![]() ![]() Racial epithets are screamed, gay stereotypes and homophobic baiting are positively revelled in, and the attitude to women is repellent. ![]() The Choirboys has a reputation as an offensive movie, and even in 2020, decades after I saw fragments of it unwisely broadcast as a Scottish television Wednesday night movie, it’s still a shocker. The appearance of Charles Haid as Nick Yanov, who announces the daily news to the assembled cops, reveals this as a fore-runner of Hill Street Blues, in which Haid played a near-identical role as Renko there’s an iconic strength in his scenes that would later play more successfully on tv. After a near accident involving the discharge of a gun, they’re warned not to bring firearms, but the killing on an unarmed man threatens to disrupt their routines. ![]() The setting is LA, and the cops are put-upon they blow off steam with intense drinking sessions in a public park. The author, who specialised in front-line tales of police departments, hated the result and removed his name, but there’s still vestiges here of what make the book so compelling in its catalogue of urban atrocities. Surely ripe for a remake, or at least a more accurate version of Joseph Wambaugh’s book, Robert Aldrich’s film was a pretty strange choice for a Christmas movie from Universal in 1977 it flopped at the box-office, perhaps understandably given the scabrous content. ![]()
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