Fuzz

1972
PG
1h 32m

IMDb RATING

5.4/10

2.3K

YOUR RATING

Police in Boston search for a mad bomber trying to extort money from the city.

Play trailer3:00

1 Video

67 Photos

Action Comedy Crime Drama Mystery Thriller

Detectives at a rundown police precinct in Boston scramble to catch a bomber who's targeting local politicians while trying to extort money from the city.Detectives at a rundown police precinct in Boston scramble to catch a bomber who's targeting local politicians while trying to extort money from the city.Detectives at a rundown police precinct in Boston scramble to catch a bomber who's targeting local politicians while trying to extort money from the city.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

5.4/10

2.3K

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

Trivia
Burt Reynolds almost suffered serious burns to his face while doing his own stunt during a scene in which he is set on fire. Out-of-control flames whipped up his asbestos-lined coat sleeve, around his neck, and along the back of his head. This cut made it into the movie.

Goofs
Carella poses as a homeless man in order to catch the firebugs. But he remains clean-shaven, without the several days' growth of beard that a real bum would surely have.

Quotes
Detective: What do you mean they're putting garbage in your car?
Man with Garbage: Every morning garbage in the front seat. You know, coffee grounds, potato peels and moldy fruit. It just gets such a mess when it gets on the floor and, you know, walking around with it slipping on your heels. It's disgusting; old chewed up bones like they had a dog or something. And one day it looked as though somebody had blown their nose in pieces of old toilet paper and wet cigarette butts and things like that. It's really disgusting, and you can't find that in your car seat every morning and live through it. My stomach turns and I really threw up several times, but not in the front seat of the car.

Crazy credits
Evan Hunter wrote the "87th Precinct" novels under the nom de plume Ed McBain. For this film, he is credited with the screenplay under his own name, but as McBain for "based on the novel by."

Connections
Featured in Inside 'Live and Let Die' (1999)

Soundtracks
I'll Be Seeing You
By Sammy Fain (uncredited) and Irving Kahal (uncredited)
Sung by Dinah Shore

User reviews42

Review

Featured review

5/10

"Because You're Inept"

With the last shot leaving very much in doubt whether the crime wave that has struck the 87th precinct is truly over, my guess is that the producers were anticipating a Fuzz 2. The need for one never arose however.

A very good group of players just can't quite get this film to come together. Fuzz reminds me of a Police Academy film with two many pretensions. In fact the Boston PD may just be where those Academy graduates end up.

The main plot of the film involves a master criminal, the Deaf Man played by Yul Brynner who is blackmailing the city of Boston so he won't kill any of their top officials. He calls his threat into the precinct with detectives Burt Reynolds, Tom Skerritt, Jack Weston, and Raquel Welch are working. When they don't believe him, Brynner kills a couple of city officials to make his point.

A couple of other story lines involving a search for some punks setting homeless on fire and a rapist and somehow and through some Clousseau like luck this crowd actually solves all the cases. You have to see the film to see how they do it.

Best scenes are Raquel and Skerritt in a sleeping bag while on stakeout with Skerritt getting terribly distracted and Reynolds and Weston as nuns observing them and a possible perpetrator. That's for the main cast members, but when painters Gino Conforti and Gerald Hiken who are busy painting the precinct while all this is going steal the film whenever they're on screen. In fact in the old days some studio would have teamed these two permanently for a series of films.

Fuzz is the harbinger of Police Academy films to come.