The Seven-Ups

The Seven-Ups
1973 movie poster
Directed by	Philip D'Antoni
Produced by	Philip D'Antoni
Written by	Albert Ruben Alexander Jacobs (screenplay) Sonny Grosso (story)
Starring	Roy Scheider Tony Lo Bianco Larry Haines Richard Lynch
Music by	Don Ellis
Cinematography	Urs Furrer
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	December 14, 1973
Running time	103 Min.
Country	USA
Language	English

The Seven-Ups is a 1973 American film released by 20th Century Fox. It stars Roy Scheider as a renegade policeman who is the leader of The Seven-Ups, a police team who uses dirty, unorthodox tactics to snare their quarry. Produced by Philip D'Antoni, who also took on his sole-directing credit as director of this film. D'Antoni was responsible for producing other gritty cop films as Bullitt and The French Connection. Several people who worked on The French Connection were also involved in this film, such as Scheider and composer Don Ellis. Due to the similarity of the name to the beverage 7 Up, members of the cast posed in front of a 7-Up truck to advertise the film.^{[citation needed]}

Plot

Buddy Manucci (played by Scheider and is a loose remake of the character of Cloudy he played in The French Connection, a character who also used dirty tactics to capture his enemies) has been getting flak from the higher-ups in the New York City police force he works for because his team of renegade policemen, known as The Seven-Ups (the name comes from the fact that most convictions done by the team heralds jail sentences to criminals from Seven years and Up) has been using unorthodox methods to capture criminals. Also, lately, there has been a rash of kidnappings. The twist is that it seems that only upper echelon criminals (Mafioso and white collar types) are the ones being kidnapped. This leads to many plot twists in which Manucci tries to figure out the puzzle, with help supplied to him by an informant (Tony Lo Bianco), who turns out to be untrustworthy, leading to the death of one of the seven-up officers. Manucci figures out the puzzle, but not before The Seven-Ups splinter from the fallout of the film's events, and Manucci's life is in jeopardy.

Production Locations

Filming locations feature uptown Manhattan and The Bronx. Buddy makes his rounds on and around Arthur Avenue and the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in The Bronx. The funeral home sequence where Ansel is abducted was filmed one block over, at the side entrance to Lucia Brothers Funeral Home on the corner of E 184th Street and Hoffman Street. Buddy and partner are doing a stake-out from an upstairs apartment across the street . In the background you can see the Third Avenue "L" train which has since been dismantled. Aside from the "L", and that the one-way vehicle traffic on Hoffman Street and Arthur Avenue has since been reversed, the locations remain today for the most part as they did in the movie. The funeral procession then rides on Pelham Parkway. Vito pays-off Moon at the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx; Buddy and Vito meet at the track field between Dewitt Clinton High School and Bronx High School of Science, and object to the new Tracey Towers housing project looming in the background. Max Kalish's house is at W 246th Street and Fieldston Road, Riverdale, Bronx.

Chase Scene

As he did with Bullitt and The French Connection, Philip D'Antoni again utilized the work of stunt driver Bill Hickman (who also has a small role in the film) to create another chase sequence for this film. Upper Manhattan is the place of choice for this sequence, which was edited by Jerry Greenberg who also has a producer credit here and who won Academy Awards for his editing work on Bullitt and The French Connection.

The chase sequence is regarded as one of cinema's greats, and is located near the middle of the film. Hickman performed yet another memorable chase sequence in which he drove the car being chased by Roy Scheider. The chase itself lends heavily to the Bullitt chase, with the two cars bouncing down the gradients of uptown New York (a la San Francisco's steep hills in the earlier film) with Hickman's 1973 Pontiac Grand Ville sedan pursued at wheel-breaking speed by Scheider's 1973 Pontiac Ventura Sprint coupe. While Scheider did some of his own driving, most of it was done by Hollywood stunt man Jerry Summers.

Everything is rendered to painstaking detail, the gritty realism and danger of each tire-busting slide, accompanied by close camera angles and camera-cars moving at high speed, parallel to the action car, added to which an almost complete lack of dialogue and music. Location shooting was done in upper Manhattan, on the George Washington Bridge, and on the Palisades and Taconic parkways.

In the accompanying behind-the-scenes featurette of the 2006 DVD release of the film, 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). The end of the chase was Bill's own idea, an 'homage' to the death of Jayne Mansfield, where Scheider's car (driven by Summers) smashes into the back of an eighteen-wheel truck, peeling off its roof like a tin of sardines.

External links

• The Seven-Ups at the Internet Movie Database
• The Seven-Ups at Allmovie
• The Seven-Ups at Allmovie