After Peter Hyams made a successful TV movie called Goodnight, My Love, producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler approached him with the desire of making a new film about vice cops. “I'd made a TV movie of the week and people started coming after me,” he later remembered. Hyams spent the next six months doing research across New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago in order to give the film an authentic feel. Elliott Gould and Ron Leibman were cast as the two detectives under the spotlight, but Leibman was soon replaced by Robert Blake as Gould believed he was a better fit. It’s important to note that filming only took a month and finished without any studio meddling. “United Artists was a dream studio,” said Hyams.
Two LAPD vice detectives want to take down crime boss Rizzo, whose influence stretches not only throughout the city, but also within their department. There are no obstacles high enough, however, to persuade the detectives to back down, and this inevitably makes the tension rise until it reaches a boiling point. Besides the fact that Hyams’ theatrical directorial debut is an amusing cop film, its importance for film and TV history also lies in the fact that it served, to some degree, as the inspiration for the cop show Starsky & Hutch.
In 1972 a neophyte Spanish media company created a rare platform for artists to explore classic genre imagery with a sophisticated cinematic sensibility.
"Le Choix des armes", or as it was called in foreign markets, "Choice of Arms" is filmmaker Alain Corneauās 1981 French crime film with Philippe Sardeās...
