MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

nomoons11 Every time I find a Matthau movie I've never seen I eagerly wait to find it on DVD or some way I can watch it. He usually carries the whole movie on his back but in this case, he was dead flat to say the least.This one was slow as marbles on a flat board. I mean the whole setup was painfully slow and missing parts that could have made this more interesting. They didn't delve too much into the dead cop's background, but just enough for you to wanna know more. What Cathy Lee Crosby's role in this is a mystery to me. She meant nuthin to it except she may have been a lesbian, or not. Could have been the dead cop's kinky girlfriend, or not.Bruce Dern turns this one into something watchable. He's usually the quirky smarta#* in most of his roles and he's no different in this one but his lines are far and away the best in this missed opportunity. It amazes me he never got bigger roles than he did. He's such a fun actor to watch. He was a gem in this one.

billposer This film is based on one of an excellent series of detective stories set in the authors' native Sweden. Much of the interest of the books is their setting. Although they have the usual virtues of good detective stories, they are also a commentary on modern life in Sweden. I was therefore eager to see this film when it came out.Unfortunately, for inexplicable reasons the setting has been changed to San Francisco. This completely spoils it. Sometimes such a change is interesting or has no real effect, but in this case it destroys much of the interest of the film. We are left with a rather dull American police story.

disdressed12 this is one movie i can't say i liked or disliked.it was all story,not much anything else,which isn't necessarily bad.it was mostly as slow as molasses flowing uphill in January,yet just interesting enough to keep watching.it was also pretty glum,in my opinion.of course the typical stereotypes of the era are here in full force.not a horrible movie by any standard,but not great by any standard either.it's one of those movies where i could take it or leave it.after it ended,i was pretty much indifferent o the whole thing.it wouldn't matter to me whether i saw it again or not.but maybe i'm being too hard on it.maybe it is what it was supposed to be,a simple crime drama.anyway,for me,The laughing Policeman is a 5/10

bkoganbing One terrible night in San Francisco in the mid seventies, a man who had a terrible secret to hide and a high position from which to tumble from took a machine gun and massacred everyone on a city bus. Of course this gets all the SFPD Homicide Squad working on it.Partnered together for convenience are Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern. Matthau's partner is one of the dead passengers and he's single minded in his pursuit. Dern and he don't really get along. I've a feeling they wouldn't have under normal circumstances, but they do manage to work together.The Laughing Policeman is as one reviewer said is a nice view of San Francisco in the early seventies. All that seemed to be missing was Candlestick Park. I was in San Francisco in 2000 and I recognized a lot of it myself.Matthau and Dern fill their roles well. Matthau is somewhat against type, a lot of the laconic humor that characterized him on screen is missing here. Dern is not the most admirable character in the world. He's a harbinger of what we later got on NYPD Blue with Andy Sipowicz. One would hope he might have grown in character over the years as Sipowicz did.Anthony Zerbe heads the Homicide Squad and Lou Gossett, Jr. and Val Avery are also detectives working on this. They fit the police roles well.Funny how life does imitate art. In just a few years Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone would be assassinated, there would be riots with verdict of that trial, and Jim Jones who had his operation in San Francisco before moving to Guiana and mass suicide. The real happenings for San Francisco made this bus shooting seem like nothing.