Word: inspectors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This time we have George Segal as a safety inspector convinced that foul play was involved in the spectacular amusement-park accident with which the picture promisingly begins. The audience, one step ahead of him as it always is in this movie, knows that sweet-faced youth (Timothy Bottoms) lurking around the wide screen has got more on his mind than cotton candy. He is a highly intelligent psychopath who gets at least as much fun out of making the cops look like fools as he does out of making thrill rides even more thrilling than they were intended...
Although Mcllvanney keeps this question hanging almost to the end, his focus is not on suspense but on a close-knit society's reaction to criminal outrage. Detective-Inspector Jack Laidlaw is assigned to catch the murderer, but he resents the assumption-especially rife among his fellow policemen-that this process is just the same as caging an animal. He argues, instead, that "monstrosity's made by false gentility. You don't get one without the other. No fairies, no monsters. Just people...
...Roof deals with the murder of a Swedish police inspector, Stig Nyman, who meets his Maker in a Stockholm hospital room at the hands of a bayonet-wielding figure. The murder is horribly bloody and practically guaranteed to turn the stomachs of the squeamish. In fact, only Sam Peckinpah could really enjoy it. But like the rest of the film it is quite realistic, and therefore effective...
...police proceed methodically and unemotionally about the solution of the heinous crime. Carl-Gustav Lindstedt turns in a strong, understated performance as Detective-Inspector Martin Beck, an unlikely protagonist given his nondescript, middle-aged appearance and his plodding method. Hakan Serner plays Beck' partner, a worried, weary little man who does most of the legwork. The foils are provided by Kollberg (Sven Wollter) and Larsson (Thomas Hellberg), two handsome young cops who cordially and sarcastically detest each other, but who manage to wrap up the case in the end. One is wealthy and arrogant, the other working-class, bright...
None of the characters are heroes, or even whipcrack detectives. But they all seem very real, as opposed to the ridiculously larger-than-life heroes of most films. Realism suffuses the film and makes it credible. The cops are just men doing their jobs. In fact, the murdered inspector turns out to have been a brutal and incompetent policeman, a man who made countless enemies during his career. The iconoclastic Kolberg notes that he best remembered Inspector Nyman for teaching him how he cut off a pig's penis without making the animal squeal...