The New Centurions (Richard Fleischer, 1972) employs an episodic structure about as brilliantly as is possible, breaking down a routine, incident-by-incident cop drama into a series of poetic ellipses and couplings, George C. Scott's specter shifting forms and meaning, while Stacy Keach's central protagonist gradually changes states. The 70s American cinema is always touted as a revival of "gritty" and "dark" character studies; this is a film that actually lives up to that mantle, and it takes the no-bullshit approach of Fleischer to strip away some of the histrionics that dominate the so-called serious American cinema of that era.
It is a casually philosophical film, much like Scott's remarkable Kilvinsky (surely one of the great characters in film), but also displays restraint, approaching characters with sympathy but refusing to accept their positions, and, more critically, to psychoanalyze them. This is where the episodic structure truly sings, as our characters skip forward in time. All we require to attune ourselves the film's emotions and ideas are these simple glimpses, noting the differences, reforming and shifting our previous approach consistently.
The action sequences impress with their control of space and geometry, bringing their tensions home with quiet, devastating denouements of violence. Each is their own take on an "action scene", plays of light and chance. This sort of brutal randomness brings us close to Fletcher's contemporary Robert Aldrich, who's 1975 masterpiece Hustle would make an interesting double bill with this. Cities and cops, and an ever-growing malignant decay, in Aldrich a shadow without out form, in Fleischer a barrage of sudden violence. Hustle's Burt Reynolds is emblematic, he drifts devoid of conviction, and, in the film's climax, manipulates his volatile environment, only to be swallowed by it shortly thereafter. The officers of The New Centurions have no knowable definition of duty, the laws, society, and themselves changing underneath them.
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