Film Forum

(1969) Kansas City cops try a chokehold on a hooker, give the works to a suspected car thief, and show kindness beyond the call of duty – and embarrassed befuddlement at a love triangle dispute. To his own surprise, Wiseman found he’d created a sympathetic movie about cops. 16mm. Approx. 81 mins.

Reviews

“HARROWING.”
– The New York Times

“Law & Order was the most powerful hour and a half of television that I’ve seen all year…”
– Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“… a vivid impression of (the policemen’s) working lives and through this a complex sense of what it means to be in their position in a large American city…”
– Gary Arnold, The Washington Post

“One of the best of Wiseman’s documentaries, an impressionistic account of the daily police routine in a predominantly black neighbourhood of Kansas City, Missouri…Sitting back and coolly observing the situation from multiple perspectives, it suggests that any sickness in the forces of law and order is a symptom of disease in the society that breeds them.”
 – Tom Milne, Time Out (London)