While Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon is frequently credited for crystallising the rules and tropes of the buddy cop movie for 80s audiences, there were plenty of other examples of the genre before Shane Black and his knowing screenplay came along. Actually, there are times while watching 1974’s Freebie And The Bean when you’d swear that, rather than being directed by Richard Rush, Black himself had tumbled back through time and decided to helm a whacked-out, wise-cracking, action bonanza in the anarchic style of a 70s Bad Boys II.
In fact, many elements of Freebie And The Bean feel like a magnificent hallucination and predictably not a lot of it has aged particularly well; however, even for this gloriously un-PC romp through the world of calamitous cops, I was stunned to discover this hard-nosed farce managed to deliver a winning comedy double act in the form of James Caan and Alan Arkin – not exactly the names you expect for a crazed action comedy.
Detective Sergeant Tim “Freebie” Walker and Detective Sergeant Dan “Bean” Delgado, are a pair of erratically maverick cops that frequently break all the rules whenever they aren’t constantly bickering with one another. While Freebie is a volatile, short-cut taking ladies man who wants the easy life of the Vice Squad, the paranoid, details obsessed Bean is hoping for a promotion to help out with his fiery family life. However, if either of them are ever going to get what they want, they’re going to have to try a close a case against a well-connected racketeer that’s been dragging on for ages. However, after resorting to stealing the garbage of the alleged criminal known as Red Meyers, both Freebie and the Bean finally seem to have the hard facts they’ve been looking for on a carelessly discarded sheet of paper.
However, their excitement is short lived when they discover that a hitman has been dispatched to ensure that Meyers keeps his mouth shut, and after the pair of detectives find that their superiors have nixed arresting him early for his own protection, they realise that they’re going to have to shadow their target to keep him alive until Monday. But while this would be a tall task at the best of times, this is the weekend that San Francisco is hosting the Superbowl, so chaos is bound to follow.
But between frenetic car chases, crazed shootings and a lot of arguments between the titular couple, Bean also starts to believe that his wife is having an affair with the landscaper that lives a few doors down from them. With do much going on, can these two highly strung, and gleefully amoral cops manage to keep their quarry alive in order to arrest their quarry, or will the endless string of arguments, drama and car crashes cause the duo of Freebie and the Bean to fail miserably?
So I suppose that I shouldn’t have to tell you that this 70s buddy cop film is misogynistic, racist and features enough rampant misanthropy to fuel a dozen throwback, Shane Black screenplays, but just in case someone gets fooled by the perky comedy theme tune into thinking that a film entitled Freebie And The Bean is going to play nice. But be warned that despite its slapstick demeanor, this film plays surprisingly rough. I guess the best way to describe it, is that’s what you’d get if Harold Lloyd remade The French Connection while trying to retain the fact that the main characters are truly horrible, volatile people. Much like Mike Lowery and Marcus Burnett from the Bad Boys films, these guys aren’t so much decorated police officers, but rather legalised thugs who have no issue suddenly taking a car chase through a heavily populated area or shrugging off the fact that they winged a civilian during an ill-advised shoot-out. On top of this, they steal, cheat, cause massive amounts of property damage, engage in off-colour comments about women and engage in non-stop, racist banter that sees Freebie constantly tease Bean for being Mexican.
However, the fact that Freebie and the Bean are both card carrying pieces of shit is actually where most of the genuinely funny humour comes from, and it certainly helps that the two are played by the rather bizarre pairing of Caan and Arkin. Bringing a manic, unpredictable, improvisational energy to their frequent bouts of outraged screaming, they deliver an amusing look at the 70s alpha male gone madcap. It’s Bullit as a buffoon; a dimwitted couple of Dirty Harrys; it’s Popeye Doyle if he was actually more like Popeye the Sailor – you may not like the attitude these guys come at you with, but it certainly makes a prime stew for some smash-mouth comedy. In fact, mouths aren’t the only things that get smashed thanks to the truly unhinged fight scenes and flabbergasting car chases that Richard Rush stages. A maniacal brawl in a kitchen sees the type of overly energetic choreography you’d see in an episode of the 60s Batman show, as our “heroes” hurl themselves at their suspects like they’re getting paid by the punch, and the vehicular mayhem is even more overblown as the pair manage to plow their car through a third floor apartment to the disinterest of the elderly couple who live in it.
If you really have a problem with 70s cops behaving badly, then Freebie And The Bean just ain’t gonna be your bag, but despite the fact that most of Caan and Arkin’s dialogue are screamed insults (I have no idea how Arkin in particular didn’t blow the sound levels every time Bean gets extra pissed), there’s a strange, straight guy romance thing going on here that manages to give all those screwball elements another dimension. Despite all the racist jibes and childish wrestling matches, you can tell that in their own fucked up way, the two genuinely care about one another. Freebie really does want to help his partner discover if his wife is cheating and it all leads to a surprisingly affecting misdirect when the closing twenty minutes suddenly take a serious down-beat turn. Ok, so the climax also features James Caan getting his ass beat by a homosexual dressed as woman who’s pretty handy with martial arts, but for a moment there, the film carries that same type world weariness you’d expect from the end of Dirty Harry when he realises that the law isn’t enough.
Still, if you can accept those incredibly rough edges that reliably come with 70s cops movies, Freebie And The Bean proves to be an incredibly funny proto-buddy cop movie that delights in offering up a couple of cops who frequently forget to protect and serve. In fact, the more ill-behaved and awkward they become, the better it lands, even when Freebie makes light of accidently shooting an innocent woman in the hip, or Bean throwing his own kids out of the house in order to accuse his wife of playing around.
Raucous and utterly deranged, Freebie And The Bean gives the gritty cop movie a bizarre, knockabout makeover that works primary thanks to the raw chemistry between Arkin and Caan and the fact that stunt drivers in 1974 obviously couldn’t give a fuck if they lived or died. Large swathes of it are certainly offensive, but that doesn’t stop this early take of the buddy cop flick from busting a gut as it bends the law.
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