The Choirboys
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| Starring | Charles Durning Louis Gossett Jr. Perry King Clyde Kusatsu Stephen Macht]] Tim McIntire Randy Quaid Chuck Sacci Don Stroud James Woods Burt Young | |
| Directed by | Robert Aldrich | |
| Produced by | Merv Adelson Lee Rich | |
| Written by | Jennifer Miller | |
| Studio | Lorimar Productions | |
| Music by | Frank De Vol | |
| Released | 12/23/1977 | |
| Runtime | 119 minutes | |
| Country | United States | |
| language | English | |
| Budget | $6,500,000 | |
| Gross | ITL 126,400,000 | |
"The Choirboys" is a 1977 American comedy-drama film directed by Robert Aldrich, written by Christopher Knopf and Joseph Wambaugh based on Wambaugh's 1975 novel of the same name. It features an ensemble cast including Charles Durning, Louis Gossett Jr., Randy Quaid, and James Woods. The film was released to theaters by Universal Pictures on December 23, 1977.
Story
Los Angeles police officers experiencing various pressures at work unwind at night with drunken get-togethers (a.k.a. "choir practice") at MacArthur Park, where their pranks often go too far: among those there are a retiring cop, a small number of young cops, a bigoted one and a Vietnam vet with panic disorder.
Running neck and neck with the ridicules "Exorcist II: the Hieratic" as the worst movie of 1977 "The Choirboys" is about the most off-the-wall cop movie ever made that was so bad that even the book's author Joseph Wambaugh,that the movie is based on, disowned it never wanting to be mentioned in the same breath with the film.
Having a bunch of beer and booze guzzling as well as mentally unstable LA police officers make complete fools of themselves is not very funny as the movie want's it's audience to think. These yo-yo's end up causing more trouble to the community as well as themselves then any gang of street thugs could possibly do and were supposed to like them? There are a number of cops who have very serious mental hang-ups that leads to suicide and in the case of police officer Sam Lyles, Don Stroud, involuntary manslaughter but what that shows is how lax the LAPD is in allowing men with serious mental problems into it ranks.
The cops in the movie "The Chiorboys" screw up almost ever assignment that their put on but what get's them in trouble is when Lyles, drunk and locked up in a police paddy wagon, goes wacko and blows away a park hustler when he tried to help him; were shown at the beginning of the movie that Lyles has been suffering from a sever case of claustrophobia since he was in Vietnam but yet he managed to get into the LAPD where, being assigned a deadly weapon, he may very well be put in tight places where his phobia would take over his common sense.
There's also the sad case of officer Baxter Slate, Perry King, who's suffering from very dark sexual hangups dealing with S&M that leads him to get involved with a dominatrix that when discovered by his fellow cops begs them for help, all Baxter wanted was for them to talk to him, but is ignored which leads to him, feeling ashamed and abundant, shooting himself.
With these two cases of police driven to he edge and beyond it's very hard to find anything funny in the movie that's supposed to be a police comedy/drama about the inner workings of the LAPD. Remarkably the most touching and understanding scene in the movie has to do with the uncouth and scuzzy head of the vice squad Sgt. Scuzzi, Burt Young. Talking to a young man picked up for soliciting in the park Sgt. Scuzzi takes the time to talk to him and treats the frightened 18 year-old with kindness and understanding like a father not a hardened cop on the beat. It turned out that Scuzzi letting the boy off without being booked didn't end his problems with him getting shot and killed later in the movie when he tried to help the paranoid officer Lyles get out of the locked police wagon he was trapped in.
Very uneven at best and mindless and offensive, to every race color and creed, at worse "The Chiorboys" totally misses the mark that it, and author Joseph Wambaugh in his book, tried to make about the pressures of being a policeman in a major US city. We get a bunch of stories of cops who are so unstable and unprofessional that they come across worse then any of the criminals in the movie and end up getting the worse of it when their ever called upon to arrest or restrain them; there's even a very disturbing scene when two of the cops Rules & Proust, Tim Mcintire & Randy Quaid, are on a roof trying to stop a woman from jumping to her death with Rules encouraging instead of trying to talk her out of it, her to do so, she jumped to her death.
The very contrive ending with officer Whalen, Charles Durning, confronting his boss Chief Deputy Riggs, Robert Webber, about him suspending some half-dozen officers, with Whalens cooperation, involved in the cover-up of the Lyles shooting was about as corny and unconvincing as it could get but was supposed to be the high point in the movie that would make you forget just how silly and hare-brained it was up until then; instead of making the movie "The Chiorboys" better it made it even worse if that at all was possible
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