Word: precinct
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rescue plans because they would have forced him to spend funds only as overseen by the city council. Last month he admitted assembling a secret "black book" on the political loyalty of thousands of city employees. A city union claimed he gave average raises of about $3,500 to precinct captains and ward leaders, compared with $300 for the "politically inactive...
...Quandary is back. This time, the controversy surrounds Daniel Petrie's Fort Apache, the Bronx, a movie which purports to show what the South Bronx is really like, through the experiences of the officers of the borough's 41st precinct. Art and social responsibility clash once again. Community activists in the South Bronx have declared the film racist while its makers defend its accuracy in depicting the area from a cop's point of view...
...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...
Then again, Murphy is a poorly concieved, poorly written character. He's the Last Honest Cop, supposedly appalled by the corruption in the precinct and the squalor in the streets, an ancient cliche. Murphy might have been utilized as the liberal mouthpiece for the film-makers' ideas on urban blight--but Petrie and Gould blow it again. Murphy tells his Puerto Rican girlfriend that he stays in the Bronx because he wants to help the victimized citizenry, he says he understands them: "You see Puerto Ricans are really no different from us Irish. We both like to dance and drink...
...like the film-makers, probably thought the movie would come off sounding like a humane plea to America to save the South Bronx. Asner's convictions and intentions make his scene with Newman--where Connolly tries to persuade Murphy not to leave the force--all the more ironic. "The precinct must be a house of law," Asner says passionately. "Damn it, there're people out there who are trying to build something and we have to let them know that the law is here to serve them...