT HIS FIRST MEMORY OF cops was of them arriving in the middle of the night and helping everyone.
My first memory of cops was different. Six or eight of us would be pitching pennies, and a cop would come along, chase us away for "gambling," and pick up the pennies.
These were tough times in a tough place: New York City's Lower East Side during the Depression. Cigarettes were a penny apiece, and winning at pitching pennies was about the only way to pay for a smoke. But the cops needed the money, too.
My adolescence was filled with distrust of cops, most of it political. Like a great many kids growing up poor. I was left of center, and cops were being used against workers on picket lines. It was a time of enormous labor unrest, and cops on horseback busting good, honest working-men's heads seemed like enough of a reason for being anticop.
Many years later, I understood why that childhood antagonism existed. The papers, the radio, and school talked about "the land of equality," saying, "You're free." A cop was the first one who told you, "Not necessarily." He was the first to tell you that there are limits and severe punishment if you overstep them. A cop friend of mine once told me what a crock he thought Miranda warnings were. I argued with him, saying that while being a cop in Russia was a hell of a lot easier than being a cop in a democracy, protecting those rights is crucial. He said, "It's awfully hard to remember that when you're responding to a domestic-violence call, and you walk in and the woman is all bloody - maybe the guy has cut her; there's so much blood, you can't tell where or how she's hurt - and you start to cuff him, and all of a sudden she's after you with a knife, 'cause you're taking her man away."
Through the movies I've done, I've come to a deeper, more powerful emotional understanding of policemen. A picture I did in England with Sean Connery many years ago, called The Offense, provided the first glimmer. It's the story of a policeman who has seen so much blood and pain that it is destroying his life. The worse his life at home becomes, the worse he becomes as a cop: meaner, more violent. The circle of mutually fed destructiveness ends in tragedy when he beats a suspect to death while questioning him.
While working on Serpico, I went out on my first twelve-to-eight, the night shift in a squad car. I was terrified - not for myself, although there was some of that, but for the pain, sickness, violence, and sheer evil that I had known was out there but had never seen. And these guys were living in it night after night.
Then, for Dog Day Afternoon, I read police transcripts of hostage situations, and they showed a compassion and understanding on the part of the NYPD Hostage Unit that amazed me. To this day, I think, no lives have been lost in New York City when hostages have been taken.
On Prince of the City, my growing appreciation of cops filled the movie. A man is faced with a series of dilemmas that I don't think many of us could bear. Members of his family are part of the Mob, and he's a cop! He's been brought up in a tradition of omerta, and yet he's being asked to wear a wire and eventually rat on his partners. The government promises him protection but never tells him that he'll have to testify, so his family winds up in hiding. As he says, "The guys I fingered are out on bail, and me and my family are the first ones to go to jail."
And now there's Q&A, which has in it the best of cops and the worst: the bravest and most idealistic, and the basest and most evil. Some cops go wild because they feel shielded by their badges. Others think they can "make a difference." All of the complexity, the ambivalence of their lives, is there. The "good guys" have catastrophic faults, and some "bad guys" behave nobly. And through it all, like a steady drumbeat, values that are basically racist condition every professional decision they make.
I don't know if my fascination with cops will ever end. I'm thrilled that a lot of street cops like my movies: "That's how it is." I'm thrilled that some of the police brass don't like the same movies: "Why do you have to show the bad side?"
I don't want to show any side except the human side: what it costs them, what they carry over into their lives after their shifts have ended. If there is any message, it's to the cops themselves: What you're doing is the hardest job a person can do. That's why it's so important that there be no corruption, no racism, no easy answers. We, as a society, have to ask more of you than we do of ourselves, because you're the ones with the guns. That's what makes you our potential enemies as well as our potential heroes.
