After a long series of flops, director Robert Aldrich revised his career box office-wise with a pair of Burt Reynolds hits The Longest Yard and this. The Longest Yard is remembered with great fondness and was remade but no one talks about Hustle much anymore.
And for a lot of watching this that didn't surprise me - far too much of it felt 70s cop show, and gimmicky (eg cop Burt Reynolds dating hooker Catherine Deneuve), and needlessly sleezy, tramping over area that has since been much covered by NYPD Blue and the cable shows.
Yet I got into this as it went on - and it went on for a while (like a lot of Aldrich flicks it's probably too long). It kept surprising me - it's focused around the mysterious death of a young girl who washed up on the beach who turns out to have been involved in sordid sexual shenanigans amongst the rich and famous (did Lethal Weapon rip this off?). Burt Reynolds is the cop on the case.... but instead of investigating he goes "it's an accident" and it's the girls' father (Ben Johnson) who does the investigating. And he starts poking around into the seedy underworld of LA and the movie turns into Hardcore and then spins off into this weird family drama with Johnson and wife Eileen Brennan (who's excellent), and Johnson having an unnatural attraction to his dead daughter and going all vigilante.
Then it turns out actually Reynolds was right all along - it was an accident, not a murder. But Johnson's knocked over a hornets nest of trouble, including dodgy corrupt Eddie Albert who is banging Deneuve. There's also a bunch of bit part crazies who parade through the film to cackle maniacally on drugs and commit crime - including shooting Reynolds dead at the end (by Robert Englund, no less!).
While this may have seemed at the time a safe, commercial filmmaking choice from Aldrich it's actually a bit mad and insane by today's Sid Field screenplay standards - plots and characters come and go, there's a nihilist feel to the city, Reynolds has this longing for the 1930s. There's also an unpleasant strand of misogyny - all the women are pretty much hookers or sluts, Reynolds smacks Denueve around but it's meant to be from love.
Reynolds is excellent - melancholic and battered - I'd forgotten what a strong dramatic actor he could be even at this stage of his career. Deneuve is more lively than she can be in her French films but is still a bit flat. Excellent gallery of Aldrich stock company support players including Paul Winfield and Ernest Borgnine.
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