Rob’s Car Movie Review: The Seven-Ups (1973)

In the late 1960’s and early ‘70s a subtle shift occurred in the type of car movies that Hollywood was distributing.

Previously the domain of low-quality, low-budget, B-movies aimed primarily at the drive-in crowd, a small trickle of high-concept, art-house car movies also saw release during this period.

Bullitt, Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Blacktop, and most notably, William Friedkin’s The French Connection, (which swept the Academy Awards in 1971 with wins for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor) showed that the genre did not have to be solely composed of low-brow screwball comedies or exploitation films.

Instead, this new species of car movie featured A-list actors starring in fairly well-funded productions that were crafted by some of the top filmmakers in the business, and saw the car chases within them brought to new levels of length, sheer thrills, and technical complexity.

The French Connection, in particular, was a massive financial success, and the film’s producers immediately sought to keep their momentum going. Issues that resulted in a slow development of a direct sequel to the movie, however, prompted them to quickly create a spin-off.

That film, while not as critically acclaimed as The French Connection at the time of its release, has nonetheless become a classic of the car movie and cop thriller genre for modern audiences. The film? 1973’s The Seven-Ups, and in this month’s installment of Rob’s Car Movie Review we’re gonna have a look at it.

The promotional one-sheet poster for The Seven-Ups. (Image courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

The Seven-Ups was distributed in the United States by Twentieth Century Fox, and was produced by the eponymous Philip D’Antoni Productions, whose principal was the main producer of The French Connection, and one of the driving forces behind Bullitt.

Instead of handing the reigns over to a seasoned director like Peter Yates as he did on Bullitt, or the aforementioned William Friedkin, who crafted The French Connection, D’Antoni opted to helm this film himself, based on a screenplay by Albert Ruben and Alexander Jacobs.

Movie Producer/Director, Philip D’Antoni. (Photo courtesy of Philip D’Antoni Productions.)

As he did in The French Connection, Roy Scheider stars, this time as Detective Buddy Manucci, based on a real-life New York City cop, Sonny Grasso, who also served as the basis of Scheider’s character, Buddy Russo, in the Friedkin film.

Joining Scheider are The French Connection veterans, Tony Lo Bianco and Bill Hickman, alongside Victor Arnold, Richard Lynch, Joe Spinelli, and Ken Kercheval.

Roy Scheider stars as NYPD Detective Buddy Mannuci. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

The movie focuses on a group of plainclothes New York City detectives, colloquially known as the Seven-Ups, who use wild and unorthodox tactics to ensnare criminals on charges that will yield sentences of seven years or more upon prosecution.

When local mobsters, like loan sharks and shady bail bondsmen, start being kidnapped and held for high dollar ransom by men posing as law enforcement officers, the Seven-Ups take note. Buddy seeks information on what’s going on from his childhood friend and confidential informant, Vito Lucia (Lo Bianco), who informs Buddy that many of the gangsters who have recently been released from captivity will be amongst the mourners at a funeral for a crime boss. Buddy and his men set up surveillance on the services.

Tony Lo Bianco as informant Vito Lucia. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

The stake-out goes awry though, when one of Buddy’s men, Ansel (Kercheval), posing as a chauffer to one of the attendees, is caught wearing a wire and is severely beaten.

Incorrectly assuming that Ansel has been one of the law enforcement officers holding their men for ransom, the mobsters kidnap Ansel, putting him in the trunk of a car that then speeds away from the funeral parlor.

One of the Seven-Ups, Ansel (Ken Kercheval), is kidnapped by mobsters. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

Buddy and one of his men follow the car, and watch as the real kidnappers, Moon and Bo (Lynch & Hickman) hijack the car, under the impression that it is carrying ransom money for the release of one of their captives.

The whole mistaken exchange goes awry, resulting in the shooting death of Ansel. Moon and Bo speed away from the scene in a car with Buddy in hot pursuit.

The kidnappers, Moon (Richard Lynch) and Bo (Bill Hickman). (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

A wild and lengthy high-speed chase ensues but ultimately, Moon and Bo get away when Buddy collides with a truck.

Buddy and the rest of the Seven-Ups are placed on suspension, pending an NYPD Internal Affairs investigation to determine if they were indeed behind all the kidnappings. Undaunted, Buddy and his crew continue to investigate further on their own, which leads them to the house of one of the mobsters who was previously kidnapped and released.

The Seven-Ups. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

Breaking in and confronting the man at gunpoint, Buddy gets the names of all the mobsters who were kidnapped. He quickly realizes that they were all men that Vito had previously given him confidential information on and thus Buddy concludes that Vito is the architect behind the kidnappings, by virtue of being the common thread that links all the crimes together.

Having put all the pieces in place, Buddy must concoct a plan to lure Moon and Bo in, as well as his old friend Vito.

The film depicts hard men within a decaying milieu. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

The Seven-Ups exhibits a style of filmmaking that was pervasive in the early 1970s, and has since, for the most part, disappeared. It is a highly grounded, gritty, realistic movie that captures the hard essence of the streets, without all of the histrionics, special effects, and on-the-nose dialogue of today’s actioners. Much like its contemporaries, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico, it depicts complex anti-heroes interacting in a dystopian cityscape strewn with trash, grime, and general urban decay.

