The Seven-Ups
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
New York City circa 1973. A business type enters an antique store as a heavily bearded type is shown upstairs by one of the store's owners. A burly deliveryman with a glass water cooler bottle enters and trips over the businessman, smashing up several antiques. A loud argument ensues and uniformed police must intervene - until a painter breaks into the office upstairs and returns with a box wrapped in grocery paper - and containing large wads of counterfeit money.Thus has The Seven-Ups - a special unit led by Buddy Manucci and including Officers Ansel (the phony painter), Borelli, and Mingo (the phony deliverman) - broken up another area of criminal activity. But their unorthodox methods upset Lt. Jerry Hanes, who has confronted the team's commanding officer Inspector Gilson before about their methods only for Gilson to fully stand up for his men. The controversy upsets Manucci, though he is reassured by his CO's endorsement.Presently the team is gathering information on a crooked bail bondsman, Festa, as his name has turned up on a wiretap. Buddy consults one of his Mob informants, funeral parlor owner Vito Lucia, who presently does not have any new information to give.Later mobster Max Kalish is arrested at his plush mansion by two FBI agents - but they are not FBI agents as they corner Kalish, punch him out, then demand a hefty ransom from Kalish's lawyer. The lawyer and a mob errand boy drive to a car wash where the phony G-men lock the car's doors and steal the ransom; they later dump Kalish in a vacant lot and drive off, and at a museum Moon, the longish-haired younger of the two kidnappers, meets his connection where money changes hands for the successful kidnapping.While walking through his old neighborhood Buddy is summoned by a barber, who tells him of disturbing activity within the area's mafia gang. Buddy and Ansel then become more concerned when they are tailing Festa and he is grabbed by two men (the same gunmen who grabbed Kalish) who portray themselves as members of the District Atorney's office. Buddy and the team then stake out Vito's funeral parlor, where Kalish and other criminals are meeting to decide what to do next; the kidnappers of Festa want another ransom, to be exchanged at the same car wash, and the mobsters' anxiety shows when a bodyguard starts to whip out a revolver on Vito when he appears. Ansel has infiltrated the ranks of mobsters' limo drivers wearing a wire - but while Buddy and the others are momentarily distracted one of the bodyguards notices the wire. Ansel is taken inside, beaten, and his cover blown.Kalish, thinking the kidnappers are cops, ties up and gags Ansel and stuff him into the trunk of his fellow criminal Carmine Cotello, who will drive to the car wash with a tail of gunmen to deal with the kidnappers. When Mingo sees Ansel is not among the limo drivers, Buddy and Borelli jump in their car and follow Cotello to the car wash. Once there, with the mobsters on one side thinking they will catch the kidnappers there, Cotello instead is jumped just outside the other side of the car wash and driven into a next door parking garage. Buddy and Borelli try to get into the place, but only after hearing gunfire - the result when the kidnappers Moon and his driver Bo think it's a setup and gun down Cotello, then blast open the trunk of his car, and are shocked to find a now-dead policeman inside - do they succeed in entering the garage. They arrest the garage worker, Toredano before discovering Ansel's body.The gunmen then make a break for it and Buddy jumps into his car and a violent high-speed pursuit ensues through the streets of New York City before spilling onto a country highway. Buddy finally catches up to the gunmen but his rammed into the underside of a stricken eighteen-wheeler.Escaping major injury, Buddy and Borelli go to the hospital where Cotello is being treated for critical injuries and the body of Ansel has been posted. Buddy is then interrogated by Gilson and Hanes and it is here he learns of the kidnapping of mafia types - and that the Chief Of Detectives believes it to be The Seven-Ups' work.Vito, meanwhile, is shaken badly by the disasterous turnabout in the Cotello incident, and he confronts Moon telling him to release Festa and lay low. Moon, though, wants none of it, vowing to kill Manucci if he comes calling. Buddy, meanwhile, sneaks into the hospital where he interrogates the weak Cotello about the kidnappers - and only when Buddy removes his oxygen tube does Cotello reveal the entire incident started with Kalish. Buddy and Mingo then storm Kalish's house and grab him and his wife at gunpoint; the frightened Kalish insists he knows nothing about who killed Ansel, that he only knows about the kidnappings of Festa, himself, and other mobsters.It is then that Buddy suddenly realizes what's going on, as all the mobsters who've been kidnapped are mobsters his team has been tailing - and the only way to find the kidnappers is to release the garage guy Toredano, who goes home only for Moon and Bo to arrive to try and kill him and an ambush by the Seven-Ups erupts in gunfire.

Review: The stunt driving coordinator for that scene did "Bullitt" and "The French Connection" as well as many other noatable movie chases.
