Pretty Good

best movie i've ever seen.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I remember watching Freebie and the Bean as a kid and I even remember the short lived television series and I found the film to be enjoyable. I can recall a climactic scene when one of the cops takes on a kung fu kicking cross-dresser. However in later years I came across some extremely negative reviews and decided to re-watch this film after a few decades.This is a freewheeling film that is a sort of a cross between of MASH and Dirty Harry. James Caan and Alan Arkin play two off beat San Francisco cops trying to take down local crime boss Red Meyer who his also being targeted by a hit-man. In the opening scenes we see them emptying his trash into their car boot to look for evidence.As the story goes on the plot meanders, at one point we have prolonged scenes where Arkin accuses his wife of cheating on him at other times the story is confusing. The film is an early example of the buddy cop film and also has high levels of gun toting violence, police brutality and zany car chases which must have inspired The Blues Brothers.I still enjoy some surreal elements of the film such as the scenes Caan and Arkin have with Alex Rocco in his office and the anarchic style is enjoyable to an extent but too often it descends into silliness at the expense of plot development.However one thing noticeable was the amount of shootings in this film. These two guys make Dirty Harry look like a pacifist. They just brandish their weapons with no regard to the term reasonable force and at times so many ordinary members of the public are put into danger when they are about.The other issue is the casual racism, homophobia and sexism in this film. I understand the film is of its time so certain derogatory terms are expected but did actress Valerie Harper really had to be listed as 'Beans Wife' in the title credits? Harper plays a hispanic character who is made to look rather brown faced. Then again Arkin is as convincing as a Mexican origin cop as Charlton Heston was in Touch of evil. The blame for all this has to be laid at director Richard Rush to be so behind the curve.Still the film is fun, Arkin and Caan make a good team and have some good banter. It is actually Arkin who is unpredictable even though he is more cautious compared to the gung ho Caan.However the similar themed Busting that came out at the same time, which starred Elliot Gould and Robert Blake now looks like to be the better film.

An almost perfect movie. Richard Rush, who, up until this point, was known primarily as the director of a bunch of biker films that WEREN'T EASY RIDER, directed this inspired lunacy that teams James Caan and Alan Arkin as cops who'll do whatever it takes to nail dapper mobster Jack Kruschen. Caan and Arkin have chemistry to burn and the script by Robert Kaufman is very biting. Rush's direction is stellar as the film is nearly breathtakingly fast paced. The chase scenes in this film are great. It's funny, violent, and sometimes creepy (check out Christopher Morley as a very unpleasant transvestite). With Alex Rocco, Mike Kellin, Loretta Swit, and Valerie Harper, who has a small role as Arkin's hot-blooded wife Consuelo.

It's the antidote for The Laughing Policeman, that grim "police procedural" from 1973; it's Freebie and the Bean, a crude, politically incorrect, and very funny buddy movie for the sophomore in all of us.Alan Arkin and James Caan play a couple of San Francisco PD Inspectors on the hunt for . . . oh, who cares? The procedural part of the movie doesn't matter. The fun is in Arkin's neurotic and fastidious Bean (you have to forgive the racial slur right from the start) and Caan decked out in a leisure suit and looking for the next "five-finger discount" (hence, the name "Freebie").It's clearly not a movie for your mom--violent and foul-mouthed, with Arkin accusing his wife of infidelity by demanding to see if she's douched recently, and Caan performing noisy cunnilingus on his girlfriend. It all seems so daring for the 17 year old in 1975, but now, I suspect, I would just cringe and blush at the crudity and concentrate on the hostile chemistry between Arkin and Caan.After so many serious cop-dramas from the early '70s, FATB came across as something of a breath of different air. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a good movie or a nice one, but there is an entertainment value and a vitality that makes it worth watching.And don't miss the cop car through the side of the apartment building!

Bean and Freebie are two San Fransisco wiseguy cops eager to put the collar on a big-time mob racketeer, when they get a tipoff there is an out-of-state contract on his head. During a crazy Superbowl weekend, they have to make sure he stays alive long enough for them to make an airtight case against him.I like seventies cop movies. If you compare this with a quality modern-day police show like CSI, it's not so much that these cops don't go by the book, it's more that they tear up the book, set fire to it and dance around like Injuns. Arkin and Caan are like that in this film; they're constantly shouting at and hitting felons, members of the public and each other, they crash cars, endanger lives, destroy as much property as possible, murder troublesome assassins, break into people's houses, steal things and are generally extreme sociopaths at best. These are the role models I look up to. What really makes this film is the terrific on-screen chemistry between the two leads - Caan is the ultimate Italian American, running-mouth, at's-a-matter-for-you, head-busting, serial womanising jackass whose nickname comes from his penchant for bribes, and Arkin is a delirious, three-scenes-ahead-in-the-script, mad-eyed, wound up too tight, cod-Mexican wannabe officer with problems at home. I love Arkin's unique style; in his prime, nobody played these post-counter-culture nutcases with nearly as much wit and energy as him, not even Jack Nicholson. The sequence where he grills his put-upon wife (a memorable performance by Harper) on her alleged affairs is a real showstopper of stylised, intense, passionate acting, not to be missed. Extremely well directed by the mysterious Rush, a man who made some of the most interesting and least-seen pictures of the pre-Movie Brat generation (his next film, The Stunt Man, took six years to get made), with great location photography by Laszlo Kovacs. Check out the two excellent big crowd chase sequences, with sensational stuntwork by Chuck Bail, who also has a funny cameo as a car salesman who ends up on the receiving end of our heroes' humanitarian police procedures. I do have one gripe with this movie however, which is Unfair Credit Syndrome; why does Morley, who plays the pivotal role of the cross-dressing killer, not make the start credits, when Swit, who's in exactly four shots, gets billed third ? An exciting, barbed, anarchic, eye-popping, laugh-out-loud comedy police thriller.