The mystery of the killing of the two rookies is just one of the daily problems to be faced by Murphy (Paul Newman), a veteran police officer, and his young partner, Officer Corelli (Ken Wahl), in their line of duty. It's where the old people gather during the day to sun themselves, gossip and play cards, comforted by the immediate presence of the law. The heart of this community is Precinct Station House 41, which, as one of the policemen explains to the new station chief, is not a precinct house but a fort in hostile territory. Petrie's South Bronx is an urban nightmare, a contemporary American vision of World War II Hamburg (or Dresden or Manila or Hiroshima), destroyed not by saturation bombing, artillery warfare or the A-bomb but by decades of what is euphemistically referred to as urban decay, civic neglect and shifting population patterns. These objections can't be answered here, which is not to say that they shouldn't be raised. Having implicated us in this truth in such a fashion, the film makers would seem to have a responsibility to be accurate, though I suspect that not everyone objecting to the film would agree on all of the things about it that are supposed to be inaccurate. One of the reasons the film is so effective is that, right from the start, the audience shares a sense of physical desolation that eventually becomes psychological as well as spiritual. The setting of the film is not Oz but the South Bronx, which is inhabited not by Munchkins but by real people.

Those questions have much more point in connection with a film as entertaining as ''Fort Apache, the Bronx,'' which, having been filmed in the South Bronx and having been based on the experiences of two New York police officers, has the effect of fact presented as fiction. The film, which opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, is a tough-talking street melodrama, both shocking and sorrowful, acted by Paul Newman and a huge cast with the kind of conviction that can't be ignored.īecause ''Cruising'' was such a muddle-brained, nervously dishonest movie, it destroyed itself, rendering moot all questions about the film maker's responsibility to observable political and social truth. THE controversy over Daniel Petrie's ''Fort Apache, the Bronx,'' about life at an embattled police precinct station house in the South Bronx, recalls the controversy over William Friedkin's ''Cruising'' except for one important detail: ''Cruising'' turned out to be a dud, a big, fat soggy mess of a bomb that never went off, while ''Fort Apache, the Bronx'' looks as if it's going to be a hit, a movie that will be seen by a lot of people.

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