The Movie:

Richard A. Colla directed this 1972 film based on the novel by ‘Ed McBain' and screenplay by Evan Hunter (who was actually Ed McBain!) starring Burt Reynolds as Boston Police Department Detective Steve Carella. He and fellow cops Meyer Meyer (Jack Weston), Eileen McHenry (Raquel Welch), Arthur Brown (James McEachin), Andy Parker (Steve Ihnat) and Bert Kling (Tom Skerritt), like a lot of McBain's characters, work out of the 87th Precinct. Kling's central purpose is to track down a criminal known as The Deaf Man (Yul Brynner) who seems to have a knack for blowing things up. He uses this knack as a means to run an extortion ring, and understandably the cops would like to see an end to this, particularly as he seems to be targeting local politicians, the kind that can make things tough for cops if they want to.

While Kling is trying to stop the mad bomber, Carella has to go undercover in hopes of stopping two punk kids from setting fire to homeless men in the inner city. If that weren't enough, there's also a rapist running about, which requires foxy Eileen to pose as bait, a couple of murders to take up their time and a few lesser crimes to contend with. These various subplots all intertwine and mingle about over the course of the feature's hour and a half running time and eventually everything more or less comes to a satisfactory conclusion.

This one is a bit all over the place, running pretty rampant with more than enough plot threads and concepts to fill up a half dozen films easily. As such, none of the plots save for the one involving Brynner really get exploited as well as they could have been. On the flip side of this coin, the movie moves at a very quick pace and does not lack in humor or action. The movie's humor stems primarily from putting a bunch of cops in exceedingly wacky situations. It plays things completely straight, mind you, but we're clearly meant to be laughing at this movie rather than insisting it keep us on the edge of our seat. If you go into it with those expectations and don't go looking for a Dirty Harry clone, you'll probably be quite amused by all of this.

Of course, it's hard to go wrong with a cast like this. It was reported at the time that Reynolds had made some off color remarks to co-star Welch when the two of them co-starred in 100 Rifles a few years earlier in 1969. As such, she didn't want to be cast alongside him in Fuzz but apparently took the part anyway on the condition that she didn't have to deal with him. Keep this in mind as you watch the movie and it's hard not to notice that even though they appear on screen together a few times, she never makes eye contact with him and their characters don't even really interact. Does this hurt the movie? Not really. They stay in character and everyone who has worked even a day in their life has probably come across a co-worker they didn't want to work with. For this reason, you get the vibe that Eileen McHenry just doesn't really like Steve Carella but puts up with him anyhow. Individually they are fine in the film. Reynolds exudes his trademark charm and handles both the humor and the action set pieces easily. Welch isn't given as much to do but she too is fine here, she's drop dead gorgeous but also has good screen presence and shows no difficulty at all in handling what she's given.

Tom Skerritt and Yul Brynner are also pretty fun here. Casting Brynner as the villain, against type, might seem like a bit of stunt casting but it works and he seems to be having fun in the part. Skerritt does the tough guy things well. James McEachin, Jack Weston and Steve Ihnat round out the principal cast really nicely. The ending is dopey but not only is the script aware of this, it basically calls it out. Cinematography is good, the score works and adds some tension to a few keys scenes and the locations chosen for the picture give us a nice look at the Boston of the early seventies, so the movie has that going for it too.

Video:

Kino's AVC encoded 1080p high definition 1.85.1 widescreen transfer of Fuzz has very nice color reproduction and is frequently quite impressive with its detail, particularly in close up shots. Skin tones look lifelike and natural and black levels are fine. There's noticeable but minor damage to note throughout the movie, the most obvious example is during the opening credits, but it's never a serious distraction, just white specs and the odd tiny scratch. But again, it's minor, the majority of the movie is actually very clean looking. Most of the time grain looks fine but there are some scenes that do look a little noisy for whatever reason. This is on par with a lot of the other recent Kino offerings of older MGM/United Artists catalogue titles: not reference quality, but solid enough.