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THE BLUE KNIGHT, 1972
Bumper Morgan is one of the best damn cops in the business. Everyone on his beat’s been saying it for twenty years. Never mind that he’s turned fifty years old, or that “his ass is two nightsticks wide,” or that now his big belly sways and bounces when he dances to hard rock. He believes he’s still the same macho his best friend, Sergeant Cruz Segovia, always said he was. But in three days Bumper Morgan is retiring.
Bumper knows it’s time. Time to take the better job that’s been offered him, time to marry Cassie who is beautiful, loving, intelligent: “the best deal” he ever had.
Yet there’s the beat to reckon with. The beat fascinates him, sustains him, tests his strength and street cunning, mocks him and yet glorifies him. The Blue Knight is not only the story of Bumper Morgan, it is the story of the beat. Cruz calls the beat “that puta who seduced you all these years.”
The events of the next three days are shattering, as Bumper, always a hard-living man, intensifies his activities. We wander with him about the beat among various cultures: Japanese, Arab, Indian, Armenian. And among the subcultures: whore, hustler, hype hoodlum. And among the victims: the aged, the vulnerable, the children.
We see Bumper’s unique moral code at work, witness his peculiar brand of dedication as he uses “brains and balls” to get the job done at whatever the cost. But things begin going wrong as Bumper accelerates his pace of living. Easy decisions seem blurred. A group of anti-war demonstrators make a fool of him. He is caught in an act of perjury by a judge he admires. Two of his cronies grow old before his eyes. Bumper’s confidence and vigor are challenged. Finally, he gets the opportunity to “shag a big one”--to get at Red Scalotta’s bookmaking organization, an act of redemption with disastrous results.
Filled with the explosive drama and authenticity that propelled The New Centurions to national acclaim, The Blue Knight is finally a story of many kinds of love, the absence of it, and its consequences.
Bumper Morgan wears “beat officer shoes”: size thirteen triple E, round toed, clumsy, high tops with metal eyelets. They are old, worn, ugly shoes, but in the end he forces us to walk in them, at least for a time.
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