James Caan. Freebie and the Bean is a great movie which has kinda disappeared. I remember recording it off tv in the mid 80s and watching it countless times.
It’s possibly the first, or at least the first notable, buddy buddy cop movie. James Caan plays Freebie and Alan Arkin plays the Bean. You can read all you need to about it’s wildly out of date takes in the title, simply by the fact that Arkin plays a Mexican cop.
However, both characters are equally unreconstructed and equally guilty of what we would now consider unacceptable behaviour.
It’s of it’s time, but the dark and dry humour, and the relationship between the two main characters is great. And the stunts and driving sequences are far better than many notable, so called “car chase” movies of the era. And yes, I include Bullitt in that list.
Caan and Arkin play two feckless cops trying to bring down a local mobster and getting it wrong. Then they learn that Chicago has put a hit on him, so they have to shadow him for the weekend, while waiting for a key witness for their case against him to reappear in town. All while the Super Bowl is about to happen.