I was actually a fan of the television series loosely based on this 1973 TV movie. That doesn't mean I wasn't familiar with the movie...it aired endlessly on late night television for years. It's a very racist-themed movie, so much so my wife said that she'd forgotten how bad it was 30 years ago.The exterior fire scenes appear largely to be actual fires the film crew just followed a fire department around and shot, which probably weren't hard to come by in 1970's Chicago. The tone of the film is gritty and dark with kind of a neat low-rent pulsating soundtrack, but again limited to a 1973 made for TV movie kind of way. The print quality is about what you'd expect for the price. It's in its native 4:3 screen ratio, it has obvious commercial break inserts, it's soft with dull colors that fade into each other, and it's pretty dirty. It may have been a dub of a VHS transfer. On the other hand, I could say you've never seen it look better, and probably be right. Sadly, this is probably as good as gets. The soundtrack automatically showed up in PLII on my receiver but was mixed off to the right, which may have been intended to make it sound wider There are no extras of any kind. Click "Play Movie" and it starts cold to the point you appear to be jumping into the middle. (You're not...it just starts that way.) I wouldn't mind seeing a DVD release of this movie cleaned up and including the 13 episodes of the loosely-based television series that followed with maybe a Richard Roundtree commentary for the movie but...oh, who am I kidding. That anybody bothered to release this on DVD at all is probably something of a miracle, and I'll take it.
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