For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

An Exercise In Nonsense

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A fine cop thriller loosely based on the Kitty Genovese case of the early 1960s (Genovese was murdered in NYC, her screams ignored by apathetic neighbors). Raul Julia is a cop hunting a serial rapist/murderer who's terrorizing a Brooklyn neighborhood. His first killing is witnessed and ignored by a slew of nervous Nellie's who simply do not want to get involved. With a great screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, director Richard Heffron elicits some terrific acting from not only Julia but the all-star supporting cast including Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Tina Louise, Tony Dow and Nancy Walker. They all play against type, with Louise a real standout. Art Carney, Sally Kirkland and John P. Ryan are in it too. The superb music score is by Gil Melle.

This is one of those typical movie-of-the-week efforts that TV networks put out in the 1970s, chockful of stars from various TV shows doing cameos. In this one you'll see Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Kate Jackson, Tina Louise, Art Carney, etc (even Tony Dow as a suspect!). Most of the people are witnesses to a brutal murder but don't want to get involved in helping the police. Raul Julia is the cop heading the investigation.The movie never made up its mind as to what story it wanted to tell. Does it want to be a straight-up murder investigation or does it want to get into why the bystanders wouldn't help the victim? The movie spends about 40 min on the latter story, which is the more interesting one, and finally just reverted to a usual cop chase to resolve the story.To make the show a little more controversial, Tina Louise plays the lesbian lover of the victim and she becomes a suspect in the case. But all of the "stars" in this show are given one, maybe two scenes at the most. Tina does very well in her cameo, though. I got the sense that this movie was being put out as a pilot of sorts for a possible Raul Julia cop series. He's the typical single father/cop and they even set up a very brief love interest when he meets Kate Jackson who immediately disappears from the story.Interesting how many awards the actors in this show had gotten in their careers. Carney, Leachman and then-kid Helen Hunt all got Oscars. Asner had a shelf of Emmys and Tina Louise once got a Golden Globe. It must've been a pretty easy paycheck to get them into this movie although Carney acquits himself very well in a serious role in huge contrast to the audience's memory of him as the idiotic Ed Norton on "The Honeymooners".

Loosely based upon the appalling Kitty Genovese murder in 1964, wherein young Kitty was slain in front of her Queens apartment building as 38 onlookers refused involvement, this made for television movie, originally a back door pilot for ABC that failed to achieve high enough ratings deemed necessary for further production, shifts the action to Brooklyn and lowers the crime witness count to 15, a more manageable number for a film in which primary emphasis is placed upon casting of "guest stars" in lieu of attempting a measured approach into socio-cultural connotations of the tragedy. Originally titled HOMICIDE, and a year later THE WOMAN WHO CRIED MURDER for its second television showing, this work was heavily publicized but its meretricious courting of an audience ratings advantage brought negative reaction from most viewers, especially those still mindful of the original dreadful crime, and it quickly disappeared from distribution lists, effectively excising an initial top billing appearance for Raul Julia, as a New York City homicide detective. From among the celebrity packed cast emerge noteworthy cameo performances, including those of Art Carney, Tina Louise, Cloris Leachman, and Lucie Arnaz who chose a plot climactic role rather than one offered her that involved more screen time, and there is a polished turn from 12 year old Helen Hunt, as well as a poor one from Diahann Carroll, with solid acting from Julia and, as his detective partner, John P. Ryan. Breezily generic dialogue is composed for the detectives in a script that is full of bromides, as is the jazz-flavoured score. The film is capably directed, but the shade of Kitty Genovese trivializes this effort, baring its failure to explore a crucial event in modern U.S. urban history.

This film was one of the typical seventies crisis-of-the-week type dramas. However, I have always suspected it was at least loosely based on the infamous murder of Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, which occurred in March 1964 in Queens, New York. Ms. Genovese was murdered in an almost identical fashion to the victim in this film -- attacked in the courtyard of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, screaming in vain for help while "thirty-eight witnesses" ignored her. Since this movie was filmed a scant decade or so after the actual case, perhaps there hadn't been sufficient time for reflection on the proper way to tell the story for the ages; perhaps Ms. Genovese's family refused to allow any association; or perhaps the filmmakers were just looking for a quick buck.What they did to "spice up" the story was to add into the plotline the fact that the murder victim, "Jenny," was a lesbian; that her former girlfriend (played by Tina Louise -- imagine "the movie star" chasing Mary Ann all over Gilligan's island with perverse intentions! say it ain't so! LOL) has a history of violent and threatening behavior; and that among the neighbors who heard Jenny's dying screams are an immigrant couple from an unspecified Eastern European country who fear deportation; a sleazy housewife played by Cloris Leachman who is carrying on an affair behind her husband's back; and a married couple with Nancy Walker playing the wife, apparently having gotten lost on the way to the Bounty commercial shoot. Also look for a very young Helen Hunt, playing hotshot detective Raul Julia's daughter.It was the seventies; what can I say?