User Reviews

As long as there are criminals, films will be made about their exploits.. Though what we call "a gangster film" in the 1970's bears little resemblance to the classics of the 1930's, it is still a film about big-time criminals and organized crime… Only the baddies have been changed to assist identification…

"Badge 373" is a case in point… It is a simple story, based on the exploits of Eddie Egan, a real New York policeman who also, for good measure, plays a part in the film…

Ryan, a New York detective, is suspended for causing the death of a Puerto Rican dope runner… Taking a job as a bartender, he learns that his old partner on the force has been killed… Then, with the law against him because he is no longer a policeman, and harassed also by the villains, he sets out to avenge his friend's murder…

The twist is that these villains are no longer liquor and heroin smugglers, big-time gamblers or bank robbers… They are Puerto Ricans… Some of them are men who seek to foment a revolution on their island; others, led by a sinister figure in dark glasses called Sweet William, are the crooked element who will supply the necessary guns and ammunition… Ryan, played by Robert Duvall, wages his own solitary war against both parties…

It's a rough, tough and ruthless film, in which Duvall is as brutal as his adversaries; towards the end, he callously chops down a night watchman in order to gain entrance to the Brooklyn docks… In fact, it is very difficult to have sympathy for any of the characters in "Badge 373." Perhaps this is intentional… Perhaps cinema audiences of the future will not require to identify sympathetically with the characters they watch…

Certainly, this was true in "The French Connection." No one could deny that it is a tremendously exciting film ... but could anyone have a feeling of sympathetic identification with the central cop character? Gene Hackman stirred the blood, but it was difficult to be concerned about whether he lived or died

There is only a certain window of time (around the late 60s to the early 80s) that a police film of this type would have been made with the kind of gritty, deliberately ugly, murky, downbeat sort of verisimilitude that's on display here. Before that, studio craftsmanship and censors would have prevented it and after that the gaudy style of the 80s and then the refusal to accept "under the top" action and effects made it impossible. Here, Duvall plays a paunchy, tough, New York City police detective who is suspended following the questionable death of a suspect who fell from the top of a building during a drug raid. Soon after, his partner is killed and, despite not officially being on the force, Duvall sets out to determine who has murdered the man, who may or may not have been on the take. His investigation takes him into a world of revolutionary Puerto Ricans who are interested in rising up against the oppression of their "rulers," the United States. Meanwhile, his new lady love Bloom is having trouble accepting the dangerous, rough and tumble lifestyle of Duvall. With the occasional aid of his superior Egan (whose real life exploits as a cop provided the basis for this and other stories), Duvall winds his way through a minefield of murder, hate, gunrunning and racial unrest (with antihero Duvall himself portrayed as intolerant of Hispanics and pretty much any other minority.) Duvall, gut on display and frequently disheveled, is excellent in his portrayal of this common, insensitive, driven man. It's a warts and all performance in which he lets loose with any variety of foul language and slurs with little regard for his own vanity. Nonetheless, the audience is on his side because the enemy kills anyone who takes his part. Bloom hasn't got a large role and it isn't really a rewarding one, but she manages to make the most of it. Darrow makes a late film appearance as a criminal kingpin and, for some reason and to his detriment, wears dark glasses for 98% of his screen time, day or night. Egan is hardly a stunning actor, but does help in the way of authenticity as he sprang from this environment prior to working in films. Few other performers make a particular impact as the film is mostly concerned with Duvall and his quest through the mire of a dank NYC, though fans of "The Electric Company" may be interested in seeing Avalos as an arrestee trade epithets with Duvall. The city as presented here mirrors the dreary, dirty New York of so many movies from this era, something that prompted the city to reinvent itself as much as possible and take a turn towards a cleaner and more user-friendly town. Enough can't be said of the bleak, drab atmosphere (offset by the sunny and green surroundings of a cabin that Duvall retreats to after being assaulted.) There's a set piece, involving a wild chase in which Duvall commandeers a public bus in order to escape a gang of thugs, which is audacious and realistic at the same time. The same type of scene would today be shot with frantic editing, overwhelming speed and lots more destruction, though it's far more believable the old way. The script is riddled with (now) politically incorrect putdowns and plentiful foul language (kudos to TCM for recently airing the film unedited, albeit overnight!), which may offend some viewers, but American films were enjoying a new freedom in those and other areas and the envelope was forever being pushed. Hardly a perfect film, it is at least a thought-provoking one. There is a rally included in which real-life activist Luciano presents a diatribe against Puerto Rican oppression and raises some interesting questions (it's a shame, though, that so many people portraying Puerto Ricans in this movie keep pronouncing it the incorrect "Porto" Rico, which is jarring to those who know better.)

