If there is a Big 3 of classic car chase movies, it would have to be Bullitt, The French Connection and The Seven-Ups. In 1968, Bullitt ignited the car chase craze that would come to dominate 1970s cop movies and especially TV series. In 1971, The French Connection turned it into art with its ur-cinematic thrill ride beneath and between the elevated trains of New York City. And the vastly underrated The Seven-Ups, made in 1973, essentially elevated the car chase to the level of deus ex machina perfection. One could argue that from that point onwards that pinnacle has been repeatedly attempted but only succeeded in becoming ever more over the top, digitally enhanced and clichéd (although the fantastic against-traffic-in-the-Paris-tunnels sequence in John Frankenheimer’s Ronin does come pretty close to that level of old-fashioned awesome again).
The connection between these three all-time crime classics is their producer, Philip D’Antoni, the somewhat unknown force behind what came to be an action movie staple. For The Seven-Ups D’Antoni also took the director’s helm for the first time and used what he learned on his previous two smash hits to engineer the biggest, baddest car chase of them all. Check it out and see if you don’t agree.
But The Seven-Ups is more than that white-knuckler through Manhattan and across the Hudson to Jersey (and also, if you’re watching closely and out of continuity, up the Taconic into Westchester). It’s also a gritty police procedural with an outstanding cast led by the late, great Roy Scheider as lead cop Buddy Manucci, working again for D’Antoni after his excellent turn as Popeye Doyle’s partner in Connection. As time goes by, one sees how fantastic an actor Scheider was: funny, wry, intense, the bantamweight champion of no nonsense naturalistic tough guy performances. Is it any wonder that he’s in so many key 1970s films? While the fellow cops on his special semi-autonomous squad, tasked to pursue felony crimes with sentences of seven years and up, are not quite as memorable, they form a decent ensemble. In the end, it’s really the shadier characters who counterbalance Scheider’s intense, driven cop.
Tony Lo Bianco also returns to the D’Antoni fold from his breakout performance in French Connection, this time playing Buddy’s boyhood friend Vito Lucia, a funeral home director who provides Manucci with inside dope on the mob. And when the Seven-Up squad stumbles on a conspiracy to kidnap mob kingpins for ransom and lay the blame on them, they run up against two ultra-creepy, ultra-violent thugs doing the dirty work. Shotgun wielding stunt driver Bill Hickman also coordinated the crazy car chase sequence and if you know Bullitt well you’ll also recognize Hickman as the assassin behind the wheel of the black Dodge Charger being pursued by McQueen’s green Mustang through the hilly streets of San Fran. His partner in crime is played by the unforgettable Richard Lynch, who legendarily burned himself tripping on acid, giving his scarred face a look like the Joker without makeup. Lynch would go on to be one of the great film and TV baddies and his performance in Seven-Ups is a delightfully nasty a piece of work.
Throughout the film’s twists and turns, which are numerous, the ultra-gritty New York of the early 1970s is another essential character. Shot on location in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Riverdale in relentlessly unglamorous, wintry conditions, the starkness of the dirty, bustling metropolis grounds the film in the hard world of tough cops who struggle to understand the forces arrayed against them and do a dangerous job with determination and ruthlessness. The good guys may be easy to tell from the bad guys but the line is still a fine one. After one of his team is shot along with a kidnapped mobster in an undercover op gone wrong, Scheider’s Manucci isn’t shy about pinching off the hospitalized mobster’s air supply to extract vital intelligence. He later invades another gangster’s home to gather more intel by means of a rather dental use of his police special.
There’s just a pleasing no-BS quality about the characters, the locations, the action and the film overall. The cars aren’t sexy like in Bullitt but heavy, ill-handling Pontiacs bouncing all over the place. The clothes are retro-70s cool in retrospect but wardrobe clearly wasn’t the main priority. And the acting, led by Scheider, is straight to the point with none of the manic arrogance that made Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle such a cinematic scene-stealer. It all ads up to a bang up police thriller, the kind they definitely don’t make any more. With nearly everything today so high concept and so clearly pitched at the broadest possible audience demographic it’s damn refreshing to see a movie made for adults that captures a time and a place like few other films have. Bleak, kind of ugly and tough as nails, more than 40 years later The Seven-Ups still delivers a burst of adrenaline, a nice complicated plot and a sour but unflinching look into the underside of the criminal underworld. With Roy Scheider delivering one of his best performances, which is saying something, and D’Antoni orchestrating the automotive mayhem and the ice cold action, this late noir classic holds up to repeated viewings all the way through and not for just the seminal car chase sequence.
The Seven-Ups is currently a free stream on Netflix but it goes in and out of availability so I suggest you catch it while you can. It’d be a crime to miss it.
