A camera is mounted on the roof of a police car as it races through city streets, siren wailing.

In the opening titles to the The Naked Gun from 1988, the car careens over sidewalks and runs through a car wash before coming to a stop outside a doughnut shop. The emergency call in The Naked Gun was really a doughnut run--the first of many inspired bits in that movie sending up old TV serials like M Squad.

The cop-gets-a-call trope in police dramas was ready for parody. It had started off countless 50s procedurals. Each week M Squad opened with the hard-edged cop Frank Ballinger racing through dark city streets to a crime in progress. Screeching tires, blasting siren and a wailing Count Basie theme introduced the main title--M Squad Starring Lee Marvin. Then badass Ballinger would get out of the car and fire off a couple of rounds, probably taking out some lowlife thief off camera.

Serious badassery, then the business at hand--the crime of the week. Each episode followed the formula--callout, investigation, conclusion. After some basic police work and some tough-guy posturing, Ballinger would get the job done. Along the way he broke a few rules--throwing punches, drinking on duty, threatening people to cooperate--but by the end of the show, he would have the bad guy locked up. Next case. (Lee Marvin did this over 100 times from 1957 to 1960 on his way to becoming a major movie star.)

This little-remembered police drama from 1974, directed by Frank Perry, opens with that cop-gets-a-call trope too, much like M Squad and its delightful parody.

The opening credit sequence of Man on a Swing introduces us to Lee Tucker (Cliff Robertson), the police chief in an Ohio town, as he rushes to a crime scene. The camera follows his car as it speeds across a bland suburban landscape. Chief Tucker irritably snaps at the deputy driving him to kill the siren--it’s too loud. He’s explaining the case to a reporter in the back seat. They’ve just gotten a call: The body of a missing schoolteacher has just been discovered in the parking lot of a local shopping mall. Tucker has a murder case to solve.

Perry opens with a nod to cop procedurals, including a title card telling us “While places and names have been changed, this story is based on fact. The principal events that you are about to see actually occurred.” But the iconoclast Perry was not a genre director and it should come as no surprise that he had more in mind here than a straight procedural.

That starts with the cop on the case. Chief Tucker is not a standard genre protagonist. We learn from this opening and the next few scenes that Tucker is no Frank Ballinger (and he’s no Frank Drebin either). He doesn’t seem as tough or methodical or driven as the TV cops we know. Unlike Ballinger, Dragnet’s Joe Friday or even Frank Drebin, we don’t know if he will get the job done in the end. In fact, those early scenes stir some doubts about him.

The movie explores what kind of man Chief Tucker really is. By the end, we know.

Perry’s previous films, including David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Swimmer, were close character studies and social commentaries. This one is too. (All those were joint projects with his wife, Eleanor Perry. The two split about 1971, both personally and professionally, several years before this film was made.)

It does begin as a police-procedural but ultimately it subverts that structure. We follow Tucker through his investigation of the death of young Margaret Dawson. We meet a few of her friends and follow some leads, but all of them soon fade into the background. Tucker’s investigation soon centers on one person--Franklin Wills (Joel Grey). He draws Tucker’s full attention--and ours. Wills calls the station. He says he’s a clairvoyant and the Chief needs his help.

Into this movie steps Joel Grey and the procedural is over. The rest of the movie becomes a battle between Tucker and Wills.

There are a lot of reasons I want you to see this movie, but one of the biggest is to see Joel Grey in action. Franklin Wills is a complex and unusual character and Grey is fascinating to watch in the role.*

Joel Grey did not appear in many films, even after his acclaimed performance as the Emcee in the film version of Cabaret in 1972. He seems to prefer the theatre. He acted in this film and a few others in the early 1970s, but soon he went back to Broadway, performing in musicals like Goodtime Charley, which netted him a Tony nomination in 1975.

Man on a Swing gave Grey one of his most substantial film roles and he answered with a bravura performance. It’s a bold piece of work: Grey brought incredible commitment and skill to this role, playing Wills with a litheness and mobility that make him seem part-rubber-band, part-Fred-Astaire. At the same time, Grey’s eyes and face convey the inner sadness of the man as well as his potential for menace. Wills could be a charlatan or he could be an innocent man with a mystic gift. Grey makes either one seem credible.

We meet Wills in a stunning ten-minute scene in the Chief’s office: It begins with conversation between the two and ends with Wills laid out in a trance on the floor. In between, Wills has seemed to be in some kind of physical and spiritual communion with or about Maggie Dawson.