NYC detective Eddie Ryan(Robert Duvall)loses his badge after an incident involving the arrest of a "spic" goes awry(he falls from a building to the street below while trying to flee). He's an obvious racist whose disregard for certain ethnic groups gives him an unsavory reputation. Nonetheless, Eddie's a damn good cop and when his former partner, Gigi, is found brutally murdered(his throat is sliced open), he isn't about to let those responsible get away with it. He learns that Gigi wasn't no saint, in fact he was on the take, but Eddie can not allow his murderers to go free. Without a badge and gun, Eddie pursues the truth which involves a shipment of stolen machine guns, Puerto Rican revolutionaries(led by idealist Ruben Garcia, played with passion and conviction by Felipe Luciano), and a corrupt businessman, Sweet Williams(Henry Darrow). Eddie's big mistake, however, is dragging his beloved red-headed waitress girlfriend, Maureen(the alway superb Verna Bloom)into his vigilante quest for justice. With a strong performance from Eddie Egan as Lt. Scanlon, the one Eddie turns to when he discovers evidence that might lead to arrests. BADGE 373 may not be as memorable and as effective as other action thrillers loosely linked to THE FRENCH CONNECTION, but Duvall is always watchable. The only real chase scene is rather a funny one as Puerto Rican hoods pursue Eddie who has commandeered a bus! BADGE 373 is very much a plot-driven cop movie with political themes regarding the desperate acts to make a statement about the mistreatment of a race of people who feel justified to use violence to have their voices heard. Eddie must prevent the machine guns from leaving the New York harbor for Puerto Rico, plus Sweet William, who deals with anyone(even offering Eddie a job at one point), feels a sense of pride in this business transaction since he has feelings similar to Garcia regarding the plight of his people. BADGE 373 seems to be a rather obscure 70's detective street drama, even though it has a lead role by Duvall, maybe because it is more story-oriented instead of action-dependent.

**SPOILERS** Tough talking and hard hitting undercover NYPD cop Eddie Ryan, Robert Duvall, goes a bit too far by working over this innocent Puerto Rican party goer whom he causes to jump to his death off a six floor building. This all happens in the first five minutes in the film "Badge 373", Eddie Ryan's police badge number, during an outrageous bust of a Puerto Rican social club where the worst thing going on there is a little pot smoking by some of the party goers.

Suspended from the police department Eddie soon gets involved with this nationalist Puerto Rican group from the Bronx who are in the process of starting an armed revolt in their homeland. Supplied by a Harvard educated Puerto Rican hoodlum called Sweet William, Henry Darrow, the revolutionaries are expecting a shipment of over $3,000,000.00 in arms to achieve their aim.

It turns out almost by accident that Eddie's partner officer Gigi Caputo, Louis Cusentino, got involved with this hooker Rita Garcia, Marina Dorell, while he was on suspension that lead to Gigi's murder. Gigi through Rita somehow got in cahoots with both Sweet William and the Puerto Rican revolutionaries and became a willing accomplice in their arms running racket. Eddie making it a point to avenge his late partners murder gets his unsuspecting girlfriend Maureen,Verna Bloom, involved with his personal crusade that in the end gets her killed as well by the revolutionaries.

Eddie for his part goes all out, without a badge or the authority behind it, to stop Sweet William and his Puerto Rican revolutionaries headed by Rita's brother Ruban played by Fellipe Luciano, one of the founders of the Young Lords, from accomplishing their aims. During the course of the film Eddie gets worked over by the revolutionaries who after a wild car bus chase who, despite Eddie putting some dozen of them away, just put him in the hospital with a couple of broken bones.

The film comes to it's very predictable final with Eddie getting the lowdown to where the arms supply is to be loaded on to, a freighter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Catching the freighter's crew with it's pants down Eddie has them panic where Sweet William in a fit of insane rage guns down a totally befuddled Ruban Garcia who was killed just for having an emotional breakdown! Ruban just lost it's when the boat took off without the precious arms on board. Sweet Williams then wildly shoots up the fleeing freighters crew who had finally realized just what a bunch of lunatics, Sweet Williams & Co, that they were dealing with.

