Word: forte
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...heat of this debate, neither group has realized the obvious: that Fort Apache, in a cinematic context, is an awful film. The movie fails on almost every artistic and technical level. Muddled, sloppy, and usually just silly, the movie plods clumsily from Starsky and Hutch-type melodrama to confused social commentary to moronic musings on the decline and fall of modern civilization...
...course, each work of art must be judged in terms of its own goals, in other words, its success or failure as a coherent, satisfying artistic vision. For the makers of Fort Apache, their artistic and social goals seem intertwined. According to Paul Newman, the star of and spokesman for Fort Apache, Petrie and company wanted the film to be "the positive catalyst needed to start a nation-wide effort to rebuild the inner cities and better the lives of their inhabitants." A noble aspiration. Unfortunately, no one involved with the film had the talent to fulfill it. The vision...
...BEGIN, Heywood Gould has created a screenplay of almost magnificent incompetence. He had a promising premise: two dedicated cops Murphy (Paul Newman) and Corelli (Ken Wahl), confront crime, corruption, despair and death in the South Bronx; their turf is so dangerous that the precinct office is nicknamed Fort Apache, as it is, indeed, "like a fort in hostile territory." In depicting this crumbling world, Gould conjures up an assortment of ludicrous plot contrivances and inate episodes. First, there's Charlotte, the grotesque hooker who opens the film by shooting two rookie officers dead in their parked patrol car. Fort Apache...
...soon, we're following Charlotte again as she slashes the throats of horny, innocent fools. Meanwhile, back at the "fort", the new play-by-the-book commander (Edward Asner) is giving Murphy a hard time but Murphy can't really be concerned with this since his new love, a Puerto-Rican nurse, has a dark secret and the local drug-dealer is up to no good and the whole neighborhood is being torn apart by riots. Gould orchestrates these dramatic situations with the skill of an armless conductor...
Measure for measure, Petrie's incompetence matches Gould's. As illustrated by The Betsy and Resurrection, Petrie is an equally mediocre talent. In Fort Apache he relies on pointless camera meanderings, a la Brian De Palma, to give the illusion of a consistent style. The frequent tracking, zooming, and panning--usually from Paul Newman's right profile to his left--generally serve no purpose...