'The Choirboys' is a vaudeville of precinct scandals and follies that may not mean the same thing to cops that they mean to civilians. It's more likely that Wambaugh came to the realization that visualizing this colection of tales told out of school could be more embarrassing and misleading than simply publishing them. The comic vulgarity originated in the novel, and surely no one could imagine the director of 'The Dirty Dozen,' 'The Longest Yard,' 'Hustle' 'The Killing of Sister George' and 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?' suddenly developing a delicate touch. He succeeded in having his name removed from the screenwriting credits and placed an ad in movie trade papers complaining that Aldrich had done him wrong. Wambaugh, who did the original adaptation of his own best-selling novel, has been busy disowning the film. They're just rowdy fraternity boys in blue. The promotion for this movie should probably be built mately, neither the filmmakers nor the characters feel any credible pain. It's much too late to take a different tack, and at the fadeout the mood returns to cackling facetiousness. Towards the end 'Choirboys' attempts to get serious about the sordidness that it has been wallowing in for gratuitious, episodic laughs, and this switch seems both deceitful and laughable. However, once commiting your entertainment in this direction, it may be impossible to change. At a certain level there is something funny about the idea of a drunken slob creeping under a glass-topped coffee table to get a peek up a women's skirt or the idea of a jumper being provoked to her doom by a cop who tries to use reverse psychology and dares her to 'go ahead and jump.' Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness. The whole movie suggests a dirtyminded 'McHale's Navy,' with scenes pivoting on gross set jokes alternating with scenes pivoting on grosser sick jokes. There's no contrast between cops at work and play.

If the filmmakers had ironic or satirical intentions, the finished film totally obscures them. 'The Choirboys' belongs to the tradition of service comedies, but I doubt if anyone will hail it for doing a service for either cops or movie auidences.

At some stage the original author, Joseph Wambaugh, and the director, Robert Aldrich, must have envisioned a profane popular comedy patterned after 'M*A*S*H,' with the choir practicesserving the same purpose for overworked, pressured and sometimes brutalized urban cops that the binges and practical jokes served for the battle surgeons in Robert Altman's film. Among the Los Angeles patrolmen characterized - or, to be precise, caricatured - in 'The Choirboys,' now at area theaters, the term 'choir practice' is a euphemism for an all-night drunken toot in MacArthur Park.

The choirboys joseph wambaugh