ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: SPECTACULAR CRASHES
John: Hello, hello, smashing through the third floor wall of your apartment, it’s the Zone Film Challenge! Today, we’re here with the prompt of Spectacular Crashes, car stunts, and vehicular carnage. We picked a little known buddy cop comedy from 1974 called Freebie & the Bean with James Caan and Alan Arkin.
Alex: Henceforth referred to as Freebie.
John: It took me six minutes after starting the movie to get what the joke here was — or at least, half of the joke which Alan Arkin, who is not Latin American, is playing a Mexican cop hence, well- you get the idea. James Caan is an asshole bigot who uses his status as a cop to get free shit. I don’t think either of us were set ablaze with passion by Freebie, except for the stunts which were unfortunately few and far between.
Alex: Yeah I chose the film based on its reputation for its stunt work and I thought the stunt work was amazing. I think calling the film “comedy” is a little generous…
John: I’m calling the film “comedy” because it clearly wants to be one.
Alex: It wants to be one but it’s not particularly funny. The stunt work is actively amazing -
John: Oh yeah.
Alex: I liked the film a fair bit more than you did. Where the film fits into the broader context of these ‘70s cop films — especially California cop media — is really interesting because this movie, uh, fucking hates cops so much that it -
John: It’s too mad to tell the joke.
Alex: Exactly. It’s so venomous that I don’t really know where the joke begins and ends. What I do know is that I don’t like most of the jokes in the film and thinking about how they played in the ‘70s, I don’t think they played satirical.
John: Let’s drill down on this just a bit.
Alex:
From 1968 to 1973, San Francisco was the hot city in the United States. If you were young and looking for excitement or simply burnt out of modern life and looking for a place to tune in, turn on, and drop out — San Francisco was advertised as the place for you. Arguments can be made if it actually ever was that — and as the rules of cool dictate, it likely stopped being “cool” in 1967 but there is no denying that the Golden Gate Bridge and Haight-Ashbury loomed large in the television and silver screens of those revolutionary years. Bullitt led the charge in 1968 with Dirty Harry, Streets of San Francisco, Play It Again, Sam and What’s Up Doc soon to follow. In the first two, San Francisco is a place for cops, in the latter, it is a place for lovers. Freebie & the Bean platonically unites the two, as it says in its tagline… “Above all…It’s a love story.”
Often classified as a buddy-cop comedy, Freebie operates in a pitch-black register uncommon in the genre. In 2022, it plays as anti-comedy. The jokes are what one expects them to be; racist and homophobic pokes, wanton property destruction, bickering and scheming leads but the jokes are given no space to breathe. They’re piled on top of each other; Freebie and Bean hurl insults at each other, their women, their bosses, criminals and nothing they say is ever funny. For a moment, I considered that the social mores of the era had changed — or maybe that Richard Rush wasn’t a funny man but as the film gradually unwinds, it becomes clear that Rush is making a film that is actively attempting to be alienating.
It succeeds though not because Rush has mastery over the adapted script. Instead, Freebie is so alienating because it is such a conflicted film. Rush clearly resents these protagonists, hating them both with such fury that he turns up the heat on their buddy-cop bromance, having it boil over into something irreconcilably grating. Yet, the movie has this anarchic fun impulse with its infamous vehicular stunts. Freebie rides a motorcycle over the roofs of ten or fifteen Buicks, rips through the Embarcadero Freeway, and speeds his car up, over and down San Francisco’s steep hills. It’s a total blast, completely unhinged mayhem perpetrated by a maniac cop out for results. Freebie serves to mock the unchecked firepower and libertarian spirit personified in Harry Callahan, doing it years before The Simpsons rolled out McGarnagle but it makes the carnage so fun that it can be difficult to parse where the film’s heart lies.
It’s not that the film needs to place a big flashing warning label in the corner of the screen but its mixed messaging does make it less palatable. For example, at the end of the film, the would-be assassin is revealed to be an effete gay man who the pair originally met in the bathtub. In the final act, he dresses in women’s clothing and holds a woman hostage in the women’s bathroom at Candlestick Park. The man is shot and killed without much depth or empathy given to them. This plays directly into the same counter-culture panic (in this case; queer sexuality) that many of Freebie’s contemporaries used to justify the excessive force used by their leads. Now, exploitation fiction often uses shocking imagery to get a rise out of people — it’s easy, sleazy, it’s part and parcel of pulp — but for the film to effectively land its critique, it can’t just coast on general cynicism. That’s Easy Street and it speaks more to an unfocused distaste for authority than it does a specific distaste for policing.
California cop media, Dirty Harry and Streets of San Francisco being of particular note, depicted San Francisco as a naturally beautiful city always under the press of rampant crime. Do-nothing bureaucrats contributed to it but it was the counter-culture that caused it. In these stories, the city’s liberal permissiveness of homosexuality, drugs and leftist politics invited crime into the city and it was the duty of the police to rein it in. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is emblematic of this era but Freebie best depicts this often hypocritical and confusing movement in San Francisco screen history. It’s hostile towards the institution but the individuals and their antics, well, those can be fun.
