For Dennis: Freebie and the Bean (1974)

Nothing in this world helps with a bad time like family and friendship. And kindness expressed through a keyboard, often by people whose faces you have never seen, is an enormous comfort. It makes things a bit better. It makes you that much more grateful that you began the blog, and that people read and care about what you write. It also makes you realize that resuming a normal state of online affairs is one step, even if it's small, toward resuming other things as well. And so, back to the Siren, and back to bits of unfinished business.

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The Siren has made many friendships through her blog, but Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule is particularly close to her heart. A few weeks ago, as part of our meeting of the minds, the Siren asked Dennis to assign her a movie out of her comfort zone. Dennis, ever courteous, picked something that adheres to classic precedent: Freebie and the Bean.


There is a fine old American movie tradition of crime thrillers with gleefully unintelligible plots. Here the Siren thinks of The Lady from Shanghai; after the credits rolled on that one, Harry Cohn offered one thousand 1947 dollars to anyone who could explain the plot to him. No one took him up on it. And sixty years later the Siren still couldn't earn that money, and she worships Welles and has seen Lady about four times. Nor could she break down the plot of Freebie for Dennis or anyone else, and she realized that was going to be the case as soon as she saw the opening scene. We start with the two cops of the title dumping garbage cans into the trunk of a car and getting really excited about a receipt. You realize that not only do you not know what is on the receipt, but nobody is ever going to explain it to you in a manner you can retain.

And, as with classics like The Letter, the opening anchors our themes, when an orange tabby cat that had crawled in a garbage can leaps out and the cops deposit the animal on the side of the road, miles from its home. Thus is established the insouciance with which Freebie and the Bean will treat bloody anybody interfering with what they want, which is to arrest a suspect. You don't know precisely why this suspect is bad--hijacking, it seems, although Freebie earns his nickname by hijacking quite a lot of stuff himself--but they really, really want this arrest.

The Siren can see why Dennis thought this would be a departure, despite her love for director Richard Rush's The Stunt Man. Serpico this ain't. Freebie (James Caan) steals everything but the dinner mints and the Mexican Bean (oh dear), played by Alan Arkin, upbraids his partner but then pummels the hell out of suspects right alongside him (your lips says no no, but your fists say yes yes). They blackmail businessmen, they threaten to throw a construction worker off a crane, later they beat up the worker and threaten to rape his girlfriend, they make arrests on false evidence, they drive through San Francisco like it's the Indy 500 track and dear god, they don't even brake for marching bands. They do not, however, fire their guns into crowds, which establishes their fundamentally caring natures, one supposes. The racial ad hominems are mostly confined to Latinos, but there is a transvestite who, although he's the most dangerous character in the movie apart from the leads, is depicted with particular venom.

But through it all the Siren enjoyed Freebie and the Bean, a lot, mostly for the charisma and chemistry of Caan and Arkin, the director's panache and the give-a-damn attitude toward audience expectations. Plus, aside from some moments where mayhem became cruelty, the movie is often very funny.



Freebie is famous for the car-chase sequences, which slam around San Francisco's hills and tight corners and through pedestrian plazas and, in one credulity-snapping instance, lead to a dive off a freeway ramp and into some poor couple's bedroom. The Siren found herself liking the action outside the cars more, though, as the fun of seeing bloodless drive-by injuries palled. She loved the crane scene, where the camera is planted just behind the actors and moves so closely with them that the Siren, her acrophobia kicking in big-time, was momentarily afraid Bean was going to throw HER off and not that ratty-haired worker.

A sequence in a bowling alley worked superbly, as the cops tail a hitman, monitor the guy's flirting and beer intake and follow him to the men's room, where their mark thoughtfully chooses a stall and not a urinal. The noisy payoff for the bathroom scene surely inspired a lot of other directors, but it's the prelude that's perfect, as Freebie and the Bean each tuck two guns into their waistbands, then check how their shirttails flop over the artillery with the fussiness of a new mother trying to hide the post-baby belly.

In another good sequence, the two cops accompany their suspect to a dentist's office and read magazines while you await the inevitable shoot-out. And after the shooting starts--and wounds the receptionist in the backside, but you don't hold it against the heros because gee, it's the sort of thing that could happen to anyone--the chase shifts to a couple of glass observation elevators, everybody still shooting over the Muzak.

The Siren's favorite moment, however, had no action at all--it was the "cops get upbraided by the DA" scene, a movie cliche high on most "oh god not again" lists. Still, it was hilarious, made so by the timing of Arkin and Caan and the perfect rhythm of their reactions.

An unexpected good time. So, Dennis. Does this mean I'm ready for the next Grindhouse Film Festival?