The Super Cops

THE SUPER COPS was yet another film from 1974 featuring a pair of somewhat mismatched partners who are adept at finding trouble.  This time, the story is true.  Or at least based on truth.  David Greenberg and Robert Hantz were renegade NYPD officers who realized even while they were still in the Academy that they had their own philosophy regarding criminal apprehension.  Read: one that wasn't choked by bureaucracy, apathy, or even rampant department corruption.  This "Batman and Robin" duo were not the get along/go along types.  So dedicated to their jobs were these guys that they spent their days off busting notorious drug dealers their fellow flatfoots had been after for years.

Greenberg (Ron Leibman) and Hantz (David Selby) were therefore forever in hot water, despite an incredible arrest record.  They are rewarded with mountains of paperwork and traffic duty.  But even the shit detail is handled by them with incredible dedication, leading to an entire city block of impounded vehicles (and done strictly by the book!).  The other cops resent them.  Internal Affairs is hounding them, although more for things like not wearing their uniforms.  They do have an ally in weary Captain Irving Krasna (Dan Frazer) in their hellhole Bed-Stuy precinct, but Batman and Robin are always a heartbeat away from losing their shields.

The wonderfully acted THE SUPER COPS is a highly fitting portrait of this wiseacre duo, and the movie mostly plays it like a comedy.  Satiric,even.  There are great jabs at D.A.s, enterprising drug dealers, police chiefs, and all the other players from cuffing to arraignment.  The real Greenberg and Hantz were consultants on this movie (adapted from L.H. Whitemore's The Super Cops: The True Story of the Cops Called Batman and Robin by Lorenzo Semple Jr.) and even appear in bit parts.  While the film has a great gritty early '70s NYC aesthetic (fine location shooting by Richard C. Kratina), the tone is mostly light.  This is nowhere nearly as heavy as SERPICO, or many other such pictures of its era.

Gordon Parks does another fine job as director, using his blaxploitation experience to authenticate this live action cartoon, real or otherwise.  These guys get the showcase they deserve, even though it was most certainly whitewashed.