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Overrated

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Blistering performances.

A fine cop thriller loosely based on the Kitty Genovese case of the early 1960s (Genovese was murdered in NYC, her screams ignored by apathetic neighbors). Raul Julia is a cop hunting a serial rapist/murderer who's terrorizing a Brooklyn neighborhood. His first killing is witnessed and ignored by a slew of nervous Nellie's who simply do not want to get involved. With a great screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, director Richard Heffron elicits some terrific acting from not only Julia but the all-star supporting cast including Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Tina Louise, Tony Dow and Nancy Walker. They all play against type, with Louise a real standout. Art Carney, Sally Kirkland and John P. Ryan are in it too. The superb music score is by Gil Melle.

Above average movie based on the Kitty Genovese murder case of 1964. Kitty Genovese was a lesbian and so is the first murdered victim in this movie. Movie shows how callous people can be by ignoring a poor girl's murder. It is an all star cast, which has Dinahann Carroll as a potential suicide victim, Tina Louise as a lesbian, Ed Asner as a jealous husband, Cloris Leachman as nymphomaniac wife, Lucie Arnaz, Lucille Ball's daughter, as a potential murder victim, Art Carney and Nancy Walker play an older couple who ignore the murder. Kate Jackson has a nice cameo but this is clearly Raul Julia's movie. It is also nice to see Helen Hunt as a child actress and Tony Dow, Wally on Leave it to Beaver, in a scene as well. Sadly, this was a true case. Of all the cameos, Tina Lousie gives the best performance as the lesbian, ex-girlfriend of the victim, who is taking in to be questioned. What would Ginger Grant say? Enjoy this fun movie.

This is one of those typical movie-of-the-week efforts that TV networks put out in the 1970s, chockful of stars from various TV shows doing cameos. In this one you'll see Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Kate Jackson, Tina Louise, Art Carney, etc (even Tony Dow as a suspect!). Most of the people are witnesses to a brutal murder but don't want to get involved in helping the police. Raul Julia is the cop heading the investigation.The movie never made up its mind as to what story it wanted to tell. Does it want to be a straight-up murder investigation or does it want to get into why the bystanders wouldn't help the victim? The movie spends about 40 min on the latter story, which is the more interesting one, and finally just reverted to a usual cop chase to resolve the story.To make the show a little more controversial, Tina Louise plays the lesbian lover of the victim and she becomes a suspect in the case. But all of the "stars" in this show are given one, maybe two scenes at the most. Tina does very well in her cameo, though. I got the sense that this movie was being put out as a pilot of sorts for a possible Raul Julia cop series. He's the typical single father/cop and they even set up a very brief love interest when he meets Kate Jackson who immediately disappears from the story.Interesting how many awards the actors in this show had gotten in their careers. Carney, Leachman and then-kid Helen Hunt all got Oscars. Asner had a shelf of Emmys and Tina Louise once got a Golden Globe. It must've been a pretty easy paycheck to get them into this movie although Carney acquits himself very well in a serious role in huge contrast to the audience's memory of him as the idiotic Ed Norton on "The Honeymooners".

This film was one of the typical seventies crisis-of-the-week type dramas. However, I have always suspected it was at least loosely based on the infamous murder of Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, which occurred in March 1964 in Queens, New York. Ms. Genovese was murdered in an almost identical fashion to the victim in this film -- attacked in the courtyard of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, screaming in vain for help while "thirty-eight witnesses" ignored her. Since this movie was filmed a scant decade or so after the actual case, perhaps there hadn't been sufficient time for reflection on the proper way to tell the story for the ages; perhaps Ms. Genovese's family refused to allow any association; or perhaps the filmmakers were just looking for a quick buck.What they did to "spice up" the story was to add into the plotline the fact that the murder victim, "Jenny," was a lesbian; that her former girlfriend (played by Tina Louise -- imagine "the movie star" chasing Mary Ann all over Gilligan's island with perverse intentions! say it ain't so! LOL) has a history of violent and threatening behavior; and that among the neighbors who heard Jenny's dying screams are an immigrant couple from an unspecified Eastern European country who fear deportation; a sleazy housewife played by Cloris Leachman who is carrying on an affair behind her husband's back; and a married couple with Nancy Walker playing the wife, apparently having gotten lost on the way to the Bounty commercial shoot. Also look for a very young Helen Hunt, playing hotshot detective Raul Julia's daughter.It was the seventies; what can I say?