Beck 7: Call the Shots

With an extremely strong reputation in its native Sweden, MAN ON THE ROOF, adapted from the seventh Martin Beck novel, The Abominable Man, is not only the most faithful adaptation thus far, but certainly the best. And the two qualities are not unrelated. While it’s possible to adapt a book with fidelity to its events and still get the tone completely wrong — see the first version of THE MALTESE FALCON for evidence — it doesn’t hurt if the person doing the adapting has some trust in the original work. The second necessary quality is understanding. Bo Widerberg, writer-director of TMOTR, has both.

The novel risks repeating the premise of the previous entry in the series: a man, pushed beyond endurance by social forces, takes an insane and bloody vengeance on those who personify said forces. In Murder at the Savoy, the victim is a businessman who embodies the worst qualities of Swedish capitalism. In The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle) the victims are the police, who, as an institution and a few individuals, have comprehensively destroyed a man’s life until he goes full Charles Whitman.

We begin with the murder of a senior copper in hospital, a chilling and ultimately exsanguinary scene — there’s a long-held static shot just staring at a corridor, mostly empty, waiting for something awful to happen, that puts me in mind of EXORCIST III. The music, resembling an emphysemic bumblebee playing a folded paper and comb, is unsettling. The eyeball staring from between the curtains, a swipe from Argento’s DEEP RED, is alarming — and arguably wrong for this kind of realist film. And then we’re in a handheld, fast-cut assault, blood slathering every surface, as the killer strikes with an ex-army bayonet (a device seldom exploited in horror movies, oddly enough). There are some prosthetic effects here, I think, but rather than lingering on them like Lucio Fucki, to get his sadistic money’s worth, Widerberg cuts so rapidly we’re not quite sure just what we’ve seen, which makes it much more powerful — overwhelming in its speed and savagery. Janet Leigh’s rubber stomach in PSYCHO, penetrated by kitchen knife with subliminal brevity, is probably at the back of his mind. One might compare it to the icepick slaying that opens BASIC INSTINCT, but there the strictures of the MPAA shifted things from full-on Fulci mode to a more Hitchcockian swiftness, so we don’t see Rob Bottin’s effect of the steel point going up the victim’s nostril, emerging at the top of the nose and reentering the eye, for which I am grateful personally.

Widerberg’s handheld approach, a mere documentarist tremor elsewhere in the film, becomes a frenzied set of lunges here, and enables us to feel that WE are slipping chaotically in the murderee’s spilled gore. It’s characteristic of the film that the vaguely vérité observational style becomes something more furious and expressive/expressionistic during instances of violence.

Widerberg is in take-no-prisoners mode. Though his source novel is frank and bold, he does tend to amp things up, stressing the disgusting details, even everyday ones like a toddler with a filthy backside (in the book, a throwaway line of dialogue, now a disgusting chocolaty image). And Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s deadpan, low-affect dryness, though still admirably present, is joined by a sometimes startling intensity.

The casting is tip-top. There’s nobody I objected to. Almost nobody, except the mousy Ronn and the gruff Hult (above), is the way I pictured them from the book, but I didn’t mind. They were close enough. Beck (Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt) is older and fatter. Larsson (Thomas Hellberg) is more rock ‘n’ roll — but a goofy Swedish rock ‘n’ roll. Kollberg (Sven Wollter) is slimmer. But they’re all fine. Torgny Anderberg, who plays the ineffectual police chief Malm here, plays the series’ other ineffectual police chief, Hammar, in the nineties series with Gosta Ekman. He’s very effective at being ineffectual.

I note with satisfaction details like Beck building model ships, and sleeping on the couch (he’s gradually withdrawing from his marriage, in a very passive way). While the books stress that Stockholm is polluted and falling to bits, Winderberg’s camera can’t help but see how colourful and attractive much of the city looks. Oh well, you can’t do anything about photogenics, unless maybe you’re Tom Hooper.

The only characters not present are Krisitiansen and Kvant, who make their final appearance as a comic team in the novel. Since setting them up would take too much time and be a distraction, Widerberg quite sensibly replaces them with some anonymous cannon fodder. It’s the kind of tweak I can cheerfully allow.

It’s a film of two halves — the typically plodding initial investigation yields to a full-on siege situation as the vengeful gunman takes to his rooftop. Then we have helicopter assaults, tear gas, all kinds of mayhem, presented on a spectacular scale and with rather disconcerting relish by the director.

