Mother, Jugs and Speed

Apparently, nostalgia for the 1970s has been overtaking me which accounts for my re-watching of this dark comedy which I saw when it first came out in 1976. I was in college and I remember thinking it was a bit cheesy but also kinda daring in how it mixed comedy and drama. With two of the three leading roles taken by 70s icons (Bill Cosby as Mother, Raquel Welch as, well, you know), I would have thought this might not have weathered the years too well, but it remains surprisingly watchable, though today's young people might not dig it.

The title trio works for a scrappy little ambulance service in Los Angeles. Mother is the old hand, cocky and confident as he swigs beer from the driver's seat; Jugs is the office dispatcher who is taking night classes to get certified to be a driver, though the big boss (a wonderfully slimy Allen Garfield) isn't yet ready for women in the ambulances; Speed (Harvey Keitel) is the new guy, a cop currently under investigation on corruption charges. There is some character development along the way, including Jugs and Speed becoming an item, but mostly the film jolts from one emergency call to another. Mostly they're played for darkish humor, with the funniest moment being an attempt to get a woman on a stretcher down from a second floor apartment that goes hilariously awry. Sometimes there is tragedy: there is one death in the ambulance, and one of the drivers is shot dead during an altercation with an out-of-control drug user. The three stars (and Garfield) get most of the spotlight, so it's not exactly an ensemble piece, but there are solid turns from Bruce Davison as a likeably mellow driver and Larry Hagman as a crazed horndog. Keitel, known mostly for fairly intense roles, gets to relax a bit here. It takes some time to get used to him in that mode, but he does a nice job and works up some decent chemistry with Welch. Even Cosby, current-day pariah for his record of sexual assaults, is good. The PG rating is a relic of the era—this might get an R today.