The Cop on the Edge
Tom Jolliffe on the well-worn but effective cop on the edge trope…
Cinema can often be pretty simple. Good guys are often morally upstanding. Bad guys often irredeemably corrupt. Your good guy might be a cop, your bad guy a crook. The hero might have a foible or two, but is generally psychologically on an equilibrium. Meanwhile, you know the bad guy is more likely to have gone loco. The beauty of cinema though, lies in that ability to shake things up. To throw in moral ambiguity or psychological imbalance to a person who should be on the side of law and order as one example. It’s now become well worn, but the cop on the edge trope still remains popular. It became increasingly popular through the 60’s onward in American cinema, where prior, particularly during the Hays code, your protagonist lawman would have to be whiter than white. Any cop that might have been morally obtuse would have been strictly painted as a villain and almost certainly get his comeuppance.