With the entire Brooklyn North police force showing up at the port all they could do is just watch Eddie climb up, on a 150 foot crane, after a hysterical and totally out of it Sweet William for the films final and talky showdown. We get the usual BS story from Sweet Williams in how he lived better then any of those, the perusing cops, ever dream of living. Sweet William also hints that he'll be back,dead or alive, to continue the revolution even if it ends up killing him! This brain numbing harangue goes on and on until Eddie, with Sweet William unarmed and no threat to anyone, finally blows him away just to stop Sweet William from talking Eddie the police and movie audience to death with his boring and endless dialog.

Sub-par "French Connection" follow up with the real hero of the "French Connection" Eddie Egan, as Eddie Ryan's friend and boss Lt. Scanlon, in the cast. Robert Duvall was a bit hard to take as suspended policeman Eddie Ryan taking on persons, by two's three's and even four's, twice as big as he is. Henry Darrow as ex-Puerto Rican hood and now full time freedom fighter Sweet William was a lot more effective in the little time that he was in the movie. The unrelenting violence as well as x-rated and racist dialog in the movie, by its screen writer the ultra-liberal newspaper columnist Pete Hamill, was so laughable and off the wall that it came across more comical, how could anyone take it seriously, then anything else.

In watching Badge 373 I can't believe that Pete Hamill normally a trenchant observer of New York's social and political scene could write such a mediocre film. If you're an action junkie you'll like it and if you're not politically correct you'll love it.

Hamill really let his own views get the better of him here. The dirty little secret about the Independista movement in Puerto Rico is how little support it does command. If you were to take this film as gospel you would believe that the entire South Bronx was a hotbed of revolutionary activity.

In a film that was inspired by real life New York detective Eddie Eagan, the inspiration also for Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, Robert Duvall during a police raid chased a junkie suspect up to a roof where he fell in trying to apprehend him. Of course there were accusations that Duvall helped him along. It wasn't true, but the accusations were enough to force a suspension and departmental inquiry. Truth also be told Duvall hasn't got the kindest feeling toward the Latino community and they know it.

While he's on suspension and working as a bartender, Duvall's partner Louis Cosentino is killed and Duvall though he's suspended and carries no badge or gun decides to investigate on his own. Quite frankly there was no reason not to let the NYPD handle the shooting of one of their own. But Duvall misses the action and wants blood.

He gains access to information through bluff and bluster without the badge, but he sure has reason to regret not carrying some kind of piece before the film is over. He's lucky to survive and remedy what he should have done in the first place. John Wayne in McQ was smart enough to hire out to a friend's private investigation firm so he would have cover to carry a weapon, why didn't Duvall think of that?

And then the idiot compounds it all by involving poor Verna Bloom, a waitress he's been keeping company with in his pursuit of arch criminal Henry Darrow. Duvall gets her killed quite unnecessarily. Bloom and Darrow give the best performances in Badge 373.

I can't believe that Eddie Eagan himself gave some kind of official imprimatur by appearing in this. I suppose he might have owed Pete Hamill a favor.

Duvall was coming off his Academy Award nominated performance in The Godfather and Badge 373 was quite a comedown. It had potential to be better, but I think only action junkies will really like this film.

