Captivating movie !

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This is the story of real NYPD officers Dave Greenberg and Robert Hantz. New recruits Greenberg (Ron Leibman) and Hantz (David Selby) find the strict bureaucratic hierarchy of the force restricting. They are assigned traffic duty but jumped at doing unconventional work on their own time. They ignore the normal rules to take down criminals. They fight the system and stop corrupt cops.This has a good deal of the grimy street level action. It has the rough and tumble feel. While no name actors does help to creating realism, it would be nice to have bigger actors in the lead. At their core, these are solid character actors but they are no leading men. There may be real world controversy about their tactics but it doesn't matter to the movie. They do have opponents but they don't have a singular villain. That's more due to its real life nature. For all of its flaws, it has a dirty gutter quality that serves it very well.

This "buddy cop" film is all about Ron Leibman constantly flashing his buck toothed grin while David Selby looks on.That's it.The criminals, dope pushers,prostitutes - all are extremely unauthentic. Leibman is strangely attracted to a black prostitute who works out of a cockroach infested, paint chip peeling, stinky skid row room. She is perfectly coiffed and speaks like she went to Harvard. The drug pushers and pimps seem like reasonable people and will bend over backwards as "grin" and "bear it" get over on them. Totally unconvincing as they go against the grain and all the superior officers are portrayed as corrupt imbeciles. The claustrophobic New York City environs seem authentic enough; everything else is way off base.

Gordon Parks, the prolific black Life magazine photographer, made a true ticking-timebomb of a movie here - one that does not mess around! Based upon the true story of two NYC cops - later dubbed Batman and Robin - who singlehandedly employed radical tactics to clean up their precinct neighborhood of drugs, this is a cop-buddy movie before that term became a repetitive formula. Lightning paced, there is not one unimportant throwaway scene here.Man, early '70s NYC must have been a terrible place to be a police officer, from the looks of movies like this and "Serpico." These two cops start out as safety-division rookies, busting dealers in plainclothes in their spare time. But instead of receiving applause from the city police department, they receive nothing but resistance and antagonism from their peers. They have to singlehandedly navigate a minefield of police and legal corruption, boneheaded assignments meant to keep them from their work on the streets, ruthless drug kingpins, and a nasty ghetto neighborhood.Both David Selby and Ron Leibman are fantastic in the leads; part of the entertainment is watching Leibman's eyes darting around crazily in every scene in what is a flawless comic performance, and Selby's acting is low-key and wry. These two make all the comedy aspects of the story work - displaying a palpable frustration mixed with gutsy determination. Director Parks, who was already known for his coverage of controversial subjects in his photography, does not shy away from the grittiness of the story. Rather, the movie is uncompromising in portrayal of the toughness of the world of police and streets criminals that these two men inhabit. Adding to this realism is the fact that the real Hantz and Greenberg acted as technical advisors for the film, and even appear in surreal cameo roles as two fellow officers who ridicule the protagonists. It is a real tribute to the effectiveness of Parks' direction that he manages to perfectly balance this depressing mileu with bright comedy.

This film has slipped through the cracks of film history. It is by far much better than some other New York films of the same era such as: "The French Connection" or "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3". There is a gritty reality to this film which also manages to effectively use humor to further the plot line. It's engaging from start to finish and hasn't tarnished with age as is the case with the above two examples.Ron Liebman turns in a bravura performance as "Batman" and it's a shame his career didn't take off as a result of this project.Gordon Parks directs and, coming as it does after "Shaft", it at first appears to be a strange choice. Yet it is the flip side of that earlier effort and approached with just as much in your face machismo.Unfortunately this film has not been made available on either DVD or VHS in the United States. United Artists really has a gem on their hands and it's a shame they're not doing anything with it.