Director Robert Aldrich doesn't often deliver a film that falls in the middle ground. Most of the time, Aldrich's name on the film either guarantees a good movie or an absolutely terrible one. The Choirboys is Aldrich at his very worst if you thought The Grissom Gang and Hustle were bad, you ain't seen nothing yet! It is a tasteless and repetitively episodic story, a complete mess of a film which merely reinforces the very prejudices that it is supposedly criticising. Nothing about the film works, not even slightly. Joseph Wambaugh, who penned the original novel upon which the movie is based, was so appalled at this travesty that he took legal action to have his name removed from the credits! That should tell you all you need to know.
A unit of L.A. cops spend their shifts patrolling the city in search of violence and sleaze. When they're on duty they are little better than thugs with a badge, dishing out justice with total disregard for moral standards and public safety. When they're off duty they are even worse, spending their nights getting drunk in a local park and acting like hooligans. Slowly but surely, each character's motivations are revealed. For example, Officer Sam Lyles (Don Stroud) is shown to be an ex-Vietnam vet whose wartime experiences have left him claustrophobic. In one harrowing scene, he flips out whilst drunk in a locked police van and kills a hustler, a shocking act that the higher echelons of the L.A. force are only too keen to cover up. A pair of cops (Randy Quaid, Tim McIntire) are assigned to talk a suicide jumper down from a high-rise building, but their approach is so unsubtle and aggressive that she ends up flinging herself to her death. One cop, the handsome all-American Baxter Slate (Perry King), is found out as a kinky sex addict and disowned by his colleagues, leading to such personal shame that he commits suicide. And so it goes . the cops continually foul up one job after another with their trigger-happy attitudes, their racist and sexist unprofessionalism, and their reckless disregard for true law and order.
There are those who hail The Choirboys as a blackly comic expose of the police profession. But in truth there is nothing funny about this horrible little film. Aldrich virtually hammers us over the head with extreme vulgarity and offensiveness to make his point, and the approach is so heavy-handed and unpleasant that the film becomes a challenge to sit through. The cast of terrific actors are particularly embarrassing in their thankless roles, none more so than Lou Gossett Jr, Charles Durning and Robert Webber (the latter especially degraded by his part as a callous superior officer with an immoral personal agenda). Christopher Knopf's screenplay offers no glimmer of salvation for the gallery of slimeball characters, so that as the film comes to an end after its interminable two hours the viewer is left with a nasty taste in the mouth and an empty feeling in the stomach. Avoid The Choirboys it's one of the worst of all-time!
A unit of L.A. cops spend their shifts patrolling the city in search of violence and sleaze. When they're on duty they are little better than thugs with a badge, dishing out justice with total disregard for moral standards and public safety. When they're off duty they are even worse, spending their nights getting drunk in a local park and acting like hooligans. Slowly but surely, each character's motivations are revealed. For example, Officer Sam Lyles (Don Stroud) is shown to be an ex-Vietnam vet whose wartime experiences have left him claustrophobic. In one harrowing scene, he flips out whilst drunk in a locked police van and kills a hustler, a shocking act that the higher echelons of the L.A. force are only too keen to cover up. A pair of cops (Randy Quaid, Tim McIntire) are assigned to talk a suicide jumper down from a high-rise building, but their approach is so unsubtle and aggressive that she ends up flinging herself to her death. One cop, the handsome all-American Baxter Slate (Perry King), is found out as a kinky sex addict and disowned by his colleagues, leading to such personal shame that he commits suicide. And so it goes . the cops continually foul up one job after another with their trigger-happy attitudes, their racist and sexist unprofessionalism, and their reckless disregard for true law and order.
There are those who hail The Choirboys as a blackly comic expose of the police profession. But in truth there is nothing funny about this horrible little film. Aldrich virtually hammers us over the head with extreme vulgarity and offensiveness to make his point, and the approach is so heavy-handed and unpleasant that the film becomes a challenge to sit through. The cast of terrific actors are particularly embarrassing in their thankless roles, none more so than Lou Gossett Jr, Charles Durning and Robert Webber (the latter especially degraded by his part as a callous superior officer with an immoral personal agenda). Christopher Knopf's screenplay offers no glimmer of salvation for the gallery of slimeball characters, so that as the film comes to an end after its interminable two hours the viewer is left with a nasty taste in the mouth and an empty feeling in the stomach. Avoid The Choirboys it's one of the worst of all-time!