This is exemplified by the cinematography, rife with golf ball-sized film grain and oversaturated colors that, combined with a heavy reliance on jerky, handheld shots, gives the viewer a sense of being inside the world and time the film takes place in. Having lived in New York City during that era as a kid, I can attest to the film’s success in capturing of the city’s less-than-halcyon state.

New York City was a tough place in the early ’70s, and the film’s cinematography captures it perfectly. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

The editing is likewise proficient, while the sound design, full of 1970s stock gunshots, tire squeals, and motors revving (some borrowed directly from the soundtrack of Bullitt) is pure perfection for the nostalgic modern viewer.

While the plot is often somewhat obtuse and the pacing a bit laconic at times, it nonetheless lets its characters be the impetus for the action as all well-defined characters should. There’s no deus ex machina moments or Hollywood contrivances to cover holes in the plot to be had here.

The entire ensemble cast is superb. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

The acting is also superb, with Scheider, young and slender, putting in one of his best performances ever, and the rest of the ensemble nearly rising to his level.

And then there’s the seminal scene in the movie: the pursuit.

In addition to playing Bo on-screen, Bill Hickman was also the movie’s stunt coordinator and one of the stunt drivers. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

It must not have been easy for D’Antoni to top the chase efforts in his prior films, Bullitt and The French Connection, but luckily he had Bill Hickman on hand during production, who played the role of Bo. Acting was actually a second profession for Hickman, as his true vocation was being one of the top stunt drivers and stunt coordinators in movie history.

Having worked together on Bullitt and The French Connection, in which Hickman did all the coordinating and a fair amount of the stunt driving (he also played the driver of the bad guys’ infamous Dodge Charger in the former film), D’Antoni and Hickman strove to create another tantalizing chase for The Seven-Ups. And indeed, they succeeded.

Buddy drives a 1973 Pontiac Ventura Sprint hatchback. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

Occurring at the midpoint of the movie, the chase, featuring Buddy in a silver 1973 Pontiac Ventura Sprint hatchback packing a 175 horsepower 5.7-liter V8, versus Moon and Bo in a ponderous, black ’73 Pontiac Grand Ville with a 215 pony 6.6-liter V8, lasts nearly 10 minutes and sees the pair of vehicles careen from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, across the George Washington Bridge, and then up Route 9 in New Jersey.

The baddies roll in a ’73 Pontiac Grand Ville. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

Although the production received help from the NYPD throughout the production, when it came to the pursuit sequence, which took nearly four weeks to film, the crew was forced to get shots when they could, as the extreme danger that the stunt driving required would not have received approval. “We were great at stealing shots,” D’Antoni recalled in an interview.

“You cannot rehearse a chase in the city of New York. Once the police department sees what you’re rehearsing, they’re not going to let you do it for real,” said Randy Jurgensen, one of the film’s stunt drivers.

The chase features wild weaving and dodging through city traffic. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

Indeed, during filming, the cars often exceeded speeds of 90 mph on the narrow streets of Manhattan, catapulting over slopes, dodging cross traffic, and weaving through real city traffic. There were multiple close calls, including when a car door flew off and nearly struck the camera crew, and a moment when the stunt drivers were pulled over at gunpoint by a real NYPD cruiser because the uninitiated officers thought they were witnessing a bank robbery getaway.

D’Antoni’s masterful direction of the action is most evident in two scenes, one in which the drivers nearly mow down some children playing in the street, and another at the chase’s climax, when Buddy crashes.

In the first instance, D’Antoni widely framed the cars at high speed, and then cross-cut to tight inserts of the children multiple times so as to maximize the tension in a quasi-Hitchcockian manner.

In the latter – Buddy’s crash – the lens and camera position that D’Antoni chose to capture the car plowing into the back of a parked tractor trailer and shearing the entire greenhouse off is simply brilliant. It amplifies the utter violence of the wreck and is truly shocking to the viewer.

The chase climaxes on Route 9 in New Jersey. (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox.)

According to Hickman, who designed the stunt, the moment was intended to be a tribute to Jayne Mansfield, who was sadly killed when her car was involved in such an incident.

Actor Richard Lynch, who played Moon, remembered: “Everybody stood by, and [stunt driver} Jerry Summers really plowed into that damn thing. It was one of the longest moments I can recall. Nobody moved. We waited, and then everybody started rushing to the car. He got a little hurt, the stuntman, he was a little damaged, He got a lot of glass damage. But for the most part, he knew what he was doing.”

Buddy’s crash at the end of the chase is violent and shocking. (Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.)

While not as finely-crafted a film as The French Connection, The Seven-Ups is nonetheless a prime example of 1970’s cop noir.

For me, it’s a shame that it has become a somewhat forgotten film, as all aspects of its production are top notch. The chase is, in my humble opinion, the best ever captured on film, especially when one takes into account that every frame of it was real, with no special effects employed.

As such, I have no hesitation giving The Seven-Ups a rating of seven out of ten pistons, and if you’ve never seen it, suggest you do so immediately.