(In fact, that line may not even have been stale when this film was made.) THE SEVEN-UPS demonstrates all that was right with the best films of the golden age: sparse dialogue, realistic acting, real locations (winter in a dirty New York has never looked better/worse), propulsive stories, and, yes, the best car chase ever filmed.
Thank you, Philip D'Antoni, Roy Scheider and Tony Lo Bianco: for as long as cop films are watched, THE SEVEN-UPS and its 1970s brethren (e.g., THE FRENCH CONNECTION), will set the standard..
Roy Scheider carried the movie, which was based on the crew, the 7 Ups, that backed up Gene Hackman in the "French Connection".
Vito, was played by Tony Lo Bianco who did a great job, as good as Roy Schneider, Buddy the head of 7 Ups cop, whom he informed and exploited.
was a great actor from the 70's (Jaws is one of my all-time favs, Marathon Man etc) and although the 7-ups is not an Oscar-worthy film, it puts you precisely in a time a place (NY, early 70's, as did French Connection) and gives you some tough characters and a glimpse of life as a cop at that time.
From the man who brought cinema-goers 1968 "Bullit" and 1971 "The French Connection", Philip D'Antoni goes on to produce, but also make his directorial debut with the realistic, tough-as-nails crime thriller "The Seven-Ups" starring an unwavering Roy Scheider as the leader of a secret squad of the New York police who got their name from the minimum sentence of their targeted gangsters.
I saw 'Jaws' for the first time aged 7 but a good chunk of why i LOVED that film was Roy Scheider's Brody, I honestly can't imagine that film without him and his "SMILE YOU SON of a B...H" Back to "The Seven-Up's"I'd read a little about this film in movie magazines and books over the years but had never ever seen it until yesterday (thanks I have to say to YouTube), had wanted to see it for over 30 years and finally I have done so.I'm with the majority of reviewers here...it's gritty, well made with some good performances especially Schnider who with his brown leather jacket makes it his 'Bullitt' there is even a scene in which he removes the cool jacket to reveal a black turtle-neck and holster (a knowing nod to McQueen's classic film perhaps?) I have to admit that the first 40 minutes or so are kinda slow as with many of the 1970's cop thriller's/drama's of the time but stick with it as the pace builds and it gets better and better from this point.The CAR CHASE is a stand-out as many here have stated (and might be worth the watch for this wonderfully filmed sequence alone) it starts out as a fairly ordinary affair but turns into a terrific pursuit.Richard Lynch always had the look of a good villain and he is again here.One of the reasons I'd wanted to see it (apart from Scheider) was I had read it almost played out like an unofficial "French Connection" sequel and it kinda does.Tony Lo Bianco is terrific as Buddy's (Scheider) friend and he was also in Connection, it could be argued that this is a far better film than that films sequel and I would subscribe to this as the French Connection II was to me very disappointing.Fans of 1970's Cop Thrillers will find much to enjoy in the second half of this film...the ending is terrific with shades of Blue Thunder's ending, speaking of which that is another terrific Roy Scheider film along with '2010', 'Jaws', 'Jaws II" (yes really, Scheider makes it thanks to Brody and that "I know what a shark looks like up close and I don't intend on going through that hell Again" speech) and "Marathon Man.Roy was a terrific actor and has left us with some wonderful performances in some wonderful films...God Bless.Now to track down "Sorcerer" (aka Wages of Fear) another I've never managed to see..
"The Seven-Ups" is a follow-up of sorts to "The French Connection", based on a story by the legendary detective Sonny Grosso, and uses some of the same talents from that other movie.
Unlike a lot of slick Hollywood productions, this never gets bogged down in spectacle (save for one major set piece which I'll get to in a moment) or unnecessary melodrama.Grossos' gritty tale tells of tough undercover detective Buddy (Roy Scheider), part of an elite unit that goes after organized crime and resorts to some pretty unorthodox methods.
What causes problems for Buddy and his men - played by Victor Arnold, Jerry Leon, and Ken Kercheval - is the interesting situation of a pair of rogue cops (Bill Hickman and the great screen villain Richard Lynch, in one of his earliest roles) going around abducting underworld figures for ransom.The movie is highlighted by one absolutely incredible car chase, occurring just past the halfway point and cranking up the films' energy level to a high degree.
About the only thing in "The Seven-Ups" that isn't too subtle is the intense music score by Don Ellis.Overall this is genuinely good stuff and well worth watching for any fan of crime pictures, especially the great NYC films of the 1970s.Eight out of 10..
The action comes when the seven ups clear up their name.Good standard entertainment and a good car chase...as one reviewer put it no subplots no sex the only female in the entire movie an old gangsters wife who is threatened while the undercover cops seek to prove their innocence and catch the real kidnappers.
No PC garbage no gimmicky weapons...just a good solid police action story.Great car chase with Pontiacs including a Ventura II a Nova name tag clone.This movie probably deserves about an 8.