An oddity of this book is the way it features several gory cop-killings, while the authors insist that the dangers of working for the police force are routinely exaggerated. In the interests of drama, Sjöwall and Wahlöö have done quite a bit of that exaggeration themselves: an undercover policewoman is endangered in Roseanna, a junior detective murdered in The Laughing Policeman, Kollberg gets stabbed in The Fire Engine that Disappeared, and this one is the bloodiest yet (but Widerberg adds even more carnage). So the point is worth making, and over the next couple of books they make it repeatedly: it’s in the interests of the police to exaggerate the dangers of their job, and by citing “assaulting a police officer” as the reason for their own violence, they get to fake the statistics with impunity.

The only thing that doesn’t quite come off in this one is the very ending. Like Capra’s MR. SMITH, Beck ends the novel unconscious, and things are concluded with a strange, funny line from Larsson (he’s a strange, funny man) — its abruptness is the whole point in the book, but it must have seemed TOO abrupt for the film, and Widerberg adds a zoom-in and b&w freezeframe on the slain killer, mistimed to make things both abrupt AND fussy. But this is a quibble: the film is a rarity (my first Widerberg, though): everything seems loose and free, and at the same time JUST RIGHT.

THE MAN ON THE ROOF stars Valle Munter; King Hrothgar; Mr. Big; Inspector Andersson; Dirch Frode; ‘Mandel’ Karlsson; Linus; Märeta; Evald Hammar; and Jean Sibelius vanhana.

Beck #4: Roll Call

The fourth book in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series, The Laughing Policeman, not only became the first non-American winner of the Edgar Award for crime fiction, it became the first modern Swedish novel to become a Hollywood movie. Since it was the seventies by the time that happened, Stuart Rosenberg’s film can leave out the double meaning of the book’s title, and just leave it as an ironic dangler. (See also STRAW DOGS and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but note that Roman Polanski felt compelled to add a scene to CHINATOWN that made the title literal.)

Screenwriter Thomas Rickman (THE COAL-MINER’S DAUGHTER) has changed lots of other stuff too, and I would say that practically all his changes make things worse, though a good many of them probably couldn’t have been avoided. And, since the cast is great and enough of the intriguing story remains, what we have is actually a really pretty good policier. Watching the films around it that got everything wrong, I can appreciate this one much more in spite of the cliches and reactionary stuff.

Walter Matthau is Martin Beck — only here he’s a San Francisco detective called Jake Martin. Like Beck, though, he sleeps on the couch, though the movie has no convenient way to make it clear that this is his choice, part of the policeman’s long, slow, voluntary break-up with Mrs. Beck. As in the books, Martin is surrounded by a variety of other cops of varying degrees of competence, but none of them really resembles the characters in the novel. The always-welcome Anthony Zerbe is required to play a shouty boss character that surely felt somewhat tired even then, but the addition of Bruce Dern and Louis Gossett Jr adds welcome flavour.

Someone has massacred all the passengers on a bus, then gotten clean away. One of them turns out to be a young detective. Is it a random homicide (of the kind far more common in the US than Sweden) or is some more secret motivation at work. Dern uses an authentic cop word to describe mass shooters: “they’re kronky,” he says, meaning crazy. But I believe, from my reading of John D. MacDonald, that kronky really signifies someone who’s twitchy, suspicious, clearly hiding something. The word has now been superseded by the similar hinky.

Cinematographer David M. Walsh’s (MONTE WALSH, SLEEPER) visuals take advantage of fluorescent strip lighting’s tendency to turn green when photographed on film, giving the film a hazy, ghostly pallor that’s somehow very pleasing. Rosenberg, who made COOL HAND LUKE and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, has a deft way with a long lens, so the film has both a slight documentary grit and a Hollywood sheen. The TransAm Building becomes a major supporting character of the Frisco scenes.

The most unfortunate and dated change from the book is Rickman’s rewrite of the villain character. In the book, he killed an ex-lover who was threatening to derail his upcoming prosperous marriage. Now, years later, he enacts a massacre to take care of a dangerous witness and the cop who, on his own time, has been investigating the cold case. Rickman makes it a sex killing, but also makes that nonsensical by typing the character as gay. “A fruiter,” insists Dern’s character, about nine times too often. Complete with Van Dyke beard, a tonsilar aberration which has haunted Beck films since ROSEANNA.

And here, at last, are Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and he’s GOT THAT BEARD.

