MovieChat Forums > Busting (1974) Discussion > Great Los Angeles Locations!!!

Great Los Angeles Locations!!!

posted 14 years ago by mail-2775
3 replies | jump to latest

I just saw Busting (1974) for the first time, and this is one that is well worth seeing. Although every single detail of this film is truly excellent, it somehow doesn't end up being a great film, but there are still a lot of reasons to watch it.

This is the only film I've seen with Robert Blake where he is any good, and Elliot Gould can't not be good, plus they have a great actor I'd never heard of named Allen Garfield as the bad guy, so the acting is excellent.

The camera work in it is astounding, doubly so considering it was over 35 years ago. The whole thing is well done, but when they get to the shootout ambulance chase scene, the camera car cutting between a gnarly collision between two other cars is heart-stopping.

This was the only buddy cop movie I'd ever seen where they didn't resort to any cliches at all, but then near the end the two cops got suspended, so it was true to form after all.

The main thing that caught my eye about this film, through and through and through, was the incredible L.A. locations. They showed places where I lived and played 15 years before I moved to L.A.. They show the whole Yucca Corridor, with Pla-Boy Liquors (the only place to buy a 40 when in the part of town where when you hit a red light you don't stop), there is a crazy chase scene/shootout in what I believe to be the Grand Central Market downtown, Hollywood Boulevard, and much more.

I can only fault this film in two ways (for technical details)

1) It portrays the L.A.P.D. as being a thoroughly corrupt department in the 1970s, and, despite all its problems, I have no reason to believe it was corrupt at all from the 1950s-on.

2) The officers repeatedly shoot fleeing suspects, armed or not, through the back from a great distance while they are running away. California law has never supported that unless the subject was an escaped prisoner or a prisoner escaping.

The motion of the camera in this film is truly remarkable and it is worth watching just for that.

Only four comments for this film? How sad.

[–] CBikle 12 years ago

1 This movie came out about 2 years after Serpico, although NYPD corruption was a different story - I think the LAPD corruption in this movie's precinct was magnified for story purposes.

2 Yeah, I guess there was no LAPD consultant on set (maybe because of how the LAPD is portrayed in the movie) of course, you could rationalize it by saying that the 2 cops were loose cannons, used to doing things their own way and getting away with it because their captain likes them and tends to sweep stuff under the rug anyway, as we saw in the movie.

About Allen Garfield, he was a regular TV character actor of that time (he'd probably done over 2 dozen episodes of Barney Miller), but I think this was his first big role.

[–] Winfield_Browne 8 years ago

I was out of town for the filming of this and all the others so the locations are nice to see here for remembering.

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
be kind, rewind...

[–] Prismark10 8 years ago

The were at La Brea Tarpits when they figured out why Garfield kept going to the hospital.

It's that man again!!