This film is over 30 years old,its attitudes are disgracefully non - PC. That is a given.It's not like today when everybody loves one another and we all live in harmony in a Rainbow Nation and all creeds and races co - exist in an atmosphere of mutual respect.Well,don't they? Things aren't a lot different in 2006,it's just that Hollywood likes to make us think they are.I'm not saying for a minute that it's right that things have barely changed in 30 years,but no amount of wishing will make it so.Professional criminals still hide their activities behind the poor and disenfranchised of their own communities,ferment trouble for their own advantage and cops like Eddie Ryan still hate them bitterly for doing it.Laws meant to protect the weak and vulnerable still shelter the cruel and ruthless.If Eddie Ryan,like Harry Callaghan before him,feels like chucking in his badge then he cannot altogether be blamed.Not that he gets a chance as his bosses pre-empt him. Clearly certain members of the Hispanic community are not shown in an exceptionally positive light in "Badge 373" and Mr Ryan is a baad baaad man,homophobic,racist,sexist and probably several other ists as well.but he does not exist in a vacuum,he merely reflects the society he lives in.I would suggest that a significant proportion of the population held attitudes not a thousand miles away from his and considered them to be perfectly acceptable. So here we are in 2006 tsk tsking about a film that shows a society whose views we don't approve of.They were times of social unrest,when there appeared to be a real threat to the status quo.Criminals took advantage of the turmoil and it was difficult to tell the man with a grievance from the man with a gun. "Badge 373" occupies quite an important position in the "Cop Movie" pantheon.It has obvious similarities to "The French Connection" but lacks TFC's sheer energy and inventiveness.It broke new ground in showing the cop / hero as a distinctly unpleasant person - something "The Shield" has made a virtue of.Your cop could now be dirty(Dirty Harry wasn't actually "dirty" was he),unprepossessing,inarticulate and amoral.Mr Robert Duval created a pugnacious objectionable ignorant cop we aren't supposed to admire,but one that we can believe in.He has been corrupted by the world he moves in and works by its rules,not those of respectable society.He is a wreck of a man,like "The Bad Lieutenant". "Badge 373"'s influence reaches a long way,you can't make a cop movie today without at least sub-consciously referring to it. It may look a bit cheap and shoddy by today's mega-budget standards and much of it may seem familiar,but remember you are looking at it from the wrong end of time's telescope.

Not great by any means, but this sleeper, buoyed by a terrific performance by Robert Duvall, is very entertaining. Duvall is a suspended cop tracking down the killers of his partner. The quest leads him to a very sinister Puerto Rican mafioso (Henry Darrow) and more gunfire than you could imagine. The competent but mostly unimaginative direction is by Howard Koch (though he does stage a pretty exciting chase sequence involving a NYC transit bus). The supporting cast includes Verna Bloom as Duvall's long suffering girlfriend and Eddie Egan as his crusty yet benign superior. It's occasionally rousing, never really dull and fairly fast moving. The faux funk music, which is unbelievably intrusive is by J.J. Jackson.

Writer Pete Hamill was an ace New York beat reporter, newspaper editor and author; how he mangled this script is beyond me. In a critical scene, the arch villain, Sweet William, gives racist cop, Eddie Ryan (the story's hero), a lecture about the American colonization of Puerto Rico. I thought for sure, Hamill would have linked it to Ryan's Irish roots and compared it to how Ireland was in a similar struggle to free itself from Great Britain. But that would have been too deep for a film where Eddie Ryan's simplistic worldview and racist instincts are supposed to give the audience a rooting interest, and, in fact, are the very instincts and worldview that solve the crime.

To its credit, the film did have some suspense, but the action scenes were pure Starsky & Hutch. The cars chasing bus sequence was staged by Cary Loftin (Bullitt), and the stunts looked well executed; however, the scene was directed so unimaginatively and photographed too far from the action to make an impact. But my biggest laugh came when Henry Darrow and Felipe Luciano, in discussing their ethnic pride and libre Puerto Rico plot in detail, eschewed their native Spanish and instead, rambled for minutes in perfect English.

My views on films are enigmatic sometimes; this is one of those times..!

I tend to like 2 completely mutually exclusive types of film; really good enjoyable movies & really bad enjoyable movies. Some can be a bit of both and this is the category I present for "Badge 373". A group of my friends & I enjoy nothing more than film nights which include a wide variety of good and bad films; all ultimately just fodder for us to critique, but features like this one really help break up the monotony of current Hollywood sensibilities and political correctness.

I won't bother to re-iterate what has already been posted regarding "plot" etc, but I will add comments to justify why I think it deserves to be included at the very top of the "So bad it's good" selection.

To start Robert Duvall...He has two characters in his repertoire "Angry man" (Network,Badge373,etc) & "The thinker" (The Apostle,THX1138). Thankfully he plays his angry man who practically shouts all the time in this..and shout he does; obscenities and racist remarks a given (sexist,racist,homophobic{before most knew the meaning of the word} and practically ever other you can imagine). The dialogue is simply ridiculous and even Duvall must have had many quiet chuckles to himself "memorising" such unforgettable lines as "I hope you're circumcised as survival in prison is measured in terms of inches"! Yep you guessed it; this film was produced pre-certification...