Showing homophobia in the police force is just realistic, even commendable, but the film in no way distances itself from Dern’s attitude. Even about ten years earlier, in THE BOSTON STRANGLER, the filmmakers understood that gay men were unlikely to become sex-killers of women. If Dern’s character, a part-time asshole, fixated on this sex angle and were proved wrong, that would be one thing. But the nonsensical homophobic theory proves to be correct in the film. The bad guy killed a woman because he’s queer.

Martin/Beck is given a bit of an explosive temper, too, which is different from the novels but not really a bad thing per se. It’s just that Matthau’s rages seem triggered by sexual matters, strip shows and gay bars and prostitution. The audience is encouraged, I think, to see sexual liberation as part of a general moral slide that ends in murder. Even though there’s a suggestion that the murderer committed his first killing to cover up his homosexuality, since “things were different just a few years ago.” So sexual repression is, it would seem, more dangerous than even the sleaziest commercial exploitation.

The final big change is the most destructive — Rickman adds the inevitable car chase, with the killer ending up on a bus so that we’re back to square one. DIRTY HARRY was just two years previous, so Rosenberg has a hard time making this seem fresh or exciting. The dated cliches have a certain nostalgic value, it’s true, but they basically represent a failure of imagination. Returning to the opening crisis is technically sort of a good idea, in principle. But it plays out as boring. It’s to the credit of Rickman’s dialogue and what’s left of Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s plot and all the good acting and filmmaking choices elsewhere that this is only a moderate blemish.

Rewriting all the minor characters — removing incompetent kops Kristiansen and Kvant, for instance, tends to soften the novel’s criticism of the police. We do get Anthony Zerbe as one of those perpetually furious, exploding police chiefs, but the books’ exposure of the way the police force is politicised and the bosses are more concerned with covering their own asses is missing.

The “Swedish nympho” — actually just a highly-sexed and pragmatic young woman in the book — is absent, but we get Joanna Cassidy as a lesbian nurse. She’s kind of a positive portrayal — the movie wants her to be titillating, and Cassidy is suitably glamorous, but it’s a very rare example of a lesbian in a mainstream Hollywood film who isn’t either a murderer or a murder victim. Some kind of weird flirtation with Dern confuses the issue. What we see quite clearly in the movie is that Hollywood finds lesbians titillating and gay men disgusting and frightening. It’s not as bad as FREEBIE AND THE BEAN in this respect, but then, nothing is.

Lou Gossett Jr is on hand, too, looking very cool. I was impressed by him telling off Dern for provoking some Black guys — “You’re making it harder for the next cop.” Dern pays no heed. On this viewing, the line struck me a little differently. Faced with a clear example of a white cop being unprofessional and kind of racist, Gossett’s character’s first loyalty is to the force. This seems somewhat true to reality, even if it’s not specifically what the filmmakers intended: some African-American cops do see to see themselves as cops first, and can be as racist as many white cops. Sjöwall & Wahlöö repeatedly talk about the culture in the police force that insists on group unity and an us-against-them attitude, where the “them” is the whole of the rest of the population.

The book’s ending could have worked really well on screen, I think — relying on a character reaction, it could have played a little like the end of THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123, the other entry in Walter Matthau’s public transport duology, making excellent use of that amazing fizzog. In the book, Beck’s teenage daughter presents him with a record of the title song, by Charles Penrose. Beck’s family find it hilarious, but the constitutionally glum Beck doesn’t crack a smile. But at the end of the book, he gets a phone call that cracks the case — the murdered cop had come up with the right answer. Ironically, however, this piece of the puzzle shows up after the case has already been resolved, so it’s a black joke by fate of the kind the books are full of. And Beck, at last, gets the joke.

But, instead, we get an ironic pay-off as a forgotten plot point reemerges as a laughable dead end (it may have inspired the grim gag at the end of Mamet’s HOMICIDE), a reminder that even if you follow every clue in the most professional manner, the universe is likely to have the last laugh. In that sense, it feels absolutely in keeping with the original authors’ sardonic view of the world.

THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN stars Charley Varrick; Freeman Lowell; Sgt. Emil Foley; Zilkov; Prof. Nelson Schwartzkopf; Zelmo Swift; Wonder Woman; Dr. Ernie Lombardi; Zhora; and Sherrif J.W. Pepper.

