Cop (1988)

Joanie Pratt (Randi Brooks): Have you had breakfast yet?
Lloyd Hopkins (James Woods): I haven't been to bed yet.
Joanie: If you come over you can have a little of both.
Lloyd: I thought you didn't like to talk to cops.
Joanie: Who said anything about talking?
Lloyd: What's your address?

Policeworkprivatelife, where's the line? When not having sex with his wife, which he often doesn't, Lloyd has sex with women on the periphery of his detective work, as a time saving measure. He's a work obsessed cop, the type who develops an unprofessional monomania and bends the law when necessary. He has a very high arrest record, so people respect him, including higher-up Dutch Peltz (Charles Durning). Lloyd is just so damn good (or is he, if you know what I mean).

I'd like to know the roots of this type of film and character, but I'm not sure how to investigate its history. Touch of Evil, Orson Welles 1958, is a very important and early example in the film world, and Jim Thompson's 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me is a remarkable development in shaded cop figures (though not the same; I'd have dinner with Lloyd, but not Lou). I'm not sure if those are the earliest or ground-laying examples because I'm not an aficionado of crime films or novels. There are people who are experts in this field, and I'd like to meet one and ask them. I will look for the loner in the bar, wearing a fedora, and ask that person. If that person happens to be James Ellroy, he'll ask me if I know that Cop is an adaptation of his 1984 novel Blood on the Moon, and I'll say yes. The film is adapted and written by James B. Harris, who was a producer for Stanley Kubrick on The Killing (and Paths of Glory and Lolita). The Killing has a corrupt cop but not a questionably corrupt cop.

Although I believe cops like this exist in real life, and Michael Mann told me they take purer forms, I don't believe they exist like depicted in Cop, which is very sensationalistic and even kind of goofy. For example, the killer is a poet who leaves notes like "Next class - phys ed/Then you'll be dead." Movies like this can be a lot of fun, but also some of the goofiness is poorly done and perhaps unintentional. More than anything else, more than the clichés, the cardboard characters, the cheap dramatics, the easy laughs, more than anything it bothers me that a major dramatic moment takes place in a phone booth.

The above depicts the revelation of the true identity of the killer. It's in a fucking phone booth, over the phone. The scene may have been taken directly from the book, but it shouldn't have been, because even if it works in the book there's no way this is a good movie scene. If anticlimax is its intention it comes off as disingenuous given the loud dramatic notes that ring throughout the movie. How a movie with lines like "I don't give a shit if you two were fucking each other in a bathtub of cocaine" can come to make such a bad decision is beyond me.