Need I say more regarding the dialogue? It really has to be heard to be believed..! I would certainly agree with what other critics have said here..that it is a "Cop-film" born of the times it was made; with the copper portrayed as a hard-as-nails, uncompromising, morally challenged, thug: Who is as bad as the criminals he is chasing down. As has been said; It does not do the fine job that French Connection did, but then can you really compare the two directors (William Friedkin vs Howard Koch)?

Do yourself a favour and get hold of a copy if you can; it took me close to 7 years to track down a copy after seeing the trailer on a bootleg VHS of "Cheech & Chong's - Up in smoke". I will now list reasons for your time & effort to source this feature: 1.THE most ludicrous dialogue ever committed to film 2.Hopeless action/fight scenes that don't even look rehearsed(Comic genius) 3.The cop who's story is being filmed acts in a supporting role 4.No films like this will ever be made again(Un-PC) 5.Duvall has THE worst undercover costume ever(Wig & tashe) 6.The main villain is called "Sweet William" 7.It has possibly the most ridiculous chase scene ever with a bus-load of innocent civilians dragged into one mans vendetta & after all the effort to chase him, in order to kill him, they just thump him in the gut and leave him alone!...I could go on forever..."the learning to shoot with his left hand" scenes are pure gold, as is the "Until they kill me" line delivered with possibly the worst Brooklyn/Irish hybrid accent you ever heard.

All that's left for me to do is write up the tag line: "A gun in his sock, an iron bar in his belt & no badge!" 5 Star atrocious goodness. Watch this after going down the pub for a few beers & you will laugh yourself silly...I know we did!

Robert Duvall is one of my favorite people to watch on screen. He doesn't have a tremendously deep bag of tricks, but he's serious and earnest and I hope he keeps working for a long, long time. I say this partly because he's good and he has some more penance to do to make up for Badge 373, a perfect zero of a cops and robbers flick.

What was Duvall thinking when he made this clichéd glob of TVish trash? He was coming off the glory of The Godfather. Did he just sign anything he could get his hands on thinking that with his stellar performance as Tom Hagen, people would flock to see him in anything? There's absolutely nothing likable about this movie. I enjoyed the big, muscular cars of the early 70's, but that's not enough to keep one's attention span from snapping pretty darn quickly. The cinematography was lifeless, the color was garish, the pacing and plotting and canned music were all dull, and there wasn't a single person, plot device, or line of dialogue that was the slightest bit interesting.

I didn't care about Duvall's Eddie Ryan. The only character who even showed up on my radar was Verna Bloom, Ryan's girlfriend. She's a big, painted zoftig woman who looks utterly different in High Plains Drifter and Animal House. I liked her, but all she can do is squeal her Brooklyn accent, get hurt by Eddie, and die dramatically.

The rest of the movie is just so much clichéd nonsense with one scene stacked on top another, giving Duvall a chance to spurt racial epithets, threaten revenge for his murdered partner (Oh, you didn't see it coming that Ryan's partner gets killed early on? Duh!), get thumped in a ludicrous bus/Puerto Rican gangster chase scene, practice to shoot with his left hand, drive some really cool Dodges and Plymouths, and have the worst case of thought bubble flashbacks to remind him and us why he's just going to have to blast the head bad guy when he corners him on some sort of crane.

Howard Koch did some really good work in his career; here he directs an astonishingly bad mixture of R-rated cop movie and TV drama. The whole thing just looks so cheap and silly and you have to wonder just how many good movies Duvall will still need to make to cleanse his soul of the sin of Badge 373.

The early 1970s was a prime time for police-themed movies, not just in America, but in other countries as well. However, "Badge 373", while probably not the worst of its kind, is for the most part a very forgettable example of the genre. For starters, while Robert Duvall has certainly played tough and ruthless characters well in other movies (see "The Outfit" for an example, which came out the same year), here his performance is kind of half hearted. I think the reason for that may be that the screenplay is really lacking. Certainly it makes Duvall's character kind of one note, but the story aspect is just as bad. While the mystery is easy to follow, it is a really slow investigation. There's quite a bit of padding here, such as a completely unnecessary nighttime chase involving a bus. That action sequence, by the way, is not particularly exciting, nor is any of the other (and limited) action that is in the movie. I'm sure even the few people who saw this movie when it played in theaters found it a dull experience, so I can only imagine what modern day viewers weaned on the hyper kinetic cop thrillers of modern times would think of it. It's hard to believe it received a Blu-ray release a few years ago.