Mother, Jugs & Speed
                             
Director: Peter Yates
Year: 1976
Rating: 6.0
Mother, Jugs and Speed. Take a guess which one Raquel Welch is. Mother? No, that is Bill Cosby. Speed? Nope. That is Harvey Keitel. Yup, Jugs though with only one g. To be polite, I guess. Because Jugs means exactly what it sounds like. The nickname given to her by the men she works with. And it isn’t because she carries water. Try that today. This feels like an off-beat lesser film for director Peter Yates after Bullitt, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Hot Rocks with The Deep coming right after this. But he also directed For Pete’s Sake right before this one with Barbara Streisand in a comedy. The film follows the lives of the people in an independent ambulance service headed by Allen Garfield who gives his employees a pep talk each morning. The world sucks, inflation is killing us, the hours are too long but the good news is that there are still muggers out there, diseases, bones breaking and that is how we make our money. $42.50 a pick-up. In 1976. Now you have to mortgage your house to pay for an ambulance.



It is a small crew - Cosby as the droll comic one, Larry Hagman as the creepy alcoholic who tries to screw an unconscious woman with a drug overdose in the ambulance as it is speeding to a hospital (some of you no doubt think that should have been Cosby), Dick Butkus (ex-football player) takes up space, Bruce Davison as the mellow pot-smoking one, Raquel as the receptionist and dispatcher and Keitel as the new hire who is on suspension from the police force for possibly selling cocaine. It feels like a sit-com group of personalities and in fact it later was made into a sit-com in 1978. And the woman was named Juggs.



This one bounces back and forth between madcap antics in zany situations and then suddenly serious drama raises its ugly head. It works for the most part but the first third is all madcap and fairly amusing and you expect it be that way all through. Then comes a death. Another death. Another death. And it isn’t really funny at all anymore. Please go back to being funny. I liked you much more as funny. It is very much an ensemble piece with Cosby getting the most time but others getting their share. Back then after I Spy and the first Cosby Show he was a huge star. Now I am not sure it is politically correct to watch him. Hard to without thinking where is he stashing the knock-out drugs – probably in the black case he uses to give massage girls a boost. Keitel looks so young and charmingly wholesome here – even after Mean Streets and in the same year as Taxi Driver. His intense roles were just getting started. As the film progresses, Raquel gets more and more time and that is a good thing. For a while there I was wondering what she was doing in the film. Wasn’t Loni Anderson available?