Beck #2: Long Distance Call

THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE is an outlier — Martin Beck is sent to Hungary in search of a vanished journalist, his stated mission being to avoid an international incident, and spends his time wandering about in a desultory manner. The Beck books’ rich supporting cast do get to take part a little, though, via phone calls, investigations back in Stockholm, and for the last act when Beck returns home and (spoiler) solves the case.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö were evidently well-read in crime fiction and had seen a lot of movies: the next volume in the series seems to show the influence of Fritz Lang’s M, one of the first procedurals (predating Anthony Boucher’s coining of the term “procedural” in 1956, and his earliest literary example, V as in Victim, written by Lawrence Treat in 1945).

Big spoiler follows in the invisible (up in smoke) para below. Highlight it with your cursor if you want to read it.

(The central twist of TMWWUIS is that the journalist who has vanished in Budapest never actually went to Budapest. He was murdered at home in Sweden the night before his scheduled departure. His killer, an approximate lookalike, decided to throw investigators off the scent by stealing the victim’s passport and plane ticket, flying to Hungary and then mysteriously disappearing (sneaking back home and resuming his own identity). It’s a neat trick, and was still neater when James M. Cain thought up the basis for it in Double Indemnity. Maj & Per not only change the details, but plays the story backwards, following the investigator deceived by the trick, rather than the perpetrator/s.)

As a reading experience, TMWWUIS is maybe the least compelling of the series (Steady on: I’ve only read the first five, there may be other low points to come, but so far they seem to be improving if anything.) Even Beck marvels at how disengaged he is from this case, after becoming obsessed with the Roseanna McGraw murder the year before. But the twist is great, and the short appearances by the supporting cast of cops are very enjoyable: Kollberg is shaping up very nicely, and there’s a tiny appearance by the bumbling duo of Kristiansen & Kvant, lazy and stupid patrol cops, who will go on to provide much of the comedy relief and satirical slant that leavens the dour crimey aspects.

DER MANN, DER SICH IN LUFT AUFLOSTE is a 1980 German coproduction based on the book, starring Derek Jacobi, surprisingly enough, as Beck. I got hold of a low-res rip of a VHS pan-and-scan of a scratchy and discoloured print, dubbed into Russian, with no subtitles. As with ROSEANNA, however, the plot follows the book closely enough for me to vaguely follow it. Unlike ROSEANNA, it wasn’t possible to appreciate the work of director Péter Bacsó or cinematographer Tamás Andor — it seemed zoom-happy and undistinguished, but must have looked nicer when new. Was it always sicklied o’er with a green cast? It’s pretty unpleasant, not at all like the US film of THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, which makes something eerily beautiful out of the tendency of fluorescent lights to photograph green.

Jacobi/Beck is called away from his summer holiday to go on this urgent investigation. We see him at his holiday home with his wife and his topless teenage daughter, but we don’t get much sense of Beck’s disenchantment with his marriage, which he allows to slowly disintegrate as the books go on. It might be implied in the dialogue, though. Did I mention I don’t speak Russian?

The film is a bit of a Europudding, which in fairness the novel invites. Jacobi is surrounded by real Swedes (at least one of whom went on to appear in the long-running Beck TV series and in Wallander) and Hungarians, making his presence a bit odd, but since everyone has had Russian voices transplanted into their throats, he doesn’t particularly stand out. I think he’s the wrong actor for the part, though. Bob Peck would have been good, if you want a British Beck. He even rhymes. But Bob Peck wasn’t particularly on the world’s radar in 1980. (I miss Bob Peck.)

Jacobi is great at nerves. Beck doesn’t really have nerves, he has sinuses and acid indigestion and a sort of grinding low-level glumness. He isn’t colourful, which Jacobi is by nature. Jacobi is an actor who wants to add to what’s on the page, whereas a good Beck actor should want to subtract. You need a man with the legendary minus factor — the kind of guy, as Ken Campbell put it, who is useful because you can bring him into a scene just as it’s threatening to get too interesting.

Jacobi knows what’s called for and gives an admirably low-key performance, but it’s still him giving it.

It being 1980, the fashions and settings are truly hideous, the rather admirable excesses of the 70s falling into a state of sartorial putrefaction. The settings don’t even seem particularly convincing. The white and gold trim of the Swedish Foreign Office strikes me as lurid. It rather smacks of roller disco.

Whenever I see a shot of a jet plane landing, I generally get a sinking feeling. It always feels like a dire way to convey the fact of travel, but cutting to the protagonist at passport control would be lame too, and airports are depressing. Herr Bacsó duly cuts to Jacobi getting his passport checked. The belt and braces approach.

