Whydunit

MAN ON THE ROOF

Directed and Written by BO WIDERBERG

Through repetition the scene has become a classic: the sniper perched on a seemingly inaccessible rooftop, bodies littering the pavement below, a crowd of gawkers milling just out of range as the police wheel up their elite troops and latest weaponry to try to pry the lunatic from his perch.

In the usual movie, it is at this point that everyone decides to cut away from character and call in the stunt coordinator to wow the audience with a big finish, a slam-bang deployment of men and materiel, all hardware and hard knocks, with nary a thought for such behavioral patterns as the film's earlier sequences may have established for the participants. Not so in Man on the Roof, the Swedish-made policier based on one of the Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjoewall and Per Wahloeoe. One by one, the technological hopes for victory over the crazed killer are thwarted by his cunning and his quick reflexes. Even the usually infallible Beck is almost killed trying his hand against the killer. In the end, it is three quite ordinary men, unaided by anything fancier than nerve, some crude explosives and a simple plan of action, who do him in. There are plenty of spectacular thrills in the sequence, but it remains always in scale, an extension of the realistic tone that has distinguished the earlier portions of the film. Even the sniper's prowess is explicable. He is, himself, a onetime cop. His psychopathic rage has turned against his former colleagues for reasons that make gruesome psychological sense.

Patient Cop. One likes the movie for refusing to be yet another example of the paranoia and the senselessness of the times in which we live. It is as patient as Martin Beck (well played by Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt) in linking the final mass violence to the brutal, suspensefully executed murder with which the film begins. It is full of lightly sketched details that give Beck, his team of detectives, the whole cop milieu weight and depth almost subliminally, in the manner of a good novel. More than that the picture is familiar and knowing about its setting, Stockholm. Finally, it deals with issues--police brutality, the insensitivity of political leaders, the strange mixture of passivity and volatility in the population the cops are trying to protect--with deftness and clarity.

Director-Writer Widerberg is best known in the U.S. for the romantic Elvira Madigan. But, as he showed in a much better film, Adalen, 31, he is a man of strong political convictions, which he is able to get across without turning the characters into long-playing ideological records. In one fine moment here, for example, he allows a rogue cop a long speech in which he reveals how the job has brutalized him. If it is no easier to like him as a result, at least one can begin to understand what happened to him. In short, Widerberg is a moviemaker rather like his detective hero--patient, circumspect, careful not to let his opinions get in the way of solving the puzzles his job presents to him. It is a pleasure to watch both of them at work .

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