Cars on Film--The Seven-Ups
The Seven-Ups is a 1973 film about a New York City detective unit that prosecutes major felonies--those for which the offender can get seven years or more. It's one of those gritty, realistic, darkly-themed early-70s crime dramas like Serpico and The French Connection, though not as well known as it deserves to be. Roy Scheider stars as Buddy Manucci, the leader of the "Seven-Ups" detective squad.
To set up the video clip for you: the "Seven-Ups" are investigating a wave of kidnappings of Mafia associates. One of their number infiltrates a mob funeral wearing a wire, but gets caught up in one of the kidnappings and killed by the bad guys. As the sequence begins, the squad has found their comrade's body in a car trunk. The two hit men who killed him roar out of the parking garage in their Pontiac Grand Ville, and Buddy gives chase in his Ventura coupe.
Director Philip D'Antoni also produced French Connection and Bullitt, and he used same stunt coordinator as he had in those films to stage the chase sequence--Bill Hickman, who appears as the driver of the Grand Ville. Make sure you have your popcorn ready.
I consider this the best chase sequence I've ever seen, for a lot of reasons:
-- The two principal cars are both Pontiacs, which may have been product placement, but this sequence is as far from an example of product placement gone wrong as you can get. As the film's Internet Movie Car Database entry shows, the traffic on the streets is made up of a realistic mix of makes and models such as you'd find in a major American city in the winter of 1973.
-- The cars perform realistically. They handle just like 1970s Detroit iron with stock tires and stock suspensions--which is to say, not very well.
-- The drivers perform realistically. They don't take the curves like they know what they're doing; there's no fancy powersliding, but plenty of oversteer, hesitancy, misjudged turns, and jittery corrections (for example, at 3:20).
-- The continuity is extremely well done for such a complex sequence.
-- The cars don't perform any over-the-top maneuvers. There's no corkscrew jumps off hidden ramps, no rolling along unscathed from frame-bending landings. Everything you see here is 100% plausible.
-- There's almost no dialogue. The script wisely lets the action tell the story, instead of giving the actors a bunch of unrealistic and unnecessary exposition to recite while driving. The drivers wouldn't have time to talk anyway, they're too busy trying to control the oversteer!
-- There's no "dramatic underscoring" music either. What happens on the screen is dramatic enough that we don't need it.
-- The participants act like normal people in an extreme situation. They're not superhuman, and they're not fully in control of their own emotions. The guy in the Grand Ville's passenger seat may be a cold-blooded killer, but he flinches at every near miss (example: 1:14) and he's just as shocked as we are when the Grand Ville nearly plows into the crowd of kids playing jump rope (2:46). For his part, Buddy is acting out of rage, and it shows. He doesn't bother to radio for backup until the black-and-white unit gives chase (just after 5:00), even though he could use the extra help. On the parkway, he is so fixated on catching up to the Grand Ville that he bumbles into the ambush the bad guys set for him using a Greyhound bus (8:18). Then, he gets into a pushing and shoving contest, in which the heavier Grand Ville has the advantage--and barely survives the climactic crash into the stalled semi.
-- For some reason, I've always really liked the shot where the Grand Ville takes the door off the orange compact (5:03). Wikipedia comments:
In the accompanying behind-the-scenes featurette of the 2006 DVD, Hickman can be seen co-ordinating the chase from the street where we also see another example of how memorable (and dangerous) these sequences were: on cue, a stuntman in a parked car opens his door, only for Hickman's vehicle to take it completely off its hinges, where (from the behind-the-scenes footage) we see the door fly off at such a force it could so easily have killed the close-quarter camera team set-up only yards away (it missed them only by chance).
I understand that there are some errors in geography, but unless you are very familiar with the locations, you won't notice them. What remains is one of the best automotive chase sequences ever committed to film, in one of the better crime dramas to come out of the 1970s.
--Cookie the Dog's Owner
Chris Hafner on January 13, 2009 at 08:22 AM
Wow, that's an *intense* car chase. I love it - Roy Scheider looks as if he's about to rip somebody's head off.
You're right that it's realistic. Those cars never get going *that* fast, but they're all over the place. And it's just as much fun watching the other cars on the road. There's a beautiful white Fiat Spider that gets a few moments of glory, but there are some spectacular cars on the road.
My only question - was that a shotgun blast that took the hood off the Ventura? It was quite an impact.
Cookie the Dog's Owner on January 13, 2009 at 08:56 AM
The #2 hit-man's weapon is indeed a sawed-off, double-barrel break-action shotgun--there's a brief scene of him loading it at 7:46-:47.
