Word: wambaugh
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...GLITTER DOME by Joseph Wambaugh; Morrow; 299 pages...
Through five bestsellers, four films and two television series, Joseph Wambaugh's characters have altered America's view of its police. His Los Angeles officers are neither the lone-eagle heroes of reactionary fantasy nor fascist mercenaries cracking the skulls of the innocent. They are, instead, ordinary, besieged working men and women whose lives are presented with war-zone humor, lively plots and a refreshing lack of night-school sociology. In Wambaugh's newest novel, those servants have grown a little less civil, and the quiet desperation of their lives has moved up several decibel levels...
...Their angst is echoed on the mean streets just below the topiary of Beverly Hills: heroin, child abuse, pornography, snuff films and bizarre murder. When Film Studio Boss Nigel St. Claire is found with two .38-cal. bullets in his face, Al Mackey and Marty Welborn, a couple of Wambaugh's best creations, are called...
...film is not quite up to its star. It occupies a country somewhere between Barney Miller and the works of Joseph Wambaugh: a land of masculine camaraderie in which the bureaucrats don't understand how things are in the real world, and an unspoken tenderness is exchanged between police and perpetrators because they both inhabit the same mean streets. But the cut of life examined in the film and its attitudes are not highly original, and are too close for comfort to the manner of made-for-TV movies...
Director Becker sometimes permits Wambaugh's penchant for psychological overexplanation and realistic background to jostle aside the film's essentially comic spirit. Most of the time, though, characters and situations are permitted to develop their own odd and ultimately catchy rhythms. There is no slickness to the movie. Prentiss is sharp without being abrasive, sweet without being sticky. Foxworth offers a daringly understated performance. He attracts attention and then affection through the kind of patience and politesse that one rarely encounters these days in actors playing lead roles. His work alone would make The Black Marble worth seeing...