Q & A
U.S.A 1990
Director: Sidney Lumet
Monthly Film Bulletin
April 1991
Volume 58
Number 687
Lieutenant Mike Brennan, legendary as a tough cop on the New
York force, deliberately kills a Latino low-life, Tony Vasquez, then
terrorises witnesses into testifying that it was self-defence. Al Reilly,
a young assistant DA, newly transferred from the police (where his late
father was also a legend), is assigned to the investigation . Assured by
his superior Quinn that it is an open-and-shut case of justifiable
homicide, Reilly sets to work aided by two police officers, Chapman
(black) and Valentin (Latino). Questioning witnesses, including Bobby
Texador, Reilly uneasily discovers a personal involvement in that Nancy
Bosch, the girl he hoped to marry until she walked out because of his
reaction on discovering that her father was black, is now living with
Texador. With Nancy refusing to believe his plea that he was surprised
rather than prejudiced, Reilly finds the case taking an unexpected turn
when Valentin discovers that the bullets in Vasquez's body match those
from another Latino killing. Chapman, a devoted admirer of Brennan despite
the latter's reputation for racist brutality, reluctantly agrees to play
his part if Brennan indeed proves guilty. Suspecting Quinn of complicity
when he brushes aside the evidence, Reilly - his confidence shaken when
the furious Brennan reveals that his father was in fact a crooked cop -
consults his old mentor Bloomenfeld from the New York County DA's office,
and is encouraged to pursue his investigation. Meanwhile, Texador takes
off for Puerto Rico with Nancy and a drag artiste called Roger Montalvo.
Summoning Reilly, Texador gives him the whole story: Brennan, notorious as
a fag-basher, terrorised Montalvo into setting up the murder of Vasquez
for him; Montalvo is willing to testify, knowing his chances of living
with Brennan free are nil; and Texador has hidden Montalvo away as a
measure of self-protection, because he (Texador) is the last surviving
member of a teenage street gang (including Vasquez) which Brennan has been
systematically wiping out. They were all once witnesses to a killing
committed in his street-gang days by Kevin Quinn, who has ever since been
using his records of Brennan's misdeeds to force him to serve as his hit
man. Reilly informs Bloomenfeld, but Brennan kills both Texador and
Montalvo before they can be formally interrogated. Brennan is shot dead
resisting arrest. Reilly is shocked to learn from Bloomenfeld that the
affair is now closed since the department cannot afford the scandal. Only
Reilly knows the whole story, but assorted pressures can be brought to
bear to ensure his silence. As for Quinn, he Is resigning to run for
governor; and nobody, Bloomenfeld says, is likely to vote for him anyway.
Based on a novel by Edwin Torres, who doubtless received his instruction in the ramifications of racial prejudice and social corruption at first hand as one of New York's first Hispanic judges, and who also served as technical adviser on Prince of the City, Q & A not surprisingly emerges as something of a companion-piece to Lumet's earlier film. For the first half, at least, one watches mesmerised as the clean-cut young hero, an assistant DA embarking on his first case with the zeal of a carefree crusader, gradually learns the moral lesson that there is no such thing as black and white, since both are mitigated by infinite shades of grey.
The opposition is neatly stated very near the beginning when, with the prevailing ethos of the precinct established as a racially mixed bunch of cops smile indulgently over Brennan's picturesque tales of kicking black/Hispanic ass, the District Attorney questions his new assistant about his background, which included a stint in Harlem when he was with the police. "It's tough in there...", the DA begins, smiling understandingly, whereupon Al Reilly, misunderstanding, breaks in to agree that the poor Harlemites do indeed have a hard time of it. Just asking to be dented, Reilly's pretensions to qualify as Sir Galahad gradually receive their comeup-pance from all sides: in quick succession, he is forced to acknowledge that the heroic father held up as an example was in fact crooked; that his racial tolerance is somewhat less than skin deep (his failure to persuade otherwise the girl he loves is the nail in the coffin of his self-belief); and perhaps most shatteringly of all, that compromise can slyly undermine even the best of us (as a young patrolman, we learn, he turned a blind eye to a partner on the take).
