General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Report to the Commissioner

Report to the Commissioner is a 1975 American crime drama directed by Milton Katselas, based on James Mills's 1972 novel of the same name, about a naive New York City police rookie whose accidental shooting of an undercover policewoman triggers a departmental cover-up reaching the office of the police commissioner.¹ It stars Michael Moriarty as rookie detective Beauregard "Bo" Lockley, Yaphet Kotto as his partner Richard "Crunch" Blackstone, and Susan Blakely as undercover detective Patty Butler.² The film arrived late in the early-1970s wave of gritty police thrillers that followed The French Connection and Dirty Harry (both 1971), and it marked the theatrically-released feature debut of Richard Gere.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	Los Angeles opening 29 January 1975; New York opening 5 February 1975; 112 minutes, color, Panavision, MPAA rating PG¹
Source	Novel Report to the Commissioner by James Mills (New York, 1972), author of the source book for The Panic in Needle Park (1971)¹^•³
Screenplay	Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961) and Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection, Shaft, both 1971), both credited³
Production	29 April to early August 1974, on location in New York City and at the Burbank Studios, California⁴
Key crew	Producer M. J. Frankovich; cinematographer Mario Tosi; editor David Blewitt; music Elmer Bernstein⁴^•³
Critical standing	55% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 47 reviews; critics consensus: compelling performances and gritty cinematography, but an overwrought, contrived corruption story²
Notable debut	Richard Gere's first theatrically-released feature role, as the pimp "Billy"⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The story is framed as a report to the police commissioner: on 11 June 1974, NYPD detective Richard "Crunch" Blackstone is called to an apartment where an undercover female officer has been shot dead.¹ The tale then moves back to show how it happened.³

Patty Butler, working under the alias "Chicklet," has become the live-in girlfriend of Times Square drug trafficker Thomas "Stick" Henderson (Tony King) to gather evidence against him.² Captain D'Angelo (Héctor Elizondo), the only superior who knows she is undercover, assigns the idealistic rookie Bo Lockley to find her as a "missing person," expecting him to fail so that D'Angelo can cover himself if anything goes wrong.³ Lockley, helped by a street contact, Joey Egan (Bob Balaban), tracks her down, ignores instructions to leave her where she is, and gets into a gun battle with Stick in which Patty is killed; Lockley never learns she was a fellow officer.⁵

After the shooting, cover-up lies travel up the chain of command from Chief Perna (Dana Elcar) to the Police Commissioner (Stephen Elliott), who cannot get honest information from his own cops, and Lockley's colleagues try to make him the scapegoat.³ The action centerpiece is a rooftop chase across Times Square in which the fugitive Stick, dressed only in his underwear, sprints over trash-littered roofs and streets in his bare feet, ending with the two armed men trapped together in a Saks Fifth Avenue elevator.³^•⁵ In that standoff, Stick argues that the department would just as soon see both of them die, and that they must find a way to trust each other.⁵

Production

Producer M. J. Frankovich fired screenwriter Ernest Tidyman and hired Abby Mann to replace him in July 1973, but both men are credited onscreen. Frankovich had already chosen Milton Katselas, who had directed the stage hit Butterflies Are Free on Broadway and in film (1972), and considered Jon Voight, Edward Albert, or Beau Bridges for the role of Bo Lockley; none of the three appeared in the final film.⁴

Production began on 29 April 1974 in New York City, with location shooting at recognizable Manhattan sites including Saks Fifth Avenue, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and Times Square, and principal photography ended at the Burbank Studios in Los Angeles in early August 1974.⁴^•⁶ The film's technical advisors included serving and former NYPD personnel: Detective Sonny Grosso, one of the original detectives of the real "French Connection" case, who had been portrayed by Roy Scheider as Buddy "Cloudy" Russo in The French Connection (1971); retired chief of detectives Albert Seedman, who also appears on screen as Detective Schulman; and officers from the Narcotics Bureau and the Department of Correction.⁴^•³

Richard Gere, then little known, plays the pimp Billy in his first theatrically-released feature appearance.⁴^•³ Elmer Bernstein composed the score, and the songs include "Loving You Gets Better With Time" and "Changes," written and performed by Vernon Burch with Spencer Proffer and Jeffrey Marmelzat.³^•¹

Reception

Reviewers were divided. Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, called it "a competent, slick cop movie that doesn't always work," praising Tony King's performance as Stick and the elevator standoff while finding Moriarty's portrayal of Lockley too overtly manic; he read the bleak ending as a Watergate-era parable in which the NYPD stands in for the Nixon administration, though he judged the moralizing "prefabricated" next to the more effective human drama.⁵ Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, was harsher, arguing that the novel had been structured like a screenplay, that Katselas seemed out of his element, and that the film never settled on what kind of movie it was making.⁷ Time singled out the two chase sequences, including a legless beggar pursuing a taxi on his wheeled platform, as among "the least likely chase scenes in screen history."⁸

On the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer the film holds 55% from 47 reviews, with a critics consensus that its performances and gritty cinematography are compelling but its corruption story overwrought and contrived; the audience Popcornmeter score is 65%.² Reviewers blamed its mild box office on the downbeat conclusion, and the non-sequential structure, which opens with the aftermath of the shooting, was compared unfavorably to the flash-forwards of Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes (1971).³

One production choice set the film apart from its genre peers: while most 1970s crime films traded on street profanity, Report to the Commissioner depicts Manhattan's squalid streets without expletives, which is part of why it received a PG rating.³ Kino Lorber released the film on Blu-ray in 2015, and it remains available on streaming and rental services.⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026