The Seven-Ups
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| The Seven-Ups | |
|---|---|
 1973 movie poster |
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| Directed by | Philip D'Antoni |
| Produced by | Philip D'Antoni |
| Written by | Albert Ruben Alexander Jacobs (screenplay) Sonny Grosso (story) |
| Starring | Roy Scheider Tony Lo Bianco Larry Haines Richard Lynch |
| Music by | Don Ellis |
| Cinematography | Urs Furrer |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | December 14, 1973 |
| Running time | 103 Min. |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Seven-Ups is a 1973 American film released by 20th Century Fox. It stars Roy Scheider as a renegade policeman who is the leader of The Seven-Ups, a police team who uses dirty, unorthodox tactics to snare their quarry. The film was produced and directed by Philip D'Antoni, who was responsible for producing such other gritty cop films as Bullitt and The French Connection. Several people who worked on The French Connection were also involved in this film, such as Scheider and composer Don Ellis. Due to the similarity of the name to the beverage 7 Up, members of the cast posed in front of a 7-Up truck to advertise the film.[citation needed]
[edit] Story
Buddy Manucci (played by Scheider and is a loose remake of the character of Cloudy he played in The French Connection, a character who also used dirty tactics to capture his enemies) has been getting flak from the higher-ups in the New York City police force he works for because his team of renegade policemen, known as The Seven-Ups (the name comes from the fact that most convictions done by the team heralds jail sentences to criminals from Seven years and Up) has been using unorthodox methods to capture criminals. Also, lately, there has been a rash of kidnappings. The twist is that it seems that only upper echelon criminals (Mafioso and white collar types) are the ones being kidnapped. This leads to many plot twists in which Manucci tries to figure out the puzzle, with help supplied to him by an informant (Tony Lo Bianco), who turns out to be untrustworthy, leading to the death of one of the seven-up officers. Manucci figures out the puzzle, but not before The Seven-Ups splinter from the fallout of the film's events, and Manucci's life is in jeopardy.
[edit] Chase Scene
As he did with Bullitt and The French Connection, Philip D'Antoni again utilized the work of stunt driver Bill Hickman (who also has a small role in the film) to create another chase sequence for this film. Upper Manhattan is the place of choice for this sequence, which was edited by Jerry Greenberg who also has a producer credit here and who won Academy Awards for his editing work on Bullitt and The French Connection.
The chase sequence is regarded as one of cinema's greats, and is located near the middle of the film. Hickman performed yet another memorable chase sequence in which he drove the car being chased by Roy Scheider. The chase itself lends heavily to the Bullitt chase, with the two cars bouncing down the gradients of uptown New York (a la San Francisco's steep hills in the earlier film) with Hickman's 1973 Pontiac Grand Ville pursued at wheel-breaking speed by Scheider's Pontiac Ventura. While Scheider did some of his own driving, most of it was done by Hollywood stunt man, Jerry Summers.
Everything is rendered to painstaking detail, the gritty realism and danger of each tire-busting slide, accompanied by close camera angles and camera-cars moving at high speed, parallel to the action car, added to which an almost complete lack of dialogue and music. Location shooting was done in upper Manhattan, on the George Washington Bridge, and on the Palisades and Taconic parkways.
In the accompanying behind-the-scenes featurette of the 2006 DVD release of the film, Hickman can be seen co-ordinating the chase from the street where we also see another example of how memorable (and dangerous) these sequences were: on cue, a stuntman in parked car opens his door, only for Hickman's vehicle to take it completely off its hinges, where (from the behind-the-scenes footage) we see the door fly off at such a force it could so easily have killed the close-quarter camera team set-up only yards away (it missed them only by chance). The end of the chase was Bill's own idea, an 'homage' to the death of Jayne Mansfield, where Scheider's car (driven by Summers) smashes into the back of an eighteen-wheel truck, peeling off its roof like a tin of sardines.
