Sub-Cult 2.0 # 10 Freebie and the Bean (1974)

Given my love for New Hollywood, morbid fascination with mismatched buddy cop comedies and affection for The Stunt Man it seems a little perverse that it has taken me this long in my life and career to finally get around to seeing Richard Rush’s 1974 Freebie & the Bean, the New Hollywood blockbuster that created the template for the contemporary mismatched buddy cop comedy. 

I’ll see just about any mismatched buddy cop movie, no matter how shitty or formulaic, just as I’m a sucker for show-biz comedies no matter how dire because I am a fan of the sub-genre as a whole as much as I am for individual films. Yet it took a mismatched buddy cop comedy theme month for me to finally take the plunge and experience the freewheeling craziness of Freebie and the Bean, perhaps because my first experience with the film came when I saw an excerpt from it included in the seminal documentary The Celluloid Closet as an example of Hollywood’s casual and not so casual homophobia. 

The excerpt featured tough, xenophobic and homophobic cop Freebie (James Caan, all hairy-chested machismo and brute force) fighting a transvestite with super-powered kicks in a football stadium bathroom before dispatching the gender-bending criminal with wildly excessive force, shooting five times when one or two bullets would do. 

Freebie and the Bean was problematic before the phrase became a ubiquitous buzzword. Rush’s film was similarly politically incorrect before the age of political correctness. It’s as cavalier in its treatment of sexuality, race and gender as its anti-heroes are careless about bending, breaking and ignoring the rules, and the law, whenever it suits their immediate needs. 

Mismatched buddy cop formula dictates that mismatched cops must be paired together by a hotheaded superior so that they can undergo a time-tested, well-worn arc where instant tension and conflict leads gradually to friendship and cooperation once two seemingly very different lawmen (and it almost invariably is lawmen, not women) realize just how much they have in common, not the least of which is their obsession with solving the big case, even after the aforementioned captain angrily demands their guns and badges in a moment of pique.  

Freebie and the Bean opens with its titular maverick detectives already partners. They aren’t just partners professionally; they’re also best friends who seemingly know everything about each other. Their conversations have an easy, unforced rhythm, the zing and zip of real life.

Rush’s seminal buddy cop comedy underlines just how essential chemistry and star-power are to this particular sub-genre. A successful mismatched buddy cop comedy doesn’t just require good actors: it requires movie stars with larger than life personas that supersede any individual role. That’s why Robert Carradine was such a bust in Number One With a Bullet, the first entry in mismatched buddy cop comedy month; he had no persona of his own to bring to a role written for, and partially by James Belushi, so he floundered in a part that he was egregiously wrong for. 

But a successful mismatched buddy cop movie requires chemistry as much, if not more, than star-power. We need to be mesmerized by the relationship between our wildly mismatched leads. That’s one of the many areas where Freebie and the Bean excels. Caan’s Det. Sgt. Tim "Freebie" Walker and Arkin’s Sgt. Dan "Bean" Delgado feel like they’ve been bantering crankily and merrily forever. They’re clearly two people who are happier arguing with each other than they would be agreeing with anybody else. 

The friendship between Caan’s Freebie and Arkin’s Bean transcends their job. The movie shares with the work of super-fan Quentin Tarantino a love of language, of storytelling, of talking for the sake of talking and the joy of talking as well. These men love each other as much as they hate the criminal scum of San Francisco, which is a lot. 

Casting a Jewish actor of Eastern European heritage like Arkin for the role of a Hispanic might seem culturally insensitive at the very least until you realize that, in a surprising development, when Freebie and the Bean was made not a single living Mexican was pursuing a career as an actor. Not a single one. So the filmmakers were of course forced to cast caucasian actors to play Bean and his wife Consuelo Delgado, who is played by Valerie Harper, who you might know from her absence from the television program Valerie’s Family. 

Freebie is an ethically challenged bruiser whose glib banter includes a never-ending string of racial and ethnic slurs but the movie seems to think that Freebie can’t genuinely be as racist as he professes to be if his best friend and partner is Mexican, which represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of racism. 

The mismatched buddy cop movies that followed reverently in Freebie and the Bean’s footsteps often pitted a by-the-book, uptight detective against a maverick who plays by their own rules but get results. Freebie and the Bean however focuses on Freebie, a maniac maverick who plays by his own rules and doesn’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process, as long as it’s someone who falls under the exceedingly broad category of “bad guy” while Bean, with his tie and family and neurotic ways certainly looks like a by-the-book, uptight detective but is actually maniac maverick who plays by his own rules and doesn’t care who gets hurt or killed.

These guys don’t have a good-cop, bad-cop dynamic going so much as they have a bad cop, worse cop routine. Freebie is a lunatic who will beat the shit out of criminals at the slightest provocation; the same is true of Bean.

Freebie and the Bean opens with its anti-heroes deep into a case involving big-time racketeer Red Myers, who they are asked to protect and keep alive by apoplectic D.A. Walter W. Cruikshank (Alex Rocco). 

There’s a great comic moment when Rocco’s enraged lawyer is chewing out the anti-heroes and he angrily barks at them to take a seat even though they’re both already seated. Caan and Arkin play it perfectly, looking at each other in quiet amazement but saying nothing because nothing they could say could quelch his incandescent rage.

Freebie and the Bean’s influence on all of the ramshackle, casually Fascist mismatched buddy cop comedies that followed is hard to overstate. But Rush’s strangely forgotten celebration of excessive force and gleeful, unapologetic police brutality also feels like an overlooked landmark in the cinema of comic destruction. 

A good half decade before John Landis destroyed much of Illinois in the process of filming The Blues Brothers Rush was using the deep pockets and bottomless resources of Warner Brothers to stage wild automotive slapstick that reduces San Francisco to a wild tangle of violently colliding bumper cars. The future director of The Stunt Man proves predictably adept at orchestrating stunts of great quantity and quality.

The chases and crashes of Freebie and the Bean are genuinely exciting, bordering on exhilarating and winningly comic but these adrenaline-pumping set-pieces of glorious automative destruction planted the seeds for a thousand arbitrary car chases in movies that slavishly followed the formula Freebie and the Bean played a big role in both introducing and fleshing out.

Freebie and the Bean has a curious problem: it might just be too entertaining. From the very beginning, the enduring, wildly commercial strengths of the mismatched buddy cop comedy and its appalling weaknesses were inextricably intertwined. 

It’s not particularly unusual for action movies and dramas to ask audiences to root for the bad guy, implicitly or explicitly. In the case of many mismatched buddy cop comedies the bad guys are also the good guys; they’re anti-heroes as well as villains. That describes Freebie and the Bean’s titular protagonist as well. 

Rush’s inventive action-comedy makes brute force and wanton destruction way too much fun. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the film’s admirers include such problematic faves as Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick, who reportedly deemed it his favorite film of 1974. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Freebie and the Bean but it left a sour aftertaste. The mismatched buddy cop movies created from its seemingly slapdash but surprisingly solid template would share almost all of the movie’s faults and few of its virtues, particularly originality. 

The many elements of Freebie and the Bean that would become well-worn cliches with time were still fresh when it was released. So in some ways Rush’s wild, anarchic romp is a victim of its own success and influence. There are lots of movies that resemble Freebie and the Bean in big and little ways but at the time it had the benefit of surprise. 

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