Cop

(James B. Harris, USA, 1988)

Is there anything more enticing to a filmmaker than the cut to black to mark a dramatic, surprising or shocking ending? A blackness that confronts the spectator with a disconcerting display of cinema’s powers – and holds our attention for as long as possible before the obligatory final credits flash or roll.

From the wrap-up episode of The Sopranos in 2007 to the horror film Immaculate (2024), from William Friedkin to Martin Scorsese, from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) to Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), from Anne-Marie Miéville’s Le Livre de Marie (1985) to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983), the cut to black registers as a bold exclamation point – escaping at the point of highest intensity, and eschewing such polite conventions as the stately fade out.

One of the best cuts to black in 1980s popular cinema is provided by James B. Harris in Cop, a taut, minimalistic thriller that has slowly accrued a well-deserved cult following. What is referred to in contemporary music as a sudden death ending often involves, in its cinematic equivalent, the depiction of death. Or, more usually, murder – as is the case here.

Rewatching the film today, it’s clear that Harris prepares us for these closing frames from the very first moments. In that opening credits sequence, over an intermittently all-black screen, we hear the dialling of a pay phone, and a man’s frustrated attempts to report a crime to the police, negotiating an operating system that keeps taking his quarters. This mission takes almost two minutes – and, tellingly, Harris never gives us a subsequent image of the anonymous caller.

Who we do see, once the image kicks in, is Lloyd Hopkins, played with nervous (sometimes manic) energy by James Woods. Lloyd is a Los Angeles cop in the Dirty Harry tradition: he skirts, and often transgresses, the letter of the law in order to do his righteous job. Moreover, he’s on a particular crusade that informs every aspect of his life, professional and personal: he’s after men who brutally kill women – women who have been lured into fatal situations by their fairy-tale dreams of romance.

To this end, Lloyd ensures that his own eight-year-old daughter, Penny (Vicki Wauchope), harbours no illusions about the big, bad, real world. Instead of reassuring bedtime stories, he regales her with gruesome accounts of police cases he has cracked. The child delightedly exclaims: “Tell me how you got the scumbag, Daddy!” It’s a great scene.

The complicated plot of Cop is adapted from James Ellroy’s 1984 novel Blood on the Moon – Harris, former close collaborator of Kubrick, cannily forecast a trend and picked up the adaptation rights on several Ellroy books including The Black Dahlia (eventually directed by Brian De Palma in 2006).

Lloyd, following a twisty trail that passes through a feminist bookshop run by poet Kathleen (Lesley Ann Warren, superb as the fall gal in this story), eventually identifies a serial killer: Bobby Franco (Steven Lambert).

The tense, superbly directed showdown between Lloyd and Franco takes place in the most significant site of Cop’s traumatic backstory: a local high school. And, specifically, in its gym.

James Woods with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands is a scary sight – especially in retrospect, now that the actor proudly espouses his provocative, ultra-conservative world-view on social media. Long before his extreme swerve in that direction, Woods as Lloyd exudes an anti-political-correctness aura that is undeniably exhilarating; every scene plays to his underdog charisma and his tremendous physical grace – a combo that accompanied him for the better part of two decades, all the way to Larry Clark’s Another Day in Paradise (1998) and Carpenter’s Vampires (1998).

Woods and Harris enjoyed a special bond during the ‘80s: the actor’s fine brand of spiky, highly performative irony had already featured in their previous collaboration, the little-known prison drama Fast-Walking (1982).

As Lloyd and Franco stealthily prowl about on different levels of the gym in Cop, Michel Colombier’s sparse musical score echoes the metallic sounds and footfalls of their trajectories. The villain – seen only in this finale – is a steely acrobat, clad all in black for maximum invisibility. He taunts Lloyd: “You didn’t do your homework, Sergeant.”

After a few fast, clever moves, Lloyd finally has Franco unarmed and at his mercy. But first, a twist. Franco understandably – and smugly – underlines the situation: “Well? Aren’t you going to read me my rights? Cuff me? Take me into custody? … You’re a cop. You’ve got to take me in”.

In response to this, Lloyd just smiles. He has “some good news and some bad news” to impart. “The good news is, you’re right, I’m a cop and I got to take you in. The bad news is I’ve been suspended and I don’t give a fuck.” He fires his shotgun three times, and then the film triumphantly cuts to black. With one especially brilliant touch: in the dark, the sound of the gun’s spent cartridges hitting the gym floor.

MORE Harris: Boiling Point

© Adrian Martin 25 June 2024