Policeman's Lot

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE ONION FIELD Directed by Harold Becker Screenplay by Joseph Wambaugh

Joseph Wambaugh, the policeman turned novelist, considers his one non-fiction book, The Onion Field, his most important work. That true story of a cop killing is what Wambaugh also considers a paradigm of the problems and social attitudes confronted by policemen in their work. He refused to put it in the hands of the studios, which he rightly believes mishandled adaptations of his novels (The New Centurions, The Choir boys). So he wrote a screenplay from his book and helped to produce the movie himself, using his own and friends' money. The result is a grimy, authentic, earnest movie, quite lifelike in its realism and, unfortunately, in its lack of a compelling dramatic structure. At its best, The Onion Field occasionally shocks.

Yet in its determined accretion of detail, much of which turns out not to be particularly relevant to Wambaugh's main themes, promising characters are sub merged. What is worse, the important points he dearly wants to make are severely blunted.

His true story concerns a pair of policemen and a pair of petty criminals who are brought violently together on an otherwise routine night in the streets of Los Angeles and in the country near Bakersfield, Calif.

The cops, acting out of instinctive suspicion, stop the crooks' car. The criminals are, in fact, just on the prowl for a likely store to rob, but the psychopathic leader of the duo (James Woods) gets the drop on the investigators. He manages to disarm them and abduct them to the onion field of the title. There, under the false impression that he has violated California's "Little Lindbergh Law" (which imposes a death sentence for certain types of kidnaping), he suddenly decides to kill his prisoners.

One officer is murdered, but the other, Karl Hettinger, played by John Savage (Hair), escapes. In the crime's aftermath Hettinger will come to believe that he and his partner had not been properly alert when making their collar and had been all too passive in the hands of their abductors. That, and the memory that he ran without looking back when a favorable opportunity to escape presented itself, causes Hettinger to fall prey to a guilty depression that destroys his police career and very nearly his life.

The contempt visited on him by his superiors (they actually make him deliver mea culpa lectures to colleagues) is implicitly and properly shown by Wambaugh as inhumane. But his more profound scorn is reserved for the legal system that requires more than seven years to finally dispose of the case, as the killers employ one delaying tactic after another to keep open what should have been an open-and-shut conviction. There comes a point, Wambaugh seems to be arguing, when the defense of a criminal's civil liberties infringes on the rights of victims to a prompt redress and, as in the case of Hettinger, the opportunity to bury his awful memories. Forgetting is impossible if you have to retestify about a crime eight times in almost as many years.

Regrettably, the film spends a great deal of time in detailing the not very illuminating background of everyone involved in the incident. (It does, how ever, offer Woods a chance to give a splendid performance as a psychopath --jaunty, furious, ingratiating, ignorant and intelligent in bewildering turns.) The film's deliberate piling up of superfluous minutiae tends to have a numbing effect even before the characters get down to the main business of the plot: the murder and its endless afterlife in court.

Here, too, Wambaugh continues to me ander. He is unable to solve the problem of compressing seven dull years into a coherent, suspenseful story, possibly because he, and Actor Savage, cannot find a way to turn Hettinger into a sympathetic person, or even an articulate one. The Onion Field is a serious and most uncompromising movie. It lacks, however, the sort of disciplined craft that might have made it a powerful and affecting one.

-- Richard Schickel

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