Q&A

Reviewing Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast last month made me draw a comparison between Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of the Agatha Christie novel. Branagh owed a great debt to Lumet’s film for its cast of luminaries of the day, like Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, and Vanessa Redgrave. Branagh countered with the present day’s idea of movie stars, like Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Penelope Cruz. Despite the advantages of CGI (which Branagh used unashamedly), Lumet’s analog version, which I saw in a theater in 1974, now seems alluringly bright in my memory. 

Ever since Serpico, Sidney Lumet had been going after dirty cops. Frank Serpico and Danny Cielo, the protagonist of Prince of the City, were actual people who gave up their careers as New York City police officers by testifying in court against their fellow cops. Aloysius Francis “Al” Reilly, the young deputy district attorney in Lumet’s Q&A (1990), is the fictional creation of Edwin Torres, a former New York state Supreme Court justice who turned to writing fictional thrillers (Torres also wrote Carlito’s Way). Reilly is green, idealistic, the son of a career cop killed in the line of duty. Nick Nolte plays Mike Brennan, a legendary cop, the “first one through the door, the window or the skylight,” and a monstrously brutal and corrupt man. Brennan kills a Puerto Rican drug dealer and an investigation is ordered by the homicide District Attorney, Kevin Quinn. He appoints Reilly to the case. It doesn’t take him very long to discover just how dirty Brennan is and his investigation eventually implicates Quinn, who is preparing to run for state attorney general. Quinn once belonged to a street gang and murdered a rival gang member. Brennan was directed by Quinn to murder all of his former fellow gang members. 

Q&A is about two things – the sometimes displaced loyalty of cops to one another and the pervasive racism among them. Their racism is evident in the racial slurs or “epithets” that pepper their talk. Brennan is the worst offender, even though fellow cops deny it, claiming that Brennan hates everyone and is an “equal opportunity hater.” 

Three actors dominate the film. Timothy Hutton was never a commanding presence but early on in the film it becomes clear that his lack of presence was the reason he was cast – just as Reilly’s inexperience was the reason he got the job on the Brennan case. In other words, he was being set up for failure. Hutton does well with his Bronx accent and is evidently tough enough. Armand Assante plays Puerto Rican gang lord Roberto “Bobby Tex” Texador with panache. He handles the ethnic bravura of the character with ease, coming off as Hispanic much better than Al Pacino did in Scarface (both Assante and Pacino are Italian-American) and without having to go over the top. He is confident and proud in his position, especially when he figures out that his wife is an ex-girlfriend of Reilly’s. 

But the movie is centered, overwhelmingly weighted, on Nick Nolte as Brennan. The way he exploits his size and takes hold of everyone he’s talking to, whether it’s a fellow cop or a transvestite prostitute, is instinctively intimidating. He told Marc Maron in an interview that he wore lifts in his shoes that shifted his weight forward and grew his moustache so that it concealed his mouth when he spoke. 

Lumet’s daughter, Jenny, plays Nancy Bosch, a Puerto Rican whose father is black (Jenny Lumet is the granddaughter of Lena Horne) with sufficient conviction. It was Reilly’s reaction to the discovery that her father was black that drove her away from him. And Patrick O’Neal is all respectable veneer as Quinn. When Reilly threatens to expose the truth about his past near the film’s conclusion, his threat to take away the pension that supports his widowed mother is delivered so coldly, and the way he responds when Reilly mentions going to the press by singing “Que sera sera” tells him just how invulnerable he has made himself. 

A number of other actors smoothly inhabit their roles, especially Luis Guzmán as Detective Luis Valentin and Paul Calderón as Roger “Dodger” Montalvo. And in the role of Jose Montalvo, a transgender entertainer who is murdered by Brennan, International Chrysis (her stage name) is compelling. It was her final appearance. She died of complications from a botched breast implant operation a month before the film’s release. 

Perhaps because it’s based on a work of fiction, Q&A doesn’t have the power of Prince of the City. By the time the chief assistant DA Bloomenfeld tells Reilly that the case against Quinn has been dropped because it’s “too big”, I could see it coming. But Reilly should’ve seen it coming, too. After everything he’s seen and heard in the Brennan investigation, it doesn’t follow that he would just quit and fly to a private island off Puerto Rico to woo a grieving Nancy. The film ends inconclusively as he reaches out to touch her hand. 

More than most other films, Q&A lives in its locations. It’s New York as a native sees it and feels it. You hear street names dropped that sound familiar only because of the hundreds of movies that have been set in New York, even if they were filmed elsewhere, like a Hollywood sound stage. Lumet’s cinematographer, Andrzej Bartkowiak lights the world of the film with as much verity as he lit Boston in The Verdict. In his review Stanley Kauffmann, another New Yorker, put it succinctly: 

Lumet has a gift for seeing New York, inside and out—particularly when he has Bartkowiak’s camera, as here and in Serpico and Prince of the City. If you want glossy New York, see Woody Allen’s Manhattan. If you want the New York that makes people’s faces look the way they do in the subway, see Lumet.*

* The New Republic, May 21, 1990.