Intriguingly, a contrariwise scenario is adumbrated for the older and thoroughly, evilly corrupted DA Quinn. This starts with the image of the skinny kid on the block, hanging around on the fringes of a Latino street gang in the hope of acceptance, but instead stumbling into committing a murder; it is not hard to imagine how, vulnerable to blackmailing pressures, his future was determined. Baldly stated like this, so that the hypothetical line connecting Quinn and Reilly becomes almost evidential, the theme of the (relative) relativity of good and evil may seem dismayingly obvious. In fact, it is skilfully buried, only intermittently discernible, beneath the stylised naturalistic surface of a police and legal procedural thriller, vividly acted, scripted and shot on location as the can of worms is fascinatingly pried open.
But where Prince of the City gradually built up into a claustrophobic mosaic, at its heart a dark maelstrom into which both hero and easy solutions were inexorably sucked, Q & A turns linear. Some fuss is made early on about the records kept of an investigation, with Quinn telling Reilly to make sure his "Q & A" contains everything that is said in evidence ("The Q & A defines what really happened; if it isn't in the Q & A, it didn't happen"). When Reilly later tells Quinn that the evidence supporting his suspicions is in the Q & A, Quinn calmly tells him the Q & A is "just for the record". Instead of following up the implications (Q & As as useful sources of blackmail weaponry?), instead of exploring the rapprochement between Quinn and Reilly (Patrick O'Neal and Timothy Hutton are never allowed the space to develop much more than as archetypal villain and hero respectively), the script opts for a string of action sequences.
As the setting shifts to Puerto Rico, with assorted
hunters (by now including Italian mobsters worrying about leaks on the
Latino end of their drug operations) trying to reach the quarry before
their rivals do, these scenes are more than competently staged. Basically,
though, they belong in any old TV cop series; as a result, the eventual
revelation of an impending cover-up, tacked on as an ironic codicil to the
action excitements, comes across more like a somewhat shopworn message
than as the darkly inevitable concomitant to what went before. And by the
time we get to the truly hackneyed last shot - a disillusioned Reilly
hopefully joining his still unforgiving beloved on a tropical beach - one
is left reflecting sadly on the miscalculations (not least the clumsy
contrivance of having Reilly's sentimental problems conveniently coincide
with the case) that make a film which opens with the bang of a superb
first half gradually tail away to a whimper.
TOM MILNE
Q & A
US (1990): Drama/Crime
Roger Ebert Review: 3.5 stars out of 4
132 min, Rated R, Color
Sidney Lumet's Q & A is an excitingly well-crafted police movie, but
he's a good director, and I think that was the easy part for him. What was
hard—what the movie is really about—is the rough and careless way that
cops and other tough guys throw around racial insults. I'm not talking
about how they address their clients out in the streets; I'm talking about
how they regard each other—the blacks and Irish and Jews and Hispanics
and Italians and Slavics who make up their world. It is almost a badge of
honor in certain circles to use, and ignore, racist verbal labels.
What does that kind of talk signify? Is it said in affection? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Is it said as a territorial thing—I'm Italian and you're not? Is it tribal, reminding everyone of loyalties that can be called on in times of trouble? At some level it's accepted—everyone in this movie uses racial and ethnic slang constantly—and yet, at another level, it is just what it sounds like, a kind of macho name-calling.
In Lumet's New York City, the streets are seen as dangerously near to spinning out of control. To the Irish-American chief of the homicide bureau (Patrick O'Neal), that means it is time to close ranks. It's a war out there, he believes, between the cops and the people who would destroy the city (by which he instinctively means blacks and Hispanics). When a legendary Irish street cop named Brennan (Nick Nolte) shoots a Puerto Rican in a slum doorway, O'Neal calls in a young assistant D.A. (Timothy Hutton) to head the investigation. But he briefs Hutton very specifically: "This is an open-and-shut case." It is not. Hutton begins to suspect that Brennan may have committed murder. His investigation leads him into the lives of people in many different ethnic groups—and he is shocked one day when a Hispanic drug dealer (Armand Assante) walks in with a woman (Jenny Lumet) Hutton once dated and still loves.