Tucker looks on, bewildered, intrigued--Robertson’s minimalism in the scene a contrast to Grey’s expressive physicality. Tucker is confused and skeptical, but Wills knows things he should not know about the case. Either he is complicit in the crime or he really has some psychic power.

Con artist, criminal or clairvoyant? Maggie's murder recedes and this new mystery comes to the fore. Is this man for real?

I am not going to spoil the outcome. I suggest you see it for yourselves.

A melodramatic police thriller? Cop versus clairvoyant?

Yes, but there is more to this movie than that. A lot in fact. I am still a little rattled by it, unsure of what I saw, as I will try to explain below, after the spoiler flag.

*This movie is playing on Criterion, at least through December, so now is your chance to catch this underseen movie. Consider a double-bill with another underseen film, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, starring Kim Stanley in a fairly rare film role as a clairvoyant who gets involved in a criminal case. Like Grey, Stanley plays the character ‘big’ and a bit theatrical--but both seem just right for their unusual characters. Both movies are well-worth seeing.

[And random reminder: Check out some of my favorite writers on Letterboxd at boxd.it/e9z6y
I just updated the list, adding a lot of writers you don’t want to miss!]

[BIG SPOILERS BELOW]

Really - I don’t want to blow this movie for you. If you want to see it, stop here. Come back later.

I could be wrong - but I don’t think this movie is about the cop and the clairvoyant. Or not just about that.

This is a character study of a man losing a battle with alcohol, with tragic consequences.

At what point did you realize that Chief Tucker was blotto for almost the entire movie?

Maybe a third of people will say: No duh. He’s a cop with a drinking problem. Comes with the territory.

A third will say: No way.

A third will say: I don't think so… Cliff Robertson with those clear blue eyes? No… Well, could be, I guess…

The point of the movie--the brilliance of it--is that it shows us the ‘villain’ right up front and we never see it for what it is.

We have to get to the end of the movie to realize how badly Chief Tucker has messed up this investigation and then we go back and ask why. He’s not stupid.

He had a strong suspect in Keating, but he never made the easy link that he had worked at the same factory as Wills. He should have known that. He should have seen that.

The answer is that he was so drunk the entire time that he couldn’t do his job. He had the culprit in his office but he was too compromised to do a proper interrogation. He didn’t put all the clues together. Joe Friday or Frank Ballinger would have. Even Frank Drebin, after many disasters of his own entirely sober making, would have gotten there in the end.

Tucker is defeated by a villain that he follows with more fascinated and irrational impulse than detached reason. He is distracted, manipulated, thrown off course--ultimately to tragic ends.

How could he make such a mess of things? That’s stand-up Cliff Robertson, sturdy hero of PT 109 and later Uncle Ben in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. He doesn’t look like someone with a drinking problem.

We have to piece it together ourselves from the clues--much as anyone around someone with a drinking problem--or, more properly, the disease of addiction--must do. And we must set aside our own belief that it cannot be true--our denial.

A problem with alcohol is not like a heart attack that leads to the ER. It does not announce itself in a dramatic gesture. It has to be discovered, seen--both by the individual who drinks and the people around that person.

And they all have extremely strong motivation for it to remain so normal and expected that it goes unnoticed, unseen for what it really is, even as the damage mounts. It’s insidious.

The movie gives us plenty of clues--even taunts us in one scene for not following them where they lead:

*The film opens with Chief Tucker being driven to the crime scene instead of driving himself.
*He is drinking beer during a key interrogation.
*He stutters over a word here and there and sometimes looks a little unkempt.
*He is cozy with a local bartender.
*His wife’s only words in her first scene were “I’ll get you another beer.”
*He gets his deputies to buy him beer during the day and drink on the job with him.
*He drinks in one scene after another and he probably drinks in more scenes than he doesn’t. Different times, places, situations, he’s drinking.
*Under stress, he goes to a bar, even when it means he’s neglecting his pregnant wife. (And maybe she’s pregnant because… well, more speculation, I guess.)
*In a key scene, we see what looks like a night of alcoholic rage and self-pity, which Tucker disguises the next day.

It's right in front of us the whole time. No one says a word.

It’s so expected or ‘normal’ in crime drama that we don’t really see it anymore. Or we see it but don’t credit it as consequential. It’s just there for atmosphere, or it’s an expected character trait for a detective.