When the film gets to Budapest and the cityscapes get slightly more interesting, the Russian dubbing abruptly gives out, and now the film has a UN-style simultaneous translation, a single Comrade talking over all the Hungarian dialogue in Russian. This, I admit, threw me for a moment. Then the dubbing returns, so it’s only the Hungarian bits this has been done to. So it’s going to keep alternating for most of the rest of the film. That should be fun.

A detective’s life is not actually full of jeopardy — he’s usually at the scene AFTER the unpleasantness has taken place. Sjöwall and Wahlöö have some neat strategies to get around this — by turning over stones in Budapest, Beck will eventually uncover some nastiness not directly related to his case, leading to some suitably unappealing sex and violence. But to keep the audience engaged in the meantime, a filmmaker is going to need (a) an unobtrusive but attractive visual style, and a good theme tune and (b) characterful supporting players. Here, I feel like only the music is good. It’s by Jacques Loussier (JEU DE MASSACRE, DARK OF THE SUN) and it sounds like the death spasms of a drunken dulcimer. Jangly.

The ever-present danger of the police procedural is the plod factor. This film plods. Only the music gives you any sense that anything’s going on. It’s amazing it succeeds so well.

Some of the book’s best stuff involves the Hungarian (secret?) policeman Major Szluka, played by Ferenc Bács here. The whiff of cold war paranoia seems heavily diluted here, perhaps because it’s a Hungarian coproduction with a Hungarian director (should perhaps have been a Swedish or German director so Budapest could be viewed through an outsider’s eyes, aligning us with Beck). In the book, Beck and Szluka come to an understanding as fellow professionals, but the edgy, uncertain start of the relationship is one of the key sources of tension in what’s otherwise quite a pedestrian investigation.

Derek Jacobi, action hero! The fight scene is as flat as everything else — though Sjöwall and Wahlöö are quite capable of describing things from a detached perspective, the (highly unusual) assault on Beck by members of the European underworld is properly hairy and suspenseful. Here, it’s just coverage. It needs to feel subjective, I think. One nice angle where a train passes over a bridge in the background… Then we just cut to a police car speeding to the rescue, flattening all suspense and taking us out of Beck’s experience. Must remember not to watch any more Bacsó films, unless anyone has any really passionate recommendations.

Bacsó has either greatly toned down the attempted seduction of Beck, or some Russian state TV censor has done it. A little bit of sex wouldn’t have hurt things, though the authors have a clinical, even forensic way of dealing with bodies, and Jacobi seems as unlikely an erotic hero as he does a punch-up artist. Anyhow, Beck declines the offer.

Excitingly, incompetent coppers Kristiansen and Kvant, who appear for the first time in this volume of the series, but only as a mention, get an actual walk-on here. But they’re not cast to resemble the books’ hulking idiots. Still, it’s nice to see the supporting cast — ROSEANNA, while fairly faithful to its source, left out most of Beck’s rather loveable colleagues. Though this scene doesn’t appear in the book, and though I can’t understand Russian, this seems like a very faithful reproduction of the kind of Kristiansen and Kvant scenes we get in The Fire Engine That Disappeared and Murder at the Savoy: called to account for their latest fuck-up, the two idiots lie pathetically, get caught out, throw one another under the bus, fall into humiliating recriminations. I’m prepared to give Bacsó some credit here, and note that he seems to have made more comedies than dramas.

They’ve changed the ending, though — instead of the depressing flatness of Beck’s solution — the crime turns out to be incredibly ordinary, with only the method of concealment lending it a certain panache — Bacsó concocts a crime passionelle and folie a deux, injecting a certain Gallic romance into the denouement. He also chooses this late point to introduce realistic gore, which isn’t inappropriate but is rather late in showing up.

And then the truly awful theme song comes in. “So confused / I donno what I’m gonna do / Ween or lose / I godda gedda new from you…” Good, I guess, to know that Hungary or Sweden has it’s own Shirley Bassey. Though it may be unfair to blame Bacsó for this musical intrusion, just as Neil Jordan doubtless isn’t responsible for the sudden invasion of MONA LISA by Phil Collins (“I really hate rock ‘n’ roll,” Jordan has said), the theme tune ends the film in the most gloriously inapposite way, and makes me glad I stayed the course. And I don’t scorn the fact that one of the minor actors slips comically on his way out of the penultimate scene, that’s the kind of muddy deflating comic realism the film needed more of.