The 1972 Burt Reynolds movie blamed for a horrific murder: “Will you please call an ambulance?”
Plenty of movies have been blamed or implicated in real-life murders, but Burt Reynolds wasn’t the sort of actor you’d associate with starring in something that would be accused of inspiring a horrific crime.
After all, action comedies were his bread and butter, and once Reynolds settled into his post-Deliverance groove as the single most bankable star in Hollywood, he kept giving audiences exactly what they wanted to see. The actor played to type, and while it hurt his career in the long run, it was hardly near the knuckle.
Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Wes Craven’s Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange are just some of the films that have gained infamy and notoriety for their alleged or perceived ties to appalling acts that were carried out and subsequently blamed on the events depicted onscreen, whether they held much water or not.
On the surface, Reynolds’ 1972 vehicle, Fuzz, was just another one of his genre flicks. An action comedy, which even depicted the star on the poster as lying on the ground naked with nothing but a towel to preserve his modesty, follows a group of Boston detectives as they investigate several high-profile cases.
One of those cases involves a gang of youths who’ve been dousing homeless men in gasoline and lighting them on fire, and in October 1973, 24-year-old Evelyn Wagner suffered an identical fate. After her car ran out of gas, she went to a nearby petrol station to fill it up, only to be accosted on her return.
Six teenagers forced Wagner to douse herself in gasoline before setting her on fire, and she died from her injuries four hours later. She tried to extinguish the inflicted immolation, but while still smouldering and with her hair burned away almost completely, she managed to cross the street, enter a liquor store, and calmly ask, “Will you please call an ambulance?”
The murderers were never caught, and in the days that followed, Reynolds’ Fuzz became one of the central backdrops to the ongoing investigation. Wagner was killed on a Tuesday, and on the previous Sunday evening, ABC had broadcast director Richard A Colla’s film, leading Boston police commissioner Robert J diGrazia to suggest that it may have been in some way responsible.
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“It’s an almost unbelievable vicious crime,” he said during a press conference. “It’s about time that the public demanded an end to violence such as this in our movies and television.” Clearly, he felt that Fuzz was in some way culpable in Wagner’s murder, and while it was never confirmed since the killers were never apprehended, it can’t be completely ruled out, either.
It’s a damning legacy for an otherwise forgettable feature, and that wouldn’t even be the last instance. Less than three weeks later, a homeless man in Miami was doused with gasoline and set ablaze, and with the Wagner case still so fresh in the memory, the media once again made mention of Fuzz.