There’s a long association in crime fiction between detectives and booze. There are some Eliott Ness types, running down the mob during Prohibition, and some by-the-book Joe Fridays. But a more common figure is the loner detective, pulling a bottle out of his desk or meeting an informant in some seedy bar. In noir, the bottle is as necessary as the swirling cigarette smoke. It gives atmosphere. It’s just part of the genre. Think Dana Andrews in Laura sharing a drink with the murder victim. And before American noir, there was Sherlock Holmes and the seven percent solution. A vial, not a bottle, but it helped establish this type or trope--the detective with a battle of his own.

We’re conditioned to expect detectives to pull back a few. The drinking is normalized.

In fact, the drinking is part of the image of a rule-breaking tough guy, evidence of his masculinity. He can take a drink. He can drink it strong and keep his wits--he can still drive, fight, shoot, win at cards, bed women and bring the city’s scummiest criminals to heel.

It may not be an endearing part of the character, it may cause him some occasional problems, but it does not usually destroy him. (And it’s always him in these noir-influenced stories.) It is not his downfall. It is not a tragic flaw. In those old TV series, the detective shows up again next week to take on a new case.

But the alcohol use is tragic here. It may spell the downfall for Chief Tucker--that is more suggested than dramatized at the end--but it does spur tragedy--a second murder, of an innocent child, Virginia. We may not even realize the significance of Tucker’s drinking ourselves at the end of the movie, until we step back from it a bit. The movie itself does not announce it or underline it. We have to figure it out, see it ourselves--and we resist doing that.

Brilliant how this movie gets that onscreen--our unwillingness to put those pieces together, to credit them--to name alcoholism as the culprit in this murder mystery.

Perry lifts the bottle-in-the-desk detective from all those earlier noirish crime dramas and puts him in a modern police procedural in a suburban town. (Either that or he financed this movie on product-placement fees from Budweiser.)

We see the tragedy unfold ourselves--there's that key scene with Keating ten minutes in, as the tragic sequence begins. That first interview of Keating was all wrong. It felt off, strange--but why?

I’ve seen enough Homicide and SVU to know what needs to happen when police question their lead suspect. It didn't happen here. Imagine if it had been Ballinger or Friday in that moment. Or Benson or Stabler. Or Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton with a suspect in ‘the box.’ He tightens the screws, he pushes.

Chief Tucker gets it all wrong. He’s too easy on Keating, too relaxed. But why? He wants a result. He obviously sees Maggie in a sympathetic way. Her killer should be brought to justice.

Why can’t he get it done?

Why was he unable to get justice for the rape victim we meet early on, who was Keating’s first target?

Tucker seems to make one misstep after another. He lets a journalist go with him to witness interviews and to the crime scene. He shows him all the evidence. He knows there are garages involved, but he doesn’t follow up on the lead. He doesn’t seem to check out the jock teacher (Gil Gerard, pre-Buck Rogers) very much. He relies almost entirely on lie-detector tests. He doesn’t seem to realize that Maggie’s friend is hiding something or that Maggie was not all she seemed. He cannot even seem to get fingerprints right. He gets dazzled by Willis, misled. His investigation is superficial, aimless, sloppy--as if he had a bigger unspoken need in mind.

The people around him cover for him, do a lot of his job for him. He has a protector-enabler deputy who likes to take care of the boss. If you told Deputy Younger (Peter Masterson) or Tucker’s wife Janet (Dorothy Tristan) Tucker was an alcoholic, they’d never believe it. He has a job, he’s functioning, he’s Cliff-bloody-Robertson.

But Dr. Watson did not believe Holmes was using cocaine at first either, even after observing his “intervals of torpor” up close.

What this movie does--brilliantly--is hide the alcohol problem in plain sight. Perry makes the audience complicit in the denial.

This is not a message movie about alcoholism; in fact, it maintains complete silence on the subject: No one says a word about it.

Most movies about people struggling with alcohol are structured as melodrama: A character has a drinking problem and it destroys his life.
They are more or less message movies and you know that before the curtain goes up--The Lost Weekend or Days of Wine and Roses. (Robertson played the lead in the latter in its television form as it happens.)

I remember some earnest TV movies too--like MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Driving--and those scare-the-viewer drivers-ed films that showed mangled cars in DUI wrecks. (The latter were memorably parodied in a Simpsons episode with Troy McClure.)

