Cop (1988)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Director:

James B. Harris

Writers:

James Ellroy (novel)
James B. Harris (screenplay)

Release Date:

March 1988 (USA)

Genre:

Thriller | Crime | Drama

Tagline:

When a cop cares too much, how far is too far. [USA Theatrical]

Plot:

Lloyd Hopkins, a hard-boiled American police detective is on the trail of a mass murderer who is victimizing women in Los Angeles...

Plot Keywords:

Police | Gay Slur | Serial Killer | Neo Noir | Independent Film

Cast

James Woods	...	Lloyd Hopkins
Lesley Ann Warren	...	Kathleen McCarthy
Charles Durning	...	Dutch Peltz
Charles Haid	...	Delbert 'Whitey' Haines
Raymond J. Barry	...	Captain Fred Gaffney
Randi Brooks	...	Joanie Pratt
Steven Lambert	...	Bobby Franco
Christopher Wynne	...	Jack Gibbs
Jan McGill	...	Jen Hopkins
Vicki Wauchope	...	Penny Hopkins
Melinda Lynch	...	Sarah Smith
John Petievich	...	Deputy
Dennis Stewart	...	Lawrence 'Birdman' Henderson
Randy Pelish	...	Employee
Annie McEnroe	...	Amy Cranfield

Also Known As:

Blood on the Moon (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

110 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Germany:16 | Australia:MA (re-rating) | Australia:M (original rating) | Finland:K-16 | Norway:18 | Sweden:15 | UK:18 | USA:R | West Germany:16

Filming Locations:

1424 N. Harper Avenue, West Hollywood, California, USA

Company:

Atlantic Entertainment Group

Trivia:

At one point in the movie Lloyd (James Woods) rings a doorbell to an apartment building. One of the names of the residents is Gene Rudolf, which is the name of this film's production designer.

Quotes:

Lloyd Hopkins: You blow away a broad's date, the least you can do is drive her home.

Movie Connections:

References "The Flintstones" (1960)

Quiet deconstruction of Dirty Harry.

James Woods is the most underrated of all the great actors. Maybe it's because he hasn't starred in enough 'classics', but there's something fundamentally troubling in his personality that discourages full recognition. It's not because he usually plays villains - audiences have had great affection for the hateful throughout movie history. Woods is too normal to be a melodramatic villain; he's a tensed up, selfish, narcissistic, arrogant jerk. He has neither redeemable qualities, nor conventional charisma. His look compounds these drawbacks with its strangeness - it somehow seems all wrong; his body is to wiry for his head and shoulders, his head is reptilian and bug-eyed. And yet he charms by his total indifference to what we think of him. (He's also very funny)

Cop is too flawed to be great - its plot mechanics are too predictable; James Ellroy, having started with the daring proposition that Woods might be mad, and his investigations just an extension of this, is too afraid of loose ends to be truly scary (serial killer plots, ostensibly about the blackest modern evil, are paradoxically reassuring - they suggest pattern and order, and an identifiable problem, which once rooted will result in restoration); the visual style could be out of any dour 70s cop show (except for some gorgeous Kubrickian tracking shots); the music is hellish 80s synth orchestration; the climactic showdown is implausible and silly, although the film boasts one of the best endings in cinema.

What makes this film essential is Woods, and Harris' direction. Laura Mulvey once claimed that Hollywood cinema privileged the actions of the male hero; the woman was an object to be stared at and won. Cop refutes this by having an archetypal male hero - a cop - whose actions shape the movement of the film, and yet who is riveted to the screen, subjected to the merciless exposure of the camera. Woods cannot lie to us, every tic, flaw, line of thought is laid bare. Even though he always seems in control, we are constantly aware that he is being stared at (even before this becomes a narrative element), that he is stuck in the frame. Harris, producer of The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita etc., has learned much from Kubrick in this unforgivingly formal, analytic approach (see also Melville).

The film subverts the usual maverick cop cliches. Unlike Dirty Harry, Hopkins' concern for the cause of murdered women is undermined by his egocentric insensitivity towards the women who practically need him in his life. There is a Freudian framework used, as Hopkins' neuroses (he is accused of having a fixation on murdered women) are linked to his past, but the final working of them out (it takes place in his old school) is not reassuring. The force itself is perverted and corrupt, both in obvious (one sherrif is a drug-dealing, rent-boy pimp) and not so obvious (most of Hopkins' superiors are 'born agains') ways. Hopkins is like a Kubrick hero, an instrument of a corrupting social force.

There are problems - the co-opting and infantilising of feminism, the possible homophobia; like the Searchers, the critique sometimes seems to become confused with what is being criticised. But this is brave, dangerous, clever film-making that deserves to be better known.