70s movie featuring cop-informant amputee on a skateboard?

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StuartN
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31 Jan 2013, 6:47 pm

I remember the scenes very vividly from a 1970s police movie, probably based in New York. The main detective character gets information from an informant who has no lower limbs. The informant uses a skateboard, propelling himself with his knuckles. There is an acrobatic and fast-paced chase sequence in which the informant carries the skateboard under one arm whilst running on his knuckles.

Can anyone identify the movie?



psychegots
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31 Jan 2013, 6:51 pm

When the moderators says you should have a more specific subject title, they should use this thread as a example of how it should be done :lol:
I want to see this movie :lol:



redrobin62
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31 Jan 2013, 7:56 pm

It's called Mr. No Legs.

Here's the link for your edification, as it were.

Mr. No Legs



StuartN
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01 Feb 2013, 4:00 am

redrobin62 wrote:
It's called Mr. No Legs.

Here's the link for your edification, as it were.

Mr. No Legs


That film looks absolutely perfect for my purpose, which is the portrayal of disability in film or other culture - the use of disabled actors is so rare!

It is not the police action movie that I am trying to recall. This movie is more like Shaft, with a fairly conventional movie portrayal of an able-bodied detective. The city is portrayed in the gritty-realism style of the seventies. The person with no lower limbs looks a bit like Johnny Eck ("Half-Boy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Eck) and plays an informant. The informant used a square wooden board with wheels on the four corners, and sack or leather around his hands to skoot and to walk or run on his hands.

The specific issue I wanted a visual for was why physically impaired people are made to conform to using a seat, when some people can be incredibly mobile and active with the minimum of encumbrance.



IdahoRose
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01 Feb 2013, 5:28 am

psychegots wrote:
When the moderators says you should have a more specific subject title, they should use this thread as a example of how it should be done :lol:
I want to see this movie :lol:

So do I! This movie sounds like a riot :lmao:



StuartN
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02 Feb 2013, 1:18 pm

A lot of people my age remember the sequence, but none can recall which film it is! Serpico and Shaft have the kind of street scenes I associate with the memory, and I scanned through Dirty Harry / The Enforcer and several other 70s cop films without luck. The informant character with no legs was using a skateboard like the one in this photo, with sack or leather covering his knuckles:

Image



xenon13
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09 Feb 2013, 9:19 pm

Johnny Eck was in Freaks! He would be the right age, just as Angelo Rossitto was who was in Freaks and ran a newspaper stand through the 60s and 70s and was in all sorts of horror movies. "I'm just a little man... of no use to anyone".

Image

Image



StuartN
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12 Feb 2013, 11:46 am

xenon13 wrote:
Johnny Eck was in Freaks! He would be the right age, just as Angelo Rossitto was who was in Freaks and ran a newspaper stand through the 60s and 70s and was in all sorts of horror movies. "I'm just a little man... of no use to anyone".


IMDB only lists four titles with Johnny Eck - Freaks and three Tarzan films. Freaks is a brilliant movie, and has had quite a reversal of reputation in recent years. Incidentally, the three drones Dewey, Huey and Louie in Silent Running were played by four amputee actors, Mark Persons, Steven Brown, Cheryl Sparks and Larry Whisenhunt (who was 16). The idea was inspired by Johnny Eck.

I had another of these forgotten title questions recently, a novel set on an island where head-hunting had recently been outlawed. I used some software called Recoll to index my entire book collection and it took moments to find the title (The Ghost Road by Pat Barker), because most of my novels are on my computer and on my bookshelf.

Hopefully my forgotten cop film will be recollected by someone ...



xenon13
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13 Feb 2013, 12:02 am

Angelo Rossitto is the one who was in many horror movies including in the '60s and '70s and ran the newspaper stand. He was the dwarf



StitchJones
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07 Oct 2016, 4:46 pm

I just came across this 3 year old thread via a Google search. It seems like you are looking for the EXACT SAME movie I am for many years now. I also remember a very tense climactic scene in an elevator near the end. Have you ever found out the title of the film? Of does anybody reading this remember it?



StitchJones
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08 Oct 2016, 6:18 am

If you're still interested, I think I found the movie:

youtube.com/watch?v=LtkIPqjOP_Y



StuartN
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26 Oct 2017, 5:17 am

StitchJones wrote:
If you're still interested, I think I found the movie:

youtube.com/watch?v=LtkIPqjOP_Y


That is exactly the one, "Report To The Commissioner" (1975) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073620/]

Thank you so much!! !