This movie goes silent instead--depending on us to figure out and break the silence ourselves in the end.

It is a holy-shit kind of moment when you realize that Tucker blew the case--and probably blew a lot of cases--because of his drinking problem. He is a “functioning alcoholic” whose “functioning” is so compromised that he misses leads, gets distracted and can’t really see straight. Unlike the drinking-detectives of crime fiction, Tucker is actually affected by his drinking. (Isn’t that the reason people drink in the first place--to feel the effects?) He is, in a sense, mesmerized--pulled off center, pulled off his game--by this force in his life.

It’s a movie that depends on us to figure all this out at the end. It’s not about whether Wills was a real clairvoyant. It’s about how Tucker could have missed the connection between Wills and his chief suspect. That’s basic police work and Tucker just didn’t do it.

Tucker didn’t put it together: Wills knew Keating at the plant and possibly conspired with him--or manipulated him somehow--before the rape. Tucker couldn’t make the case against Keating for that crime. That spurred Wills to act again--manipulating or conspiring with Keating to target Maggie Dawson, then Virginia Segretta. Wills figured out Tucker had a problem and he knew he could manipulate him too--steering him where he wanted him to go.

And there’s no doubt once Wills shows up--thanks to how well Joel Grey plays him--that he has some kind of power in him, psychic and/or manipulative.

I know what you’re saying:

The chief didn’t look drunk.
Come on. It was just beer. He wasn’t drinking all that much.
He had a responsible job. He couldn’t keep it if he’s drinking all day.
Somebody would have said something if it was a problem.

The movie plays with our comforting myths--one of which is that the people around someone who has a problem with alcohol will know about it and take action.

The wife, the professor, the lawyer, the journalist, the psychiatrists, the police deputies?

One of the cleverest turns in this movie is that it makes all of them--all people we might expect would be able to recognize someone with an alcohol problem--unable or unwilling to do so. (The depiction of the psychiatrists in this movie is just brutal.)

In fact, the one person who does see Tucker with clarity is Wills and he uses it to his advantage.

Denial is a deep river, pardon the pun: I once went to an esteemed doctor and refused to believe that he could have an alcohol problem even after I smelled strong alcohol on his breath at three different appointments. It simply couldn’t be.

Neither the person with the problem nor the people around the person are inclined to acknowledge the reality: In fact, the first goal of a drinker is to keep drinking. This person will build relationships that make that possible. This person will hide the reality if that is necessary to keep drinking.

There are people with drinking problems all over the place--not just where we think they are. And not everyone who is drunk acts like Otis checking into the Mayberry Hilton. Some people don’t change much outwardly when they are drunk; some do.

I am no expert on substance use or addiction and I have no idea if Frank Perry was intentionally making a movie about it either. However, what’s on the screen is an awfully good depiction of denial that leads to a tragic outcome. This is an alcoholism-story before the fall. The next chapter, quite likely, is that the cards will come crashing down on the Chief, as the disease of addiction tightens its grip on him or the consequences of his drinking get even greater. The movie does end on such a note that we are invited to speculate what the next chapter may be for him and for his family. It does suggest that the manipulator Wills will have a hand in it.

At the end, Wills is free to continue sowing discord. He’s the catalyst of most of the events here, the driver of most of the Chief’s actions. He is an agent of destruction, with sources of power that are hard to explain. Mysterious power--both alluring and destructive--like that first can of Bud Tucker cracks open when he gets to work.

Still think this is a bad take?

There's reason to think this is all by Perry’s design. The movie keeps pointing to it, suggestively, indirectly. There’s Janet literally painting over something in the garage in one scene. There’s someone preparing or drinking a beverage in scene after scene, without comment. There’s even the bum lead at the hotel, who literally nods at the bottle to explain his action. The dragonfly shirt, the neon BUD sign in a climactic scene… they all seem like clues planted in the set design to point us this way. There’s suggestive subtext in the dialogue too. Even that opening sequence--just the tires screaming, no siren--sounds like a car careening out of control, drunk driver at the wheel.

Seems to me, this man is indeed headed for a big collision one way or another. The brilliance of this movie is that it shows that everyone can see it coming but they--we--never say a word about it.

No doubt, this is one of Frank Perry’s most remarkable accomplishments, intended or not. This character trait overturns the hard-drinking cop trope and puts it right before our eyes, where it disappears, like a conjurer’s trick.