He meets her privately and asks her to come back to him. She will not. He assumed she was Hispanic when they dated, and she will never forget the look in his eyes, she says, when he met her father for the first time and saw that he was black. Is it always there, the movie wonders, that instinctive racial discrimination that seems to be absorbed when we're young and has to be unlearned as part of the process of growing up and growing better?
The movie is about such questions, but in a subtle way, while the central story involves a web of treachery, bribery, and deceit. This is a movie with a large cast, and one of the ways Lumet deals with that is to use fine, experienced actors who almost exude the traits of their characters. There's Charles Dutton, as a hard-boiled black detective who explains that his real color is "blue"—"and when I was in the army, it was olive drab." There's Luis Guzman as his partner, a Puerto Rican detective who knows and accepts the realities of the streets but has his limits. There's Lee Richardson as an old Jewish lawyer who has high standards and gives wise counsel to Hutton—but is also finally part of the system. And Leonard Cimino has only a few small scenes as an ancient Mafia don, but he conveys the reality of his power with ruthless and yet wryly humorous wisdom.
These people and others give us the sense that Q & A isn't just about a hermetically sealed plot, that its tendrils reach out into the whole hierarchy of law enforcement in a city like New York, and that the patterns seen here in the 34th Precinct are repeated in every other precinct and every other big American city. Nick Nolte's performance is central to that feeling. He knew Hutton's late father—a hero cop—and he also knows dirt on the father that he can use if he has to. It's fascinating to see the way he works on this kid. He's been screwing the system so long, he knows just what buttons to push.
One of the most interesting characters in the movie is Bobby Texador, the drug kingpin, played by Armand Assante in one of the best character performances of the year. I didn't recognize Assante at first behind the beard and the silken, poetic speech, but what I did recognize was an original character—not simply your standard movie drug dealer, but a man whose skills and cleverness had led him to success in his business and who was smart enough to want out (it's the rare drug millionaire—or any millionaire—with the imagination to have as much fun spending money as making it).
Lumet has made a lot of other movies about tough big-city types of one kind or another (DOG DAY AFTERNOON, SERPICO, NETWORK, PRINCE OF THE CITY, THE VERDICT), but this is the one where he taps into the vibrating awareness of race which is almost always there when strangers of different races encounter each other in situations where one has authority and another doesn't. The law provides a context for how cops treat civilians, criminal or not, but does it also provide an arena where a racial contest for power in the city takes place? Can the law be color-blind when none of its instruments are? It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.
Q & A
US (1990): Drama/Crime
Pauline Kael Review
132 min, Rated R, Color
Sidney Lumet has made some exciting, dramatic New York movies (SERPICO,
DOG DAY AFTERNOON). He also made the hard-to-sit through PRINCE OF THE
CITY, a murky indictment of big-city graft, which he coscripted. This is
in the same mode: it's about the city's ethnic humor and anger, and about
police corruption. Lumet wrote the script alone, and he's so busy laying
on the rancorous, bantering atmosphere that he waits too long to get to
the plot; the movie becomes torpid. (You have to concentrate to figure out
what's supposed to be going on--that's the only suspense.) Nick Nolte, in
dark hair that makes him look like a vampire, is a big, bulky Irish cop
with a vicious streak; a repressed homosexual, he especially enjoys
intimidating and murdering transvestites. The co-star is Timothy Hutton as
an assistant D.A., also Irish, who's expected to cover up one of the cop's
killings. But the standout performance is given by Luis Guzman as a
Hispanic police detective who's pressured to be "dirty." Also
with Patrick O'Neal, Armand Assante, Lee Richardson, Charles S. Dutton,
Jenny Lumet, Fyvush Finkel, Paul Calderon, and International Chrysis.
Cinematography by Andrzej Bartkowiak; music by Rubén Blades. Based on the
book by Edwin Torres. Tri-Star.