Tödliche Fragen

"Yeah, what?" - "Who are we getting to chew up the scenery as Mike Brennan?" - "You kiddin' me? You specialising in bustin' my b**ls? Send for Nick Nolte!" - "Nick (choke) Nolte? Are you talking to me? I've just been on the phone to the mayor and the D.A. is crawlin' up my ass. You're a dinosaur, Lumet. Your ideas don't fit today. I want your director's guild ID on this desk now. People have a nasty habit of gettin' DEAD around you!"

This is one of Lumet's three hour and always worthy examinations of police corruption and compromised idealism. This is similiar to his 'Prince of the city' although it's not let down by an actor like Treat Williams who was not up to the job. Q&A suffers from some over-ripe, stagey and over played performances that are allowed to run on longer than the scene's necessity. It also has such ugliness and perversion that you wonder whether the film really needed to be made as we have been down this road before. Hutton has the best scene whereby his heart is broken by a loyal old mentor who always warned him that it was inevitable.

The main problem I have with this film is the susposed racism of the Reilly character. I'm not sure about the point of the subplot and why would a man who has a coloured girlfriend be shocked that her father is black? Surely it was on the cards.

I liked this film, a lot. It had some uneven moments in it, mostly Sidney Lumet's daughter's attempt at acting. However, Nolte and Assante are GREAT! This is gritty and realistic movie making. One sympathizes with the somewhat idealistic assistant district attorney (Timothy Hutton) as he tries to do the right thing, with so many thing in his way. The language of the movie is raw, with many memorable quotes. However, after viewing the movie you will find yourself remembering the roles of Nolte (Frank Brennan) and Armand Assante (Bobby Texador). Nolte is a cross between John Wayne and Ted Bundy. He is the first cop through the door and the first to pull out his weapon. He gets the job done, but he also breaks the law whenever he sees fit. Hutton, like many, admire Nolte, but the more they find out about the guy, the more they see that he might be the real threat to society. Bobby Tex is the very charismatic drug dealer that honestly wants to get out of the business alive. It is rare that the character that you root for the most is a drug dealer, but this movie maybe the one exception. He is better than the murdering cop. Hutton plays the straight guy in between these two forces of nature. Hutton has personal demons and real demons standing in way of doing the right thing. Good, solid story that you will enjoy. No Hollywood ending here. This movie is RAW!

Based on a novel by New York judge Edwin Torres', 'Q & A' is A Great Film, that ranks amongst Sidney Lumet's Best Films. The Late Legendary Filmmaker handles this gritty, violent & disturbing film, with top-notch creativity. Also, the performances, are fabulous!

'Q & A' Synopsis: A young district attorney seeking to prove a case against a corrupt police detective, encounters a former lover and her new protector, a crime boss who refuse to help him.

'Q & A' is gritty, violent, disturbing & yet captivating. The Drama unfolds with flourish & holds your attention efficiently. Sidney Lumet's Direction is Top-Notch. His handling of this difficult film, truly deserves distinction marks. It's amongst his best works as a storyteller!

Performance-Wise: Nick Nolte stands out. The Legendary Actor delivers a fantastic performance as the filthy mouthed, corrupt cop. Timothy Hutton is first-rate. Armand Assante is terrific. He too plays a bad-guy and he's menacing as well. Patrick O'Neal is superb. Jenny Lumet leaves a mark.

On the whole, 'Q & A' is a must see film.

Guess the film from the following description of its characters. A young man investigating misdeeds in the police force, motivated by the memory of his father (a legendary policeman) but also by the pain of having lost the affections of a woman he loves to another player in the drama. A renegade cop, rampaging violently through the city, but revered on the force for standing up to the scum on the streets. And the renegade's boss, who protects him, partly because he himself is on old-school Irish policeman; but partly because he appreciates having his own private bag-man, especially in his dealings with organised crime. Throw in some prostitutes for a little background colour, and it sounds like a perfect description of 'L.A. Confidential'. But it also describes this tough and underrated movie made by Sidney Lumet some years before Curtis Hanson's film.

Whereas Hanson's film was stylised, and glamorised violence (provided the cause was just), Lumet has gone for a more realist approach, and his bad cop (played mesmerisingly by Nick Nolte) is completely rotten, in fact resembling Harvey Kietel's 'Bad Liutennant' in Abel Fererra's movie. The film is dated by its ghastly electronic soundtrack, and more interestingly by its portrait of New York at a time when the city was at its lowest ebb. But it's a very well assembled thriller, exploring issues of race, mixed loyalties and the meaning of good policing without flinching from a grim picture of life on the margins of law abiding society. Lumet has had a long career, but this is one of his better films, and ultimately more truthful than Hanson's stylish charade. Each are good, in their own way: why is only one so appreciated?

The last and least of Sidney Lumet's three stories of (more or less) innocents trying to uncover police corruption and blow the whistle on the guilty, and the only fictional story. There's nothing wrong with the acting of the principals. Nolte is brutish and tall in an over-the-top performance. (He always looks larger on screen than in person.) His New York accent, however, is clearly superimposed on an unregional Omaha set of phonemes. Jenny Lumet looks splendid but has the same problem with her accent, and her scenes are too long as part of a mixed-up romantic subplot that doesn't hold together well. Timothy Hutton has less of a notable problem with his speech, and he is really quite good as the innocent-looking but by no means weak investigating attorney. He even looks pretty Irish. O'Neal is the smoothly villainous and murderous head of the investigation, and a very good villain he is, as usual. Guzman and Dutton provide excellent supporting roles. And Armand Assante seems built for the part of the iron-eating PR drug dealer who has made the decision, a thoroughly rational one, to get out and live in the Caribbean sunshine. His body movements provide a language unto themselves, his smallest gestures are magnetic. They draw so much attention to themselves that they are almost the self-parody that they were in his hilarious spoof of detective movies. He's an exceptional actor.

The movie's plot, however, leaves a good deal to be desired. Its fictional skeleton shows through. You've never seen so much ethnicity on the screen before, and it's misplaced. It's easy enough to believe that racial insults are offhandedly traded among in-group members but difficult to believe that every conversational exchange, no matter how casual or intense, must include one. And at the very time when some of these barriers are beginning to weaken, judging from the rising rates of intermarriage. Serpico's story was relatively simple. Prince of the City far more complex and realistically tragic. This one is simply hard to follow as well as hard to believe. Boats turn into fireballs in unlikely ways, as they do in quickie action movies. Characters fly back and forth from San Juan to New York and some are killed and it's difficult to keep track of what's what and who's who. It isn't that Lumet has lost his touch.

When a character is shot in the neck, man does he bleed out. But the director is working with less compelling material here and in any case this kind of narrative is running out of steam. All of that notwithstanding, this is still a notch above most of the junk polluting the multiplex screens today.