Batman and Robin

By J.C.

THE SUPER COPS

Directed by GORDON PARKS Screenplay by LORENZO SEMPLE JR.

The Super Cops is a loud and clumsy film about two cops--yes, again -- who buck the system. Dave Greenberg (Ron Leibman) and Bob Hantz (David Selby) were a team of real New York City policemen, but the movie turns them into just another couple of characters trotted out for a lineup that runs from Serpico through Busting.

Greenberg and Hantz arrest dope dealers by using a variety of enterprising but dubious techniques: they break into apartments from the roof, descend from tall, tall buildings on long, long ropes.

Shenanigans like these earned them the nicknames Batman and Robin, and may once have made fair copy. (The film was extracted from L.H. Whittemore's book about the pair's exploits in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in the late '60s.) On screen, though, their heroics look lame. We expect our cops to be either a good deal meaner (Hackman in The French Connection, Scheider in The Seven-Ups) or at least stronger fantasy projections of unwavering strength and authority, like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Greenberg and Hantz here are neither real enough nor friends. romantic enough.

J.C.

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