THE SEVEN-UPS are a team of plainclothes New York City detectives, not seven but four, a tight-knit quartet whose rule-twisting tactics bust crooks with charges serious enough to send them to the slam for at least seven years. Two years after 1971’s The French Connection its producer Phil D’Antoni took on director duty as well, bringing along Connection‘s compelling co-star Roy Scheider in his first lead role, composer Don Ellis to add an edgy soundtrack, ex-detective-turned technical advisor Sonny Grosso, and stunt coordinator/driver Bill Hickman, who worked up another wild chase sequence. *

‘Buddy Manucci’ (Scheider) and his partners are used to getting flack from other cops about their cowboy tactics, but their arrest record/convictions tally is hard to dismiss. Buddy gets snitch tips from undertaker-with-connections ‘Vito Lucia’ (Tony Lo Bianco, in relaxed mode), a childhood pal. The case load increases along with confusion when a series of kidnappings and shakedowns occur, with racketeers the targets. The hits are done by men posing as policemen. Suspicion in the air is replaced by lead, the flying variety.

Straight-ahead, gritty tough stuff that doesn’t overkill with raunchy dialogue and shootouts that are bigger than Iwo Jima, or indulge in melodramatic subplots about dejected spouses, booze-fueled nihilistic philosophizing, laying on ethnic angles that exhaust the vowel supply. Ex-Chicago cop-turned-actor Dennis Farina cited this 1973 entry as being closer to reality than the usual Saturday night jive.

When the warning “Oh oh. We got company. Hold on!” arrives, buckle up for one of the more famous of the era’s chase scenes, a 10-minute screecher when Scheider goes hell-on-wheels after bad guys Richard Lynch (creep nasty) and Bill Hickman (icy cool), in a speed duel between two ’73 Pontiacs, a Grand Ville bearing Lynch and Hickman and a Ventura Sprint coupe steered by Scheider. In time-honored tradition, geographical alignment takes a back seat to dramatic purposes as the zooming takes in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the George Washington Bridge, New York’s Taconic State Parkway and Saw Mill River Parkway as well as the Palisades Interstate Parkway in New Jersey.

Hard cases, wrapped for $2,425,000, taking down spot #32 in ’73 with a suitcase holding the bag of $12,100,000. Featuring Larry Haines, Ken Kercheval, Victor Arnold, Jerry Leon and Joe Spinell. 103 minutes.

* Bill Hickman, 52, had also done the knockout stunt driving in Bullitt, opening the flood throttle for the great auto intoxications  that gassed thru the 70’s and beyond.  Hickman, first on the scene when his friend James Dean was crash-killed in 1955, did acting bits in 73 movies and 45 TV series between 1943 and 1973, The Seven-Up’s his last on-screen appearance. He died at 65 in 1986, claimed not by collisions but cancer.