Die Chorknaben

It seems like we're supposed to hate this one but I loved it, I'm sorry but there you go.

Maybe it was because it came out at the time when punk had just happened. To me the book & the movie were such a break from the usual stereotypical pro-authority nonsense we were being regularly served up at the time (and sadly we seem to have gotten back to these days).

Naturally the book was, by far, the better experience (a genuine 'laugh out loud' read to be highly recommended) but nevertheless I found both hilarious and a long overdue reality check on the forelock tugging blind belief in benevolent and always virtuous 'authority' (something which applies well outsides of the confines of any Police unit too).

I think it's a real pity we seem to have lost that very healthy irreverence & scepticism and are today saddled with way too much haughty hard-faced tedium and an expectation that we blindly trust authority figures.

There's a saying that the best comedy comes from true life and there certainly is true life on display here but the problem is Altman. Just as the TV show MASH was superior to the movie, in this case the black comedy is there-and there are a few laughs but not nearly enough-because Altman doesn't know how to handle this material. What does capture is the dark humor that the cops use to survive end it captures some of the nature of what cops experience. The problem is I think it takes to too far. There's an incredible cast here though with some familiar faces who weren't notice the time but became quite famous later. For that alone it's interesting especially coming three years before Hill Street Blues a much better realistic portrayal of cops. I don't think this movie deserves all the ire of the reviews but I do think there are better adaptations Wambaugh.

I was a cop with about 10 years on the street when I read Wambaugh's book, and figured the movie would be terrible. I thought Altman and his crew caught both the flavor of the book and of life on the mean streets of LA dead on.

Maybe you had to have been there. I was a great Hill Street fan (still am), but it was sanitized for TV, and much less like the real thing because of needing to maintain a plot line. Life ain't like that, and neither was The Choir Boys.

Cop humor is hard to fathom for outsiders. Cops are, in fact, a minority group anthropologically, meeting all the same criteria. Life out there doesn't go from A to B to C. It's chaotic. So was the movie, a little. Good job of catching the feeling.

"The Choirboys" is essentially made of two different movies: the first half (and more) is a plotless, "Police Academy" -type (even if it was made several years earlier) comedy, and a fairly consistently UNfunny one, too. It's not that the gags aim mostly at a juvenile level (which they do); it's that they are simply not funny 90% of the time. In its second hour, the movie takes a sharp left turn toward drama, and surprisingly this part works better. But beware! There is a truly immoral finale that will annoy you if you take it seriously. (**)

I like to think that The Choirboys is Joseph Wambaugh's way of showing the police at play. His novel The New Centurions showed police at work. In both cases they work hard they play hard as well and sometimes combine both.

For those who grew up as I did with Dragnet as the way we thought of police The Choirboys couldn't be father from Jack Webb's straight laced view of cops than Mercury is to Pluto. This film follows a group of cops who can't share a bond with any other than themselves.

It's a fraternity no doubt and these guys carry on like frat boys. Oddly enough if you remember Goodfellas Lorraine Bracco observed that the Henry Hills never hung out with anyone other than other criminals and their significant others.

So much so that the group of them all hang out with Tim McIntire who none of them can stand. He's a pretty loathsome character, a racist redneck and a bully, still he's one of the guys.

Two of them come to a bad end for differing reasons, all of them are in a jackpot where Chief Robert Webber is looking to nail The Choirboys to the wall. The oldest of them saves them, but you'll have to see how.

The oldest of them is Charles Durning who at 53 is still on street patrol. He's basically a non-conforming guy who more than likely screwed up big time when he was young and now just doesn't give a crap. He'd like to just coast out for his 20 years and he's months away.

The Choirboys is something I'm surprised a police officer as Joseph Wambaugh was would write. I look at like Jim Bouton's book Ball Four and that less than reverent book of the New York Yankees in his stay there. This is kind of the stuff you definitely leave in the clubhouse.

This review is dedicated to my nephew Colin James Kogan who is a member of the NYPD going now on his third year. I told him that whatever it takes get off the street as soon as you can and never be Charles Durning when he reaches middle age.