The Hip Pocket #11: FREEBIE AND THE BEAN

How do you invent a genre and deconstruct it at the same time?

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Freebie and the Bean
scr. Robert Kaufman
story by Floyd Mutrux
dir. Richard Rush

We might be done with buddy cop movies.

That’s not a bad thing. I think the way we’ve centered police in our popular culture for the last 50 years or so is an incredibly dangerous thing, and we’re paying the price for it in the real world. We are unable to discuss the idea of police work as a job, instead framing it often in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys,” which is insane. During this time, the “cop movie” has been as malleable and broad a genre as “Western” or “horror,” capable of supporting comedy, drama, action, or any other modifier. Like the Western or the horror film, I think they’ve been omnipresent because they seem incredibly easy to produce, leading to plenty of terrible ones, crassly imagined and cheaply made.

By the time Richard Rush made Freebie and the Bean, it was clear that he was a genuinely thoughtful artist who loved to push the boundaries of popular genre. He had an arthouse heart and a drive-in mind, a combination only made more potent by his early career experience as a propaganda filmmaker, literally working for the US military during the era of the Korean war. He understood what he was doing when he made this movie about two cops who basically lay waste to San Francisco while trying to bring down a mid-level gangster, no matter what they have to do or who they have to brutalize in the process. It’s a comedy, but it is wildly ugly at times. Rush did not care about making his characters likable, and his contempt for the tactics of the cops is what makes Freebie and the Bean so fascinating, especially through a modern filter.

When you watch something like Lethal Weapon, there doesn’t seem to be any self-examination about the violence or the ethics of what you’re watching. That’s not true here. Detective Sergeant “Freebie” Walker (James Caan) and Detective Sergeant Bean Delgado (Alan Arkin) are partners and seem to outright detest one another. Freebie seems to be fairly blatant about his racism, which seems to be just one of the many -isms in his repertoire, and Bean’s not much better. He’s convinced his wife is having an affair and he’s acting like a giant creep as a result. This is an era where Dirty Harry is part of the cultural conversation, where there’s this push towards gritty realism and a new harder edge to the way police are portrayed. The script that Rush signed on to direct was more of a drama, and he worked with Robert Kaufman to reshape the material, giving it a comic edge that disguises how ugly it is.

As the film opens, Freebie and Bean are digging through the trash of a mobster they’ve been chasing for over a year. The only reason this degrading tactic pays off is because someone literally plants evidence in there for them to find, underlining one of the film’s key ideas: cops are rotten and there are no rules whatsoever. They don’t even lean on the idea that results are the only thing that matters since it’s not like Freebie and Bean accomplish anything of note though any of their efforts. By the end of the film, they realize that they’ve been chasing their tails, and they’ve changed absolutely nothing for anyone.

image courtesy of Warner Home Video

Valerie Harper was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Arkin’s wife, and while she’s very good here, few things say more about how far we’ve come than Alan Arkin and Valerie Harper playing Hispanic in this film. It’s not a casual thing, either. Freebie’s non-stop ethnic slurs are part of the film’s comedy rhythms and it is blistering. All of the performances in the film are great, even though Rush found himself at odds with his leads while shooting. They were baffled by the lurches in tone in the film, and that doesn’t surprise me at all. From scene to scene, the film refuses to settle into a single consistent voice. Rush keeps you off-balance the entire time. There are points where this has the same kind of crazy comic energy as The Blues Brothers or Smokey and the Bandit, with crazy car chases and destruction, including one of the best gags to end a car chase ever, but the film also features James Caan in a violent fight to the death with a transsexual in a public restroom, so it’s hard to pin down just how funny all of this is actually supposed to be.

It’s crazy that this was the film that kicked off the buddy cop trend, because Rush doesn’t really want you to like these guys. He knows how movies work, and he’s intentionally pushing back against that here. You will most likely be offended by Freebie and the Bean. That is not a bug; it’s a feature. Rush managed to deconstruct the entire notion of a buddy cop film as he was accidentally inventing the genre, and everyone who uncritically ripped him off missed the point. These two guys are locked into eternal conflict like Tom and Jerry or Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and the fact that their partners doesn’t make them any less adversarial. They inflict this constant emotional violence on one another while committing constant literal violence against everyone else.

They are horrible human beings, and the film’s dark comedy comes from just how horrible they are. This is a mockery of cops as the thin blue line. If these are the guys who are supposed to serve and protect, we are all deeply screwed.

April 28, 2021