The Onion Field

“What happened in the onion field is true. But the real crime is what happened after.”

Karl Hettinger (John Savage) is a young Los Angeles police officer who wants only to do the job right and keep his partner, Ian Campbell (Ted Danson), alive. Harold Becker, working from Joseph Wambaugh's true-crime book, follows the two men after Gregory Powell (James Woods) and Jimmy Smith (Franklyn Seales) take them from a traffic stop out to the onion fields near Bakersfield. Hettinger survives it, and the courts could still let the men responsible walk.