Purely Joyful Movie!

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Jake Martin (Walter Mattau) investigates massacre that took the lives of eight people on a city bus. One of those victims was Jake's partner, Detective Evans, who was supposed to be called in sick. The question is: what was Detective Evans doing on the bus when the shooting occurred? Jake's colleagues: Leo Larsen (Bruce Dern), James Larrimore (Lou Goessett Jr.) help him on the cast leading to various places throughout San Francisco"The Laughing Policeman" is a police procedural film that runs at a slow pace, which made it difficult to follow sometimes especially with the leads the characters have on the case. This bothered me a bit - maybe it has something to do with my generation's attention span? But the slow pace allowed us as viewers to see police procedural of the early 70s. While today's police procedural films (and TV shows) rely on technology to aid on a case, back then it seem that the police will take anything necessary to get the bad guy in; relying on gut feeling. We also get to know about the characters' lives in their police work - how they hate their job while going after the killer. "The Laughing Policeman" is worth watching despite of the slow pacing. The actors who play their roles have done a great job getting the audiences' attention to the scene. The plot will keep you guessing until the end.

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.

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.

Eight people are killed on a San Francisco bus by a greasegun-toting maniac, and one of the victims happens to be a cop who was supposed to be somewhere else. The combination of mass murder and losing one of their own sends the SFPD scrambling for quick answers, so they send out Bruce Dern and the dead policeman's former partner (Walter Matthau) to piece it all together.OK, that covers the first 10-15 minutes of film, and it's the only part of this 2 hour fiasco that makes any bit of sense.From this point on, the film turns into a jumbled, boring mess, filled with endless red herrings involving deviant sex, pimps, hookers, drug addicts and weirdos in general. No matter how closely you follow things and everything appears to lead nowhere, somehow the two detectives pull clues (and not very good ones at that) seemingly out of the air. This cyclical nonsense keeps rolling almost to the end, when finally, the policemen kinda/sorta/maybe think they have their man. In following the tone of all that's come before, the suspect conveniently makes a quick succession of unbelievably stupid moves to bring this impossible-to-follow disaster to a shoehorned-in conclusion. As if all that's not bad enough, we get to see what would normally be a solid cast looking pretty weak. Matthau seems as utterly bored as the rest of us, Dern's usual maniacal glee gets twisted into goofiness, and everybody else ends up stuck being colorless backdrop.I normally enjoy just about any gritty 70's police flick, but "The Laughing Policeman" doesn't even come close to making the grade. Please- Don't waste your time.