It just means don't expect the French Connection when you see this...cause you won't get it.The Seven Ups has all the earmarks of a 70's Cop film.
Sure you can throw Bullitt and The French Connection in there...heck even Ronin had a wicked good car chase but when you want a real white knuckle car chase you just have to see the one in this film.
Wow what a great end to a chase.Take this film with other great films of the 70's like Serpico or Dog Day afternoon and even the French Connection and see why the 70's was the greatest decade for cop films.
Scheider is one of a small group of NYC cops with unusual methods, called The Seven-Ups. One of his partners is murdered and he sets out to find and kill the thugs who were responsible, while at the same time discovering that they're involved in a plan to kidnap mobsters to extort ransom money.
The film is most noteworthy for an excellent balls-to-the-wall car chase with Scheider in vengeful pursuit of the bad guys (one of them played by Richard Lynch who in real life set himself on fire several years earlier after taking LSD).
Buddy is a cop who works in a sub rosa unite of the NYPD, the Seven Ups, that does things "their way" to clean up the streets of New York of criminals.
Vito gets information from Buddy and makes it look to Buddy that he's really giving him tips about the mob and what it's up too and uses that information to tip off his hoodlum associates, Moon & Bo, to rip the mobsters off of their weekly take as well as kidnap top mob loan sharks and hold them for ransom.Everything is going well for Vito & Co. until the mob decides to retaliate and mistakenly grabs beats and kidnaps a member of the Seven Ups Ansel, Ken Kercheval,who was working undercover thinking he was one of the hoods who was kidnapping and ripping them off.
Later Ansel was accidentally killed by Moon when he blasted out the trunk of the car that Ansel was locked in thinking that there was a suitcase full or cash, ransom, in it.Fast pace and exciting movie with that gritty and grimy photography of New York City that was so effective in the movie "The French Connection" which also stars both Roy Scheider & Tony Lo Bianco who are in this movie too.
Roy Scheider who is not a big man is as tough and effective as any big action actor I can think off like Clint Eastwood would have been in the same movie.
The movie "The Seven Ups" has the late Bill Hickman doing the dangerous stunts with the car chases as well as act in the film.
Hickman was also the stunt man in both great movies that had him doing the driving on the roads streets and highways of New York City and San Francisco "The French Connection" and "Bullitt"..
They become even more determined in their cause after one of their own is killed, and Buddy discovers that the man partly responsible is someone he may know...Curious film does seem to continue the adventures of "French Connection" cop Buddy Russo, though the link is not played up much.
This does have another exciting car chase sequence, and is also filmed on location by one-time director Philip D'Antoni, but the story never amounts to much, and certainly does not captivate the audience the way its predecessor did.
The stand-out car chase at the half-way point is quite impressive and it's a shame that it seems to have been forgotten among the ubiquitous "Best Car Chase" countdowns on TV and on the Internet.Fans of the French Connection, cop thrillers or overlooked 70s movies that represent an attitude to filmmaking and life long since gone should definitely check it out..
It may not be one of the all time greats, but it is an exceptionally good movie.Everyone has an opinion about car chases.
Besides driving most of the car chase scenes, he created a brooding, malevolent presence and a good match with Richard Lynch as a pair of coldly evil killers.Yes, the chase has "realism errors" often noted, like the use of 3 different NY roads to represent the Palisades Parkway, the ending of the chase in a crash with an 18 wheeler on a roadway for passenger vehicles only, and the miraculous timing that allows all pedestrians to escape harm.
In Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven Ups, however, Bill Hickman and Phillip D'Antoni crafted chases far more realistic, and therefore more exciting, than the flying, rolling, exploding vehicle fantasy chases so common in recent films..
This movie is not about the soda nor is it quite the French Connection.The Seven Ups are a group of elite policemen that use tactics not in accordance with protocol of the NYPD.
They are running surveillance on a local costra nostra cartel and things go awry when a cop's wire is found out.Meanwhile, Richard Lynch, the most evil looking man in film (Invasion:America, Little Nikita) and his partner end up killing the cop by accident and escape from Scheider in the coolest chase scene I've seen, Bullitt and French Connection are not as good as they one up the West Side to the George Washington and onto the Palisades Parkway in New Jersey.
FC is a better movie, but I prefer watching this one because 1) I think Scheider is great and this is his best movie, and 2) this has the best car chase EVER, one that makes Bullitt look like a cable production (thanks again to Bill Hickman, who actually plays the driver).
I don't know if this exceptionally dull movie was intended as an unofficial sequel to 'The French Connection", but it does have many of the same drawbacks: the script is so confusing that the viewer remains uninvolved and feels left out of the picture, and the direction is so cold, so lacking in energy, that even the great chase sequence can't liven things up.
