The Onion Field (1979)

(On Cable TV, January 2022) Hailing from the heyday of gritty dark depressing movies, 1970s exemplar The Onion Field is the kind of film that Hollywood explicitly rejected when it rejuvenated itself in the 1980s—a slow, uneasy crime drama based on a true story of a cop killer and the destruction left in the wake of a murder. Interminably paced, the film does pick up whenever a very young James Wood, apparently doing a Richard Widmark impression, shows up as the charismatic antagonist. Mindful of showing everything before and after its pivotal murder, The Onion Field (written by crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, adapting his own true-crime book) takes care to set up its characters, the elements leading up to the murder, the ensuing judicial and personal trials that follow, and barely ends as characters, years later, come to grips with what happened. It’s certainly not meant as a tidy genre story of crime and punishment—it doesn’t help that much of the story chronicles how the murderers played the legal system afterward to escape the initial punishment. That does build some frustration in the film’s goals—this is not a comforting viewing and viewers may want to set their expectations as such. But so it went with movies during the 1970s, especially as they strayed from simple genre formulas.