FORT APACHE, THE BRONX Directed by Daniel Petrie Screenplay by Heywood Gould
It is time—past time—to say something nice about Paul Newman. Of course, he has been well loved for his blue eyes and his cheeky style by a couple of generations of women. But aside from his roles in The Hustler, various pairings with Robert Redford and one or two other films, he has not been taken seriously by critics and other sobersides. That is understandable, since it is possible that no major U.S. star has endured more indifferent movies (beginning with his 1954 debut in The Silver Chalice) than he has.
So Fort Apache, The Bronx must be gratefully received, because it provides Newman with his first opportunity in years for a full-scale star turn. "Fort Apache" is the headquarters of New York City's 41st precinct, which encompasses the toughest black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the South Bronx. Newman plays a patrolman who is stuck in grade largely because of an excess of street-bred compassion. When the hard-nosed new precinct commander, Edward Asner, decides to shape up the 41st by launching wholesale arrests to nab suspects in the murder of two policemen, the residents run riot. During one fracas, Newman sees a colleague hurl an innocent youth to his death. The rest of the film deals with Newman's agonizing over whether to report this police crime.
While wrestling with his moral crisis, Newman gets to act all kinds of things: tough, rebellious, weary, angry, loving, even, for a couple of fine moments, absolutely crazy. That is when he has to disarm a psycho who is threatening a crowd with a knife. Newman turns his hat around, pulls faces and starts mumbling wildly to himself, so startling the lunatic that he docilely hands over his weapon.
The film is not quite up to its star. It occupies a country somewhere between Barney Miller and the works of Joseph Wambaugh: a land of masculine camaraderie in which the bureaucrats don't understand how things are in the real world, and an unspoken tenderness is exchanged between police and perpetrators because they both inhabit the same mean streets. But the cut of life examined in the film and its attitudes are not highly original, and are too close for comfort to the manner of made-for-TV movies.
Yet there are some good, quick comic bits among the gang in the station house, an interesting doomed romance between Newman and a Puerto Rican nurse (Rachel Ticotin), and some all right, brutal but brief action. Beyond that, the movie takes a liberal attitude toward its milieu, falling neither into despair nor into the tough-minded rightist posturing that marks most police epics, which tend to be cut along the Dirty Harry bias.
But mainly it is Newman, now 56, who gives Fort Apache its modest distinction. From Somebody Up There Likes Me onward, there has been a main line to his best performances, a certain inarticulate striving toward decency on the part of men who may not be the smartest guys in the world, but who have discovered their better natures through the play of instincts. This film marks a return to that line.
—By Richard Schickel