Lance goes in
Christopher Hudson
A film which has had more than one press showing in London during the last month is Big Lance ('X' general release). Lance is a six-foot black policeman in a Harlem precinct. H'e is a natty dresser and, as it turns out, an expert in the martial arts. Jerry, his white colleague and close friend, is shot dead as he goes hunting down the dope kings behind a tightly-organised narcotics ring, and Lance beats half to death a pusher he suspects of being implicated. Suspended from duty pending investigation by his superiors, following a report from a police lieutenant on the drug squad to whom the pusher squealed, Big Lance, pausing only to comfort his dead partner's widow, goes .bare-fisted after revenge.
After the shredding of a pimpcum-restaurant owner in his own chicken mincer, the trail leads to a Las Vegas casino-hotel. Menaced by hitmen as he beds the beautiful black chick who sings topless in the nightclub downstairs, Lance carves his way destructively through flesh and furniture, finally choking to death the casino owner (who appears to be the local syndicate boss) by stuffing counterfeit dollar bills down his throat. Then to Detroit, where another syndicate boss runs a martial arts school behind a used car lot, and Lance has a chance to show his proficiency with the bamboo sticks. Returning to his apartment he finds in his bathroom a lady with the unlikely name of Laura Galore. Planted by the racketeers as an informer, a few strenuous sessions in bed are enough to make Laura change her mind, and she gives Lance enough information to lead him back to his partner's widow.
But he arrives too late — she is dead of a forcibly-administered heroin overdose — and the murderers he pursues in a helicopter over the rooftops of Harlem fall to their death before he can make them talk. Lance is forced to set a trap, with himself as the bait, and an exciting car chase ensues, overland from New York to the Los Angeles docks. His victim, finally cornered under a six-ton lOrry going the wrong way down a narrow street, turns out to be the narcotics lieutenant from Lance's own precinct. Before he dies from his multiple injuries, he lays
finger on the Mafia kingpin of the whole outfit, Dutch Domino. whose headquarters are behind a funeral parlour under a Los Angeles elevated freeway intersection. Lance goes in. Five minutes later, when the police arrive, 3 single body is brought out in 3 coffin — whose?
Rod Lautrec is impressivelY
savage as Big Lance, his controlled screams, as he chops clown another lawbreaker, echoing across half Harlem. Tiffany grSmith as Laura Galore shows the , eat emotional sensitivity as she sub' mits to Lance's belligerent but tli; timately tender attentions; arl"A Max Arbuckle is sinister an' gravelly-voiced as ever in the cameo role of the Mafia Mr Big. Siggy Marciano, the real-life coP who turned film-maker after he, bust open a major international narcotics ring and was given the I red carpet treatment 13Y Hollywood, directs with gusto. Another lawman turned outlay/ is Santee ('AA' Columbia). This time we are back in the wild West, around the turn of the centurY, which means stagecoaches, hearth-and-home, whores flouncy petticoats and a code 01 honour exhumed and dusted down, for our attention. It starts oil promisingly enough with nothing happening except people sitting around in the sun, which is probably how it was for mall people in the wild West, but a plo ' emerges when a bounty hunter, chases and kills a gang °I desperadoes, leaving alive the son of one of them, Jody. Jody swears revenge, but it doesn't last long, after Santee turns out to be not so much a° evil bounty hunter as an upright, stern and gentle family man. Ile handed in his sheriff's badge after. his own young son was murdered by the Banner gang and now Ile takes Jody into the bosom of his family, teaching him how to break in horses and shoot men at more than point-blank range. The Banner gang rides into town; 1 killing the incumbent sheriff, ano Jody rides after them to bring them to justice. Santee had sworn_ to leave his gun on its mount' above the family hearth, but that old code of honour will brook a° denial, and he rides off to hat Jody against the gang. Late tha night one man rides back to th,te hranch, acoffin in the cart behin hn _ whose? I complained last week or the week before about films like Bigr Lance pre-empting the market f° good Westerns, but Santee Is neither a good nor a bad Westel merely a conventional one whie,A offers no reasons why it shoul" not have been made more cheaPlYs as a television film. Glenn Ford a Santee, Dana Wynter as his Put: upon wife and Michael Burns Jody are perfectly adequate fn their roles, but the film lacks 01 originality or the energy ante commitment needed to reaniina" the old conventions.
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