Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

SPOILER ALERT! There appears to be irony in the title since THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN offers no laughs. The efficient director Stuart Rosenberg makes an efficient crime thriller (about a psychopath on the loose in San Francisco and the cops who track him) but unfortunately, it's little more than that. It's cold, sometimes slow and completely devoid of laughs, despite the presence of Walter Matthau, who managed to add at least some (black) comedy to even the bleakest films (FAIL SAFE, CHARLIE VARRICK). Nevertheless, Matthau is still fine and Bruce Dern is excellent as his unexpected partner. There's also a really fine performance buried in the film by Cathy Lee Crosby (as the distraught wife of Matthau's first partner). Lou Gossett Jr. is a less than patient fellow cop and Anthony Zerbe is Matthau's crusty yet benign superior. A massacre on board a public bus is a real highlight. It's quite frightening.

I just got back from San Francisco and decided to watch this again. To my surprise, I liked it much more the second time.Make no mistake, this is not a great flick, but it is an interesting one. There are a ton of false leads in the beginning of the movie and we don't even get to the meat of the plot - the killer, for instance - until way into the running time. If you like logical and linear plots, this one will disappoint.But there a couple of very good points. First, the ensemble cast is great. The range of characters keeps things interesting. Lou Gossett, Jr. gets a very meaty part before disappearing. Joanna Cassidy is also good in a brief role.The highlight of the film is the relationship between Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern. Dern gets to play an early non-psycho but he is a total jerk. Yet by the end of the film you wind up liking him. Matthau is worse - he never smiles and is totally cut off from his fellow officers and his family. He can't even confront his teenage son. Watching these two make an uneasy truce and develop a relationship is what the movie really is about.The bad news is that, except for the opening sequence, the action scenes are flat - not terrible, just flat. There are a lot of loose ends floating through the plot and characters disappear at random.Perhaps most interesting is the parallel between this film's style and the Italian Giallo genre going on a the same time. The black gloved killer, the grim detective, even the plot holes would be right at place in an Argento movie from 1973, not a Hollywood film.Worth two looks.

Moderately interesting cop drama that relies heavily on San Francisco street scene of the 1970's. Hari-Krishna's, Hell's Angels, hookers, gays and angry Blacks are all part of the unconventional mix, as Matthau and partner Dern track down killer who's mowed down a bus full of passengers for no apparent reason. I gather the unusual title amounts to an ironic comment on the dour Matthau who can't spit out his gum long enough to crack a smile. Good thing for the Frisco locations and succession of characters because the plot may require the proverbial rocket science to unravel. But that's okay since you never know what's coming next, including a SWAT shootout that turns out to be irrelevant to the case. And since it's the hilly city by the bay, there's the usual bumpy car chase. Dern turns in an offbeat performance that relies on a toothy grin and sarcastic manner, along with a sweet-smiling Paul Koslo who takes his usual coy turn, this time as a jail-house song bird. In what has since become a cop show cliché, Matthau's character is shown as estranged from family and friends because of job pressures. Thus his furious gum-chewing is likely more than an affectation, suggesting something of a safety valve for those pressures.Outside of the locations and characters and echoes of The French Connection, I don't know if there's much else to recommend here, unless you're interested in how a city mops up after a mass blood-letting.

This is a somewhat interesting film about two policemen, Walter Mathau and Bruce Dern, trying to solve a mass murder where one of the victims was Mathau's partner.The story starts out pretty good. A cop tails a man onto a bus in San Francisco one night. Along the route, another man boards the bus and moves all the way to the back. A few minutes later, he stands up and starts spraying the bus with a machine gun. He kills everyone and then walks away after the bus crashes into some bushes. Mathau arrives at the scene and discovers his partner was the cop who was tailing somebody.The evidence takes the police on a scenic journey through San Francisco's underbelly - drugs, prostitution, drag queens, sex parlors, the whole works. It was probably risqué at the time, but it's a bit tame by contemporary standards.There's a problem with the editing of this film. Some scenes are included for shock value, while scenes that could have moved the story along are omitted. At times it's hard to follow what's going on with the film jumping around a lot.The dialog is pretty dated too - Lou Gossett's especially. But Walter Mathau's performance as a rumpled detective working the case while his home life falls apart makes this film worthwhile. Bruce Dern's character is so irritable that it's hard to like him, but I suppose that's what the director wanted. Anthony Zerbe is the best of a mediocre supporting cast.The film is good entertainment and worth watching for Mathau and the San Francisco scenery alone. And you'll get a few laughs at all the long hair and period attire.