Also, Bullitt being filmed in the 60s when cars were still "Hot" (Mustang GT and Dodge Charger) made for a better set of wheels then two boring, smog device laden Pontiacs in the 1970s Seven Ups. Bill Hickman was the driver of the bad guy car in both movies.
A kidnapping, a spooky carwash, grungy locations, and a long car chase all figure into this cop film about an elite group of NYC policemen, known as the "seven-ups", who pursue criminals whose crimes warrant prison time of seven years and up.The script seems perfunctory and indifferent, with too many villains, and not enough differentiation between them.
It is basically French Connection meets Bullit.Roy Scheider plays the head of an elite group of detectives, known as the "Seven Ups" One of their men is discovered during an undercover op and is killed.Scheider and his team must find his killers.
Roy Scheider heads up an all star cast in this gritty, realistic crime drama about an elite police task force that busts criminals who receive seven years and up in  prison-hence the name The Seven Ups.While Buddy (Scheider) and company go about police business, a pair of thugs named Moon (Richard Lynch) and Bo (Bill Hickman) kidnap the very people the police are trying to bust, and hold them for ransom.
If you like a good car chase, see this film.
Not a bad 70's movie, but the car chase was part French Connection, part Bullitt, right down to the shotgun blowing off Roy Scheider's hood!
Sure there were the "Death Wishes" and "The French Connections," back in the day, but I would be hard pressed to find a more gritty and intelligent film to match wits with this one from an era long forgotten.The always fantastic Roy Scheider (who regardless of his current status as an actor, i.e. being forced to play pathetic roles for a paycheck due to his age, etc by industry standards) plays the main character flawlessly, supported by a cast of hard hitting fellow cops are on the trail of a gang of hoods who are impersonating police officers and shaking down mobsters, only to rough them up (and in some cases kill them)for the money they are carrying.When one of Schieder's crew gets killed in a botched robbery, and Schieder and his boys become suspects by their own department, they take matters into their own hands, and try to clear their names and find those responsible by any means necesary.
Roy Scheider has a knack of getting perfectly cast in alot of his movies (French Connection, 7-Ups, Jaws, Blue Thunder, All That Jazz), he really is an unheralded talent.
This is a good enough movie and you probably won't be disappointed, but it again has Roy Scheider, right after he did "French Connection", playing a cop with the name 'Buddy'.
The Seven-Ups is one of the better cop movies, even today, and is second only to McQueen's Bullitt and the Dirty Harry series, which isn't bad company.
There are three things that seem to make a good cop movie:  Believable script with great acting, great car chase scenes, and some heavy action.
the seven ups were a group of new york city detectives who broke the french connection case.
this movie gives a fairly good depiction of the squad.the chase scene is one of the best ones ever filmed..
The "Bad guys" Bill Hickman and Richard Lynch make the movie great as much as Roy Scheider does.
Bill Hopkins drives the criminal vehicle.A year or two later, sensing a good thing, Bill Friedkin directs "The French Connection," featuring a chase between a commandeered cop car(Gene Hackman) and an elevated train in New York City.
Academy Awards follow.Sensing a good thing, a year or two more brings us "The Seven Ups," featuring a chase between a car driven by Roy Scheider, with lots of shots of Scheider's cursing face as he tries to bump the other car, which is driven by Bill Hopkins, off the road, although the criminal car, to be sure, carries a shotgun-toting passenger.
Having grown up in New Jersey and having spent many a day and night on the gritty streets of New York in the 1970's, watching a film like "The Seven-Ups", or its kindred spirit, "The French Connection", always evokes fond memories of a time and place which, for some, might have been NYC's darkest hour, but which for me, in my early twenties, was always one fun-filled adventure after another.
Very much a spin off from the highly acclaimed film "The French Connection," which Roy Scheider had done a few years earlier, but "The Seven Ups" falls short of the same level of intensity.
When this scheme goes awry, with one of the Seven-Ups being killed, Vito becomes fearful because he knows how Buddy can be when he's doggedly after someone..especially when one of his own is murdered.Extremely underrated cop flick has thrilling car chase through New York City as Buddy follows the kidnapping cop-imposter's trying to get them after killing his partner.
The film is briskly paced with good action sequences and sets up an interesting plot of betrayal between friends as greed comes before that childhood friendship and how what seems like a smooth crime-spree against evil mob families can get cops killed..
That said, when one compares the car chases, Mr. Hickman had involvement in the three most compared: This movie, Bullitt and The French Connection.
Using information and technical support from Sonny Grosso (who had done some of the same on THE FRENCH CONNECTION and who the character Buddy Russo in that film was based on) D'Antoni made THE SEVEN-UPS.
It's not as good as the big classics of the genre, like THE FRENCH CONNECTION movies or SERPICO, but it is interesting and it has that suitably gritty and realistic look going on.
Onsite locations of New York City and an excellent choreographed car chase highlight the film.