Freebie is an interesting relic of the post-1960s San Francisco heyday and if you’re in the market for a movie with devastating vehicle stunt work, it’s not to be missed. Richard Rush brought some bitterness to the vigilante punch bowl and helped codify some genre standards for subversive genre films about terrible cops and vigilantes. It exists best in conversation with other films; Bullit, The French Connection, and Dirty Harry but taken alone, it’s a clumsy cynical piece of almost subversive art.
John:
I’ve recently been rekindling a childhood fascination with stock car racing. Fans who came of age in that 90s and early 2000s boom period of NASCAR may have some vague sense that the sport has fallen on hard times. Victimized by a generation of boring and bland drivers, a governing body that can’t stop shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, and a culture that’s come to regard the whole enterprise as a punch line. One thing that rarely gets mentioned is the cars themselves. American stock car racing is by definition beholden to the folly of US auto manufacturers (and also Toyota for some reason). As I go back to the golden years of the sport and watch men like Bobby Allison, Richard Petty, and Bill Elliott spank battleship-sized Plymouth’s, Mercury’s, and Pontiac’s around superspeedways in 240p archival footage I become and more and more certain of one simple thing: the sport will not get better until the cars get worse.
Most motorsports are about racing the best car possible with the best driver possible. Most motorsports are about the avoidance of the kind of chaos so endemic to NASCAR. Clean lines, clean passing, clean haircuts. Corporate logoed thermal quarter-zips and hermetically sealed garages which fire their whole staff and burn the place to the ground if a molecule of dust is detected within. Most motorsports are stupid.
When stock car racing is good nothing about it is clean. This is a sport started by redneck bootleggers monetizing their male mating rituals, not European fancy lads building faberge-egg-fragile spaceships in a futile attempt to outrun their own death urge. Americans love cars, real ones, that you can buy. The only thing better than a car that’s working properly is a car that was working properly right up until the moment it got, to use industry terms, a bit rambunctious in the corners and met the wall somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred miles an hour. There’s a simple, almost libidinal pleasure in watching a big, ugy Oldsmobile with the aerodynamics of a cow get turned at hi-speed by the Buick behind it and flip ass-over-teakettle as the downforce that previously tethered it to the earth inverts itself and sends the car skyward.
Richard Rush’s Freebie and the Bean understands this. It understands it so well that it makes the whole rest of the not very good movie worthwhile. My eyes glazed over as Alan Arkin mumbled or shouted banter, my catatonic state only broken briefly by James Caan saying slurs. But every time a dump truck tipped and slid on its side, when the panels, wheels or hood were torn off some Chevy behemoth, or when that same behemoth was sent careening between the cars of a passing freight train like a flying pig I was smiling ear to ear. Mouth agape. There’s something transcendent about an on-screen car crash, especially ones this good. Movies are arguably the greatest ever record of what it is to be a modern human, and what’s more human than building something just to smash it? Or, better yet, building something by way of smashing something.
The late 60s and early 70s really were the golden age of the on-screen car chase. Films like Bullitt and The French Connection pushed the technical end of the equation into uncharted territory with timeless stunt work. Talented directors, cinematographers, and stunt drivers were able to work in tandem to convey speed and chaos beyond imagining. But again, let’s not overlook the cars themselves. Their size and weight combined with the relatively low quality of their construction made for cars that photographed extremely well, especially in motion. Modern cars can’t hope to duplicate the way the body seems to almost slide off a mid-century American car as it corners at speed. In conclusion; if we want to make movies, sports, and indeed America cool again, we need to make more cars where the spoiler does nothing, the upholstery is made of something called “Detroit Leather” and the crumple zone is directly on your head.
John: You can’t really do this as a comedy. I get that it’s obvious to do this a comedy but it inevitably blunts your take. It’s the “satire requires a clarity of purpose lest it glorify that which it intends to criticize” meme
Alex: Right. This is a film designed to get that response. There’s an Altman film, O.C. and Stiggs, that’s doing Porky’s, Animal House, but it hated its main characters and Freebie is in the same mode. I think there is room for appreciation with this movie because the stunt work is incredible.
John: If it hits free streaming, it’s worth it to see what they’re doing with these land battleships. Plymouths, Big Pontiacs
Alex: And how the film exists in relation to its contemporaries is of academic interest. As a film to throw on? Not my first pick.
John: The academic interest is where it’s of most help, it is an outlier in the 70s police drama — buddy cop stuff. It can’t quite go where it wants to go because it wants to go in several different directions at once.
NEXT WEEK: Cannes Film Festival Special! The Zone will induct Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 Palme D’Or winner Taste of Cherry (take that, Ebert!)
