Reviews

Paul Newman playing a new york cop in the Bronx with his partner who cares only about getting his girlfriend to lose her virginity. The friendship between the two of them as a matter of fact is an important issue in this great movie. It has everything a cop movie should have. Action, drama, romance... At one time Paul gets to know a good looking nurse. They have a drink together and start a romance. Paul discovers that she shoots heroin but he keeps helping her, because isn't he the one who had seen everything ? Giving birth, abortion, drunks, domestic violence, loons, bar fights and so on. During the movie he has a change of boss, and the new boss wants to do it "the hard way". He sees one of his cop "partners" (Danny Aiello) throwing an'innocent couple from a roof, obviously just killing them just to get rid of personal frustration. This was taking place during a riot. Pam Grier walks through the movie as a real life junk, killing her clients, (some of them are cops), with razors coming out of her mouth. The Bronx at his best i guess ! She gets really stoned, dies and gets rolled into a carpet and disappears. Brilliant scene at the the end of the movie : Newman and his partner chasing a thief and running over the "dead body" carpet. Great location and acting.

First of all, i am a fan of what people call "depressing movies" (i think they are just realistic), because it can help us to see how our society looks like behind the screens. Didden made "Brussels by night" i think to show some problems ran in our "land of milk and honey" since the late sixties. In the early eighties, a working man "nine to five" called "Max", married with children is so sick of the shallowness of his life that he loses his senses and does something horrible. He's just so depressed he kills his family can you believe it ? Apartment in the big city, loneliness even though he is married, everyday the same way of living... After his desperate act our main character walks into the night life of Brussels,what seems to be a depressing world. He walks into people like Alice and Abdel, without a future, but these characters seem to be happy in their own way, and they hang out, get drunk. Throughout the film, little annoyances come up and Max gets really frustrated about the behavior of Abdel. This is not his world and another killing takes place. Great scenery of our capital. Anyway impressive movie it makes you think about our society. I give it an eight, the film is well made with low-budget.