I’m giving this movie a high/er mark because it is VERY unique! In fact I’d give it higher than an 8, but everything MUST have a flaw…the ‘8’ is actually like a ’10’…or ’11’ on an amplifier…or “ludicrous speed”, heh heh! Billy Dee’s character is a VERY confident, effective yet crooked cop. Imagine that…a character like that…in 1974! He REALLY is the star of the movie and takes no shorts! But, surprisingly, he also prevails in the end! Amazing! It would seem that, in those times especially, white audiences would have wanted to see this black character fall in the end. He’s a bad guy…who prevails in the end! Not even white characters did this often back then! Billy is VERY smooth in this movie…a testament to how big a star he was/IS…and I’m CERTAIN this role helped him Land the ‘Lando’ character a relative few years later…because, again, it is such a RARE character…to even have existed in movie history…and, I can’t emphasize enough, at THAT time in our, American history! You get the feeling this movie slipped though the cracks to even be MADE…much like ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door’…which came out the same year…both probably receiving the same, shelved fate at the box office…BECAUSE they were such anomalies…with themes that understandably made white America…unsettled, to say the least. And a nod to Vic Morrow’s character…HORRIBLE how this GREAT actor died in real life. He, too, was VERY good in this movie…and pretty much anything, Like Williams, you will ever see him in.
