The Seven-Ups

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 on charges leading to prison sentences of seven years or more upon prosecution, hence the name of the team. The film was produced by Philip D'Antoni, who also took on his sole-directing credit as director of this film: in addition, he was responsible for producing 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, screenwriter and police technical advisor Sonny Grosso, and composer Don Ellis.

Plot

Buddy Manucci (played by Scheider, a loose remake of the character of Buddy "Cloudy" Russo he played in The French Connection, a character who also used dirty tactics to capture his enemies, and who was also based on Sonny Grosso) 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; this is illustrated as the team ransacks an antiques store that is a front for the running of counterfeit money. 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, illustrated when Max Kalish is kidnapped and a ransom is paid at a car wash. 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.

Production locations

Filming locations feature uptown Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx. Buddy makes his rounds on and around Arthur Avenue and the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in The Bronx. Kalish's abduction takes place in Brooklyn, across from the old courthouse on Court and Montague Streets near Cadman Plaza. The funeral home sequence where Ansel is abducted was filmed one block over, at the side entrance to Lucia Brothers Funeral Home on the corner of E 184th Street and Hoffman Street. Buddy and partner are doing a stake-out from an upstairs apartment across the street . In the background you can see the dismantled IRT Third Avenue Line of the New York City Subway. Aside from the Third Avenue Line and the fact that the one-way vehicle traffic on Hoffman Street and Arthur Avenue has since been reversed, the locations remain today for the most part as they did in the movie. The funeral procession then rides on Pelham Parkway. Vito pays-off Moon at the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx; Buddy and Vito meet at the track field between Dewitt Clinton High School and Bronx High School of Science, and object to the new Tracey Towers housing project looming in the background. Max Kalish's house is at W 246th Street and Fieldston Road, Riverdale, Bronx.

Chase scene

As in 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 the chase sequence for this film. Filmed in and around Upper Manhattan, New York City, the sequence was edited by Jerry Greenberg who also has a producer credit here and who won an Academy Award for his editing work on The French Connection.

The chase sequence is located near the middle of the film. Hickman 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 (like the cars on San Francisco's steep hills in the earlier film) with Hickman's 1973 Pontiac Grand Ville sedan pursued by Scheider's 1973 Pontiac Ventura Sprint coupe. While Scheider did some of his own driving, most of it was done by Hollywood stunt man Jerry Summers.

Location shooting was done in upper Manhattan on the George Washington Bridge, and on New Jersey's Palisades Interstate Parkway and New York's Taconic State Parkway.

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 see a stuntman in a parked car opens his door as Hickman's vehicle takes it off its hinges. The end of the chase was Bill's 'homage' to the death of Jayne Mansfield, where Scheider's car (driven by Summers) smashes into the back of a parked tractor-trailer, peeling off the car's roof.

External links

• The Seven-Ups at the Internet Movie Database
• The Seven-Ups at AllRovi