Hal on January 13, 2009 at 09:04 AM
Probably wouldn't take much to tear that hood off. Looks like he was shooting a 12 gauge shotgun. Loaded with 00 buckshot, that's the equivalent of 16 .38 caliber bullets all at once. The car was already damaged. If he got a good shot to the latch, causing the hood to pop open, the wind would do the rest.
That Car Guy on January 13, 2009 at 09:40 AM
YEAH, that's a great chase scene! At 00:56, you SEE the windshield breaking. Perfect casting... the hoods look like bad guys off of TV's "Batman", and this was shot maybe a year before Roy Scheider became Chief Brody and started chasing sharks. But the director must have hated Opel Kadettes... they sideswiped a blue one and took the door off of another.
I've seen this chase scene many times, but never knew what movie it was from... thanks, Cookie, for letting us know!
Shawn on January 13, 2009 at 04:34 PM
That's a mighty display of body roll and cushy suspensions! Are car chases today in need of special effects because the vehicles are so easy to drive fast? The beheading of the Ventura was a great climax. So did they ever catch the SOBs??
Mike Z. on January 13, 2009 at 08:34 PM
"That's a mighty display of body roll and cushy suspensions!"
No kidding. The great thing about a Hickman chase sequence is the terror induced in those of us who know just how badly those old Detroit pigs handled.
My favorite shot in this one is where the police car goes hopping around the curve onto the bridge. Yikes! Reminds me of my pizza delivery days in my '79 Dodge Aspen.
kevIN on January 14, 2009 at 05:02 PM
that Ventura small block sounds pretty wicked to me - almost like the car is running headers.
John B on January 14, 2009 at 05:36 PM
Nice scene...unlike Bullit the cars keep the damage they get during the chase...aside from misalignmewnt that hitting those curbs would have done.
Collin on January 15, 2009 at 10:07 AM
The Ventura sounds so wicked because the engine noise is dubbed over from Bullitt.
Rip on January 15, 2009 at 01:46 PM
Cool. They actually filmed the piece from about 7:20 to 8:38 on the Saw Mill River Parkway down below my high school. They closed a mile or two of highway to do it. You get a glimpse of the school on the hill after Scheider gets his hood blown off and spins up onto the grass. I was taking a film class at the time and we were all jealous of our instructor, who got to go watch filming up close. Filming switches over to the Taconic Parkey or Rt 9 (can't remember which) after that.
...m... on January 16, 2009 at 09:12 PM
...i finally had an opportunity to watch the clip tonight - nicely done...
...it's interesting that so many of the most iconic car chase sequences hail from an era of lumbering epic body roll: those of us who drove cars of the seventies can readily identify with their vaguely-guided seat-of-your-pants driving experience, like racing a wheelbarrow full of water through a downhill slalom, and certainly that makes for well-projected barely-controlled fury from our point of view, but i wonder if drivers coming from a more modern perspective find it difficult to appreciate the comparably slow-paced and comically sloppy driving in such classic scenes, lacking the necessary experience to feel that visceral engagement by which we intuitively connect with the director's intent...
...m... on January 18, 2009 at 07:12 PM
...i just realised - if that same chase were filmed today, roy scheider's seatbelt would have assured swift decapitation, although one could argue that competent handling could have avoided the collision altogether...
AMcA on January 28, 2009 at 07:49 PM
Breaks my heart to see this. 95% of the cars wander the streets of New York City are domestics. Extravagantly styled huge domestics.
So sad. Now they'd all be Camrys.
That Car Guy on January 29, 2009 at 01:44 PM
AMcA, what may be more heartbreaking is that the Camrys you speak of are made in Georgetown, Kentucky. There IS a thriving American auto industry... too bad it's owned by foreigners.
tomm on June 17, 2010 at 09:55 AM
Yes, this is a highly underated chase scene. "Bullit" gets more attention with the Charger, Mustang, and McQueen. And, no 5 hubcaps flying off one car, here.
The Ventura was maybe a '74 GTO prototype and the big GV had a 455? Also, big Pontiacs had 'radial tuned suspension' option, so they were a bit ahead of their peers. I'd bet a '73 Mercury Marquis or Dodge Monaco would not perform as well.
At the time I was 12-13, and to see brand new cars getting damaged was amazing. On TV shows, 10+ year old rust buckets got smashed.
The CGI car scenes in current movies [F&F] are silly compared to this!
tomm on July 01, 2010 at 09:07 AM
"today...roy scheider's seatbelt would have assured swift decapitation, "
Actually, today, semi-truck trailers have saftey bars [Jane Mansfield bars] on the rear to catch cars. So, yes, safety equipment works.
Bill on July 02, 2010 at 08:52 PM
I belive the pontiac ventura actually had a 455 cube engine option. If that one had it I think the chase may have ended differently.