Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

morrison-dylan-fan Recently picking up the 1958 British Film Noir Chase a Crooked Shadow,I began looking for another Noir from '58 that I could watch it in a double bill with. Knowing Ed McBain for his classic novels and work with Hitchcock,I was intrigued to find a McBain Film Noir adaptation,which led to me hating cops!The plot:As the streets of New York get dried out during a long Summer,a stranger kills two police officers. Taking the murders personally, the 87th Precinct put two of their best cops on the case: Steve Carelli and Mike Maguire. Whilst the police officers struggle to pick up a lead, news reporter Hank Miller begins to hear gangs full of cop haters.View on the film:Set during long hot Summer nights, director William Berke & cinematographer J. Burgi Contner give their cop killer an evil under the sun atmosphere,with scorching hot white lights and dirty clothes signalling the burning hot Film Noir desire the cops have to grab the killer. While keep things strictly by the room, Berke finds side-streets for stylish quirks,from a deaf girlfriend to a gang of hip juvenile delinquency.Taking notes from McBain's first 87th Precinct novel,the screenplay by Henry Kane aims for the three cop killings to fire up the passions of their fellow officers. Killing the officers before they have been given any real depth, Kane's attempt to build a feeling of Film Noir urgency runs dry,due to it lacking any sign of the novel characterization/depth that was on offer to the police and the gangs. Oddly being named Steve Carelli instead of Carella, Robert Loggia gives a very good performance as the tough-talking Carelli,who wants to stop the hate on cops.

whpratt1 Enjoyed this 1958 film dealing with a serial cop killer on the loose in New York City and a horrible heat wave which has most of actors always complaining about the heat. Robert Loggia (Detective Steve Carelli) is a very dedicated policeman and he works with Teddy Franklin, (Ellen Parker) who is an attractive gal. Alice Maguire, (Shirley Ballard) plays the role as a very sexy wife to Detective Mike Maguire, (Gerald O'Loughlin) but Alice is getting tired of being married to a cop and she wants her husband to quit because of all the cops being killed by a mad man throughout the City of New York. There are some sexy scenes which were considered very naughty to see a girl naked with a towel wrapped around her and a few other scenes with girls showing plenty of their legs. This is a great mystery and very good acting by Robert Loggia. Enjoy.

dougdoepke The early 50's were the era of Jack Webb, police procedure, and the docu-drama, where law enforcement was portrayed in the best possible professional light. After all, there was an emerging Cold War to fight. On the other hand, this late 50's movie, adapted from an Ed McBain novel, is edging away from that ideal toward a more realistic portrayal of policing in a city precinct. Dragnet, it ain't. Too bad that the result comes across as something of a trashy, exploitation flick because there's a good story with several interesting passages plus a neat twist ending buried beneath the tacky titillation. Someone's knocking off cops for no apparent reason, a psycho the detectives figure. So the heat at the precinct is really on with no real suspects. Nonetheless, much of what follows is pretty muddled and hard to follow. It's not an A-grade adaptation or narrative, to say the least.The way the cops are portrayed is interesting for the time. They knock people around, drink a lot (maybe on duty), and seem sex-starved much of the rest of the time. In short, the detectives appear not that different from most young American males. Given today's relaxed standards, colorful episodes like rousting a street gang or ogling a nude woman in a towel may seem tame, but in 1958, such scenes were quite daring. The trouble is that too much of the drama and suspense is sacrificed to a lot of cheesecake scenes, which may have sold tickets but do little to advance the story. Too bad, because the acting from a New York cast comes across as unforced and natural, plus the main characters don't look like typical Hollywood types. Even the girls, though sexy, aren't tinsel town perfect. With a better structured, less exploitative script, the film could have risen above the drive-in level. As the results stand, however, there's not much beyond an historical interest in the evolution of the cop film. Besides, guys can get more titillation by just switching over to the Playboy channel.

bmacv Even longtime fans of Ed McBain's evergreen series of police procedurals set in the 87th Precinct may be startled to learn that they started out back in the1950s (and they're still coming). Cop Hater was the first of them to reach the big screen, in a bare-bones production directed by genre-movie veteran William A. Berke.A heat wave has settled over The City (it's New York, but McBain never identifies it as such), bringing tempers to the flashpoint. An alarm clock wakes a cop for his midnight shift; when he descends into the soupy night, a shot fells him. The entire precinct mobilizes immediately - one of their own has been killed.We encounter the familiar names of the Precinct's detectives (or some of them), most notably Steve Carella (here, Carelli), played by a young Robert Loggia; he's the bright cop engaged - not yet married - to the beautiful deaf-mute Teddy (Ellen Parker). His partner Maguire (Gerald O'Loughlin) has already tied the knot, but when he tries to keep cool in his undershorts to the whirr of a feeble fan, his wife (Shirley Ballard) brushes him off (`You're wet - oozing wet,' she sniffs).When a second cop is gunned down in cold blood, attention turns to members of one of the gangs of young punks that were a fixture of post-war New York, but it's a dead end. Next, it's Maguire's turn to meet his very own dead end. Loggia, made indiscreet by too many `splashes' of Scotch to slake his thirst, tells his theories to a callow newspaper reporter and inadvertently puts Teddy in jeopardy....Cop Hater gets the feel of the grimy streets and cramped apartments of a sweltering urban jungle just right (it also preserves the film debut of Jerry Orbach and very early appearances by Vincent Gardenia and Loggia). The puzzle of the murders may seem a little mechanical (it's a riff on Agatha Christie's The Alphabet Murders), and personalities don't emerge as vividly as we might like. But then this was early in the series, and McBain had only begun to sketch out the quirks of his recurring characters. McBain, of course, is the pseudonym of Evan Hunter (born Salvatore Lombino), who wrote the screenplays for Blackboard Jungle and The Birds. In Cop Hater, his anonymous City takes pride of place.