Busting was the directorial debut of Peter Hyams, following two successful telemovies for ABC exec producer Barry Diller - the film noir detective pastiche Goodnight, My Love and the wronged man melodrama Rolling Man. It was the 14th film produced by the duo of Winkler and Chartoff following their joint beginnings with John Boorman's seminal Point Blank, one of the key thrillers of the 1960s. Hyams himself was a former CBS news anchor and used his background in crime reporting to research his script thoroughly. Thus, he interviewed pimps, prostitutes, junkies and street criminals, compiling their anecdotes into the background context for his script for Busting. This authenticity, boistered by Hyams' street-level kineticism, made for a compelling look at morality and patriarchy in contemporary America.

Ostensibly, Busting is one of the first Hollywood "buddy" cop movies. It was filmed alongside another example of the then-incipient form, Richard Rush's Freebie and the Bean. Indeed, the release of Freebie and the Bean was delayed by several months specifically so that the James Caan / Alan Arkin movie would not be in head-to-head competition with Busting and its pair of vice cops, Elliott Gould and Robert Blake. Gould at the time was at the prolific peak of his career having just completed The Long Goodbye for Robert Altman. Blake, by contrast, had finished the underrated cult police film Electra Glide in Blue and was looking to break through into Hollywood stardom. In the end, Busting under-performed at the box-office as Freebie and the Bean proved more popular and Blake retreated to TV and the hit series Baretta.

An impressive exercise in cynical moral realism, Busting follows the exploits of a pair of vice cops. Spending much of their time going after call girls and junkie sex parlour massage girls, the extent of narcotics dealing and widespread corruption impel their ideological determination to arrest the crime lord they consider behind it all (played by Allen Garfield). However, their efforts are resented by their corrupt superiors and they are punished for bucking the status quo. Their punishment includes staking out men's rooms to catch perverts and busting gay bars. When they finally get it together to go after the crime lord, a dangeorous chase ensues and they find their lives increasingly threatened. Finally confronting the crime lord they intend to arrest him but in a cynical move he suggests that even if they do, the law enforcement authority is so corrupt that nothing will eventuate and he will merely be released. Indeed, the voice-over narration in the film's final few moments makes for a thoroughly ironic debunking of any notion of moral absolutism behind the enforcement of moral standards. Indeed, vice here equates to moral relativism, anticipating Robert Aldrich's critique of moral hypocrisy and religious-engendered sexual pathology in the ill-fated The Choirboys.

While critics responded to the film's kinetic visual sense and accomplished hard-edged chase scene - which acknowledged the danger posed to ordinary citizens who get swept up in it, as would the chase in John Frankenheimer's later Black Sunday - the heavy irony and bleak, wretched cynicism alienated audiences. Nevertheless, Hyams as screenwriter essayed a fine balance of bleak despair, alternating feelings of resigned apathy and nihilistic self-righteous expression in an assessment of the risks accompanying professional practice (a theme the director would return to frquently, often in allusion to the American competitive spirit, another parallel to Frankenheimer). Wry irony makes for an undercurrent of black humour and the exchanges between the two policemen are endearing, revealing and even morally confronting. What remains remarkable about Busting, however, is the afore-mentioned equation of vice (sin as crime) with moral relativism. Its a thesis that makes for a discourse on patriarchal hypocrisy, gender socialization and the collapse of ethical absolutes in the wake of the social unpheavals of the "sexual revolution" of the preceeding decade. Like other films centering on law enforcement, though more reasoned than most, Busting essays the rise of moral relativism with reserve: in the absence of an efficacious moral absolutism, futily (aestheticized through cynical irony) is an epistemological certainty. There is thus an absurdist quality to the narrative episodes, something Hyams would temper in his later works.

Also revealing is the film's attitude to homosexuality. Like many films, including They Only Kill Their Masters and The Choirboys, Busting sees homosexuality as the epitome of moral relativism, the complete lack of any heterosexual orientation being an inherent threat to the patriarchal authority charged with policing and enforcing morality. Sexual freedom and the "anything goes" ethic of the 1970s threatens to undermine patriarchy by virtue of its gay liberation component. Thus, Busting considers its "fags" and "fruits" the nadir of a morally relativistic world, a perverse inversion (and socio-political subversion) of absolutist ethics and thus equates it with pathology - homosexual characters are "queer", sexually threatening or pathetic specacles less for any realistic correlation than for their metaphorical significance as patriarchy's ultimate Other - fucking itself, a theme carried to its extreme by the end of the decade in William Friedkin's Cruising. When deconstructing the seemingly anti-gay films, it is necessary thus to see how the stereotypical and the pathologically perverse functions as metaphors more so than individual characters, specifically metaphors for the moral and behavioral collapse of all patriarchal standards.

In a further irony, also found in The Choirboys, while homosexual meeting places abound, heterosexual relations have become commodified. Most of the female characters here are sex workers, running the gamut between the professional call girl who business and bust opens the film and the unfortunate heroin junkie turning tricks to keep high. Here too moral relativism is the dominant subtext: what "harm" does the call girl's vice do? While moral authority condemns the commodification of sex as a monetary exchange for a service, Hyams clearly reveals the distinction in circumstance between the call girl and the junkie, and - of course - their respected clientelle. Here to hypocrisy abounds as the authority that would police sexual morality to maintain the facade of an orderly morality through corruption enables the criminal element that profits from the exploitation on the one side of the practice. Tellingly, where the woman is in charge of her own sexuality - Cornelia Sharpe as the call girl - she is an independent woman free from patriarchal answerability: indeed, she must be policed so as to be made answerable. In contrast, the junkie whore is a slave to the worst of patriarchal oppression - the dealer as pimp. By so deploying moral relativism to critique, if not wholly deconstruct, patriarchal socio-political authority, Busting emerges as one of the most gripping and thought-provoking of 1970s cop films. That it is remembered instead for its narrative "buddy" hook highlights its narrative invention but neglects its discursive resonance.

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