Movie Details
| Title: | The New Centurions | |
| Director: | Richard Fleischer | |
| Year: | 1972 | |
| Genre: | Cop | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.30.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- The Don is Dead
- The Narrow Margin
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.30.25 | Internet | This adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh's first novel follows Stacy Keach and his fellow rookies Scott Wilson and Erik Estrada as they embark in a career with the LAPD. George C Scott plays Keach's mentor and there's several other familiar faces that pop up but it's really Keach's movie. This was pretty decent. I like how there are passages of time as we follow Keach as a rookie then working for vice and so forth. It is kind of a straight-forward cop movie but I gest the sense that it's one of the first to kick off a grittier more realistic 70s take on the cop movie vs. earlier stuff like Dragnet. I guess Bullitt was late 60s but I wouldn't call that movie gritty. So seen through that lens, this movie's pretty gritty. For today, it's kind of a standard cop movie. There's some nice LA location photography though including a very nice shot of downtown and all the freeways. I don't know my LA geography enough to know if that's special or not but it's a nice shot in the film. On a final note, the copy of this I found online had encoding issues or something because it was all out of order, like the chapters played on random. Very jarring at first since scenes would end mid-word. I thought it was a stylistic choice at first, like almost a montage of daily life as a cop but then Keach had a mustache and George C Scott was retiring and I knew something was wrong. That's the risk of tracking these movies down online vs. buying physical media. To be honest, the effect kind of juiced the movie for me since I was mentally stitching these scenes together in my head and making my own timeline. Not something I'd want to happen with a movie I was more invested in but the movie already has a somewhat anecdotal or episodic nature so it wasn't so bad I turned it off. |
