fred-pinkerton The completely serious film (Man on a Swing) opens with a one minute-20 second scene shot with a camera mounted on the police car roof about a foot behind the flashing light bar. While I am sure it seemed dramatic in 1974, it's impossible to view now without remembering the comedic rendition of the same viewpoint that forms the opening of "The Naked Gun". While I can't be sure this was the only "cop movie" that had a similar opening sequence, it's pretty clear to me that this film alone would have been sufficient to inspire the Naked Gun spoof scene.

NORDIC-2 On June 16, 1968 the nude body of Barbara Ann Butler, a 23-year-old junior high school teacher, was found in her car at a store parking lot near Dayton, Ohio. William A. Clark, a reporter for the Dayton 'Daily News', covered the subsequent police investigation—an investigation made far more complicated by the involvement of a psychic named Bill Boshears. Barbara Butler's murder was never solved. Nonetheless, Clark turned his reportage into a minor classic of the true crime genre entitled 'The Girl on the Volkswagen Floor' (Harper & Row, 1971). When David Zelag Goodman ('Straw Dogs') adapted Clark's book to the screen, he turned the William Clark figure into Police Chief Lee Tucker (Cliff Robertson) but did not really account for the fact that a busy police chief's routine duties and investigative methods would surely differ from those of a newspaperman. For example, Tucker takes a somewhat unlikely trip to a distant university to confer with para-psychology expert Dr. Nicholas Holnar, played by George Voskovec. Furthermore, Cliff Robertson plays Chief Tucker in a mostly deadpan fashion, making for a less than inspired performance. In stark contrast to Robertson's stereotypical tough guy cop is the manic, fitful, and deeply unsettling performance of Joel Grey as Franklin Wills, the psychic who wants to help Tucker solve the crime but makes Tucker suspicious that Wills may have some direct involvement in the crime. At any rate, Grey's performance is so good that it makes up for Goodman's muddled script and Frank Perry's trite direction. DVD (release date unknown).

sol1218 ***SPOILER ALERT*** Starts off as your average run-of-the-mill psychic helping the police solve a crime flick to later becoming something totally different. Something so strange and baffling that the local police chief Capt. Tucker, Cliff Robertson, starts to wonder if he's not the one who needs some kind of psychiatric therapy. Not the person he later suspects in Maggie Dawson's, Dianne Hull, murder self-confessed super psychic Franklin Wills, Joel Gray.After teacher Maggie Dawson was found murdered in her Volkswagen in a Laural shopping mall parking lot it became apparent that the killer covered his tracks very carefully. Leaving no fingerprints and having no one, in broad daylight, see him the case begins to run cold until out of nowhere Franklin Wills suddenly comes on the scene.Knowing things about Maggie Dawson's murder that only her killer and the police know Wills is taken seriously by Chief Tucker even though he really didn't, or up until then, gave as much as a rat's a** about the occult or clairvoyance that Wills' obviously has. Given all the leeway he needs by Chief Tucker Wills slowly uncovers more and more of the missing pieces of Maggie Dawson's murder. Wills is so good in his ability to track down the clues about what happened to Maggie that fateful afternoon at the Laural Mall that Chief Tucker starts to suspects that maybe, just maybe, he's, Franklin Wills, the person who murdered her!The first half of the movie "Man on a Swing" is pure gold in it's buildup to what Franklin Wills is all about and what exactly he knows about Maggie Dawson's, and later in the film Virginia Segretta, murder. You get the impression, just like Chief Tucker, that Wills is the real deal not some phony trying to make both a name and money for himself masquerading around as a crime solving psychic. It's the last half of the movie that really gets a bit overindulgent in trying to cover all the bases, instead of tracking down Wills' very accurate clues, in finding out if in fact Franklin Wills is really the real McCoy that he claims he is.Wills himself is anything but normal in his actions like going into spasmodic fits while putting himself under self-hypnosis, to find out who Maggie's killer is, but hell he's been right all along so why complain? We have Chief Tucker go so far as to almost kill Wills when he's wife Janet, Dorothy Tristan, felt that he was somehow threatening both her as well as his life.Admittely Wills is somewhat off the wall and even a bit dangerous in his demanding that Janet accept his handkerchief to the point where she became terrified of him. It was as if Wills felt insulted or hurt by Janet in not accepting his gift! Still Wills' never goes so far as even laying a hand or even finger, with the exception of Chief Tucker in showing him how Maggie was strangled to death, on anyone but himself in the movie.*****SPOILER ALERT****The film ends on a sour note with the audience as well as Chief Tucker not really finding out if Wills is real or not in his ability to mentally solve crimes. We can only guess, like Chief Tucker,that Wills is really on to something in his crime solving methods but what that is anybodies guess. All we get from Wills, who's predictions in the movie were dead on, is a sinister grin in that he knows something that we don't know as the movie suddenly comes to an end!

JasparLamarCrabb A really good and very creepy suspense film directed by Frank Perry without a hint of his usual pretense or needless gravitas. Cliff Robertson is a small time police chief investigating a young girl's murder. Joel Grey is a self-proclaimed clairvoyant bent on helping him. They make a great pair, with Robertson's calm playing well off of Grey's frequently hysterical energy. Perry mounts the film in such a way that it gets increasingly creepy as it goes a long. Both Robertson and Grey are excellent as is Dorothy Tristan as Robertson's patient wife. Based on fact, the movie is very open-ended and some may find that frustrating. Nevertheless, it's still very worthwhile. Big Question: did Budweiser finance this movie? Robertson is seen drinking a can of bud in virtually EVERY scene!