(1973)
3
Bruce Eder
"What do you think it is out there, some kind of a game?" asks police detective Jim McAndrew (Ralph Meeker) of traffic helicopter reporter Harry Walker (David Janssen). "Yeah, and it's the only game in town," Walker replies, as he pursues a murderous band of bank robbers. That sums up the character of the hero in this surprisingly rewarding made-for-television film, which will please action-adventure fans with its impressive and extensive flying sequences and helicopter combat sequence, but which also contains some interesting character details. Janssen's Walker is a man who longs for the one time in his life when he felt he was accomplishing something, as a young pilot during World War II -- he listens to late '30s and early '40s pop and jazz, and wears a World War II pilot's jacket while flying on his one-man traffic helicopter job. And he's up against a trio of Vietnam vets-turned-bank robbers, who wear long hair and have beards and could pass for Weather Underground-types if this movie had been made, say, two years earlier. Either way, the generational conflict is set up, a combat pilot of one era, with his tarnished visions of honor and romance, up against a crack team of veterans 30 years younger, who are pretty cavalier about committing murder. One wishes that Walker didn't quote Humphrey Bogart from Casablanca to a hostage that he rescues, as it belabors a point, but the makers have been pretty clever in their use of period details elsewhere. When Walker is racing along in hot pursuit, the soundtrack uses a portion of what sounds like the extended break section of the Benny Goodman version of "Sing Sing Sing" and elsewhere we get snatches of late '30s jazz-based pop. Meeker and Elayne Heilveil (playing Teresa Jane, the hostage) have the only other two developed roles, and Meeker's is the better one, as a contemporary of Walker's who is a little more at peace with the passage of time. Overall, this is the kind of surprising made-for-television feature that used to turn up in the early '70s, not quite good enough to have been a theatrical movie, but good enough to have been a B-movie that outclassed the top-of-the-bill A-film with which it would have been paired.
Birds of Prey on AllMovie
Birds of Prey (1973)
