Bande de flics !

This is a movie searching for an audience. Best bet would be the "National Lampoon" crowd. Essentially "The Choirboys" has no plot, and really is nothing more than a series of mostly tasteless skits strung together with the very thin thread of policemen pulling numerous pranks. Nevertheless, some of the nonsense is very funny. You also have a terrific cast pulling off this stuff. To say that the film is different than the usual buddy cop movies would be a real understatement. Think "Animal House" without the fraternity, but with cops behaving badly. Definitely not an endorsement for political correctness, but a throwback to a time when one didn't have to weigh every word for fear of offending someone. - MERK

I wish they still made movies like this. By that I mean one that has some sympathy for the adult male of the species.

This group of cops is varied in their attitudes , some bigoted, some liberal, some in the middle; just like civilians and real cops. The first part of the movie shows a lot of vice work and dated but funny comic routines, at a time when a single mother and a baby were not always inserted into every story. These cops go about arresting gays and prostitutes before laws and attitudes had changed.

The film was made in 1977, and for those too young to have lived it I am sure there are many cringe inducing scenes. One important and anachronistic episode shows an S&M hooker being caught physically abusing one of the police officer friends. The cops friend handles the hooker roughly , mad that she hurt his friend, and warns her to get lost.

If this film were made today, the hooker would be a single mother with a heart of gold, and the cop would be sneered at for being in this position to begin with. It was refreshing to see a movie with some sympathy for an adult male character, before the Hollywood mantra became "women can do whatever they want, men don't matter." Later in the film one of the cops with PTSD gets himself in trouble when he over reacts, and his friends try to cover for him. I have seen some younger viewers write that they were offended by the blue code of silence. I wonder if they would have been as offended if the perpetrator were a single mother and the victim was a man. I doubt it.

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.

"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. (**)

...that truly excellent novels shouldn't be made into movies. Actually, Joseph Wambaugh (the author of _The Choirboys_ had several bad experiences with Hollywood directors mangling his work (The New Centurion, The Blue Knight), to the extent that he blasted the film biz in his scathing _Glitter Dome_.

In defense of director Robert Aldrich, Wambaugh's humor must be nearly impossible to convey through acting, but by the same token, it doesn't even appear that a good effort was made in this film, which seems to attempt to capitalize on a few lurid episodes of the novel that, when woven into the overall story, do much to characterize rarely-seen sides of police life, but when portrayed sheerly for shock value, kick this film squarely into "B" movie territory. It's a shame, since some decent acting performances (such as Louis Gossett Jr's) are evident, but they founder in this effort.

Overall: instead of renting the movie, buy the paperback. Infinitely more entertaining.