The film, which has a screenplay by journalist Pete Hamill, was produced and directed by Howard W. Koch, and stars Robert Duvall as Ryan, with Verna Bloom, Henry Darrow and Eddie Egan himself as a police lieutenant.

[2] Eddie Ryan (Robert Duvall), a tough, no-nonsense, abrasive and racist Irish NYPD cop, has to turn in his badge after scuffling with a Puerto Rican suspect who then falls to his death from a rooftop, but that doesn't stop him from heading out on a one-man crusade to find out who killed his partner of three years, Gigi Caputo (Louis Cosentino), all the while neglecting his new live-in girlfriend, Maureen (Verna Bloom).

In The New York Times, Roger Greenspun pointed out the biases of the film: "All of the evil is perpetrated by Puerto Ricans, either innocent but violent revolutionaries who run around shouting 'Puerto Rico Libre!'

[4] Variety called it "a ploddingly paced police meller with racist and fascist undertones ... Producer Howard W. Koch, doubling as director, demonstrates no visual style or energy and even allows the several obligatory chase sequences to dribble into tedium.

"[14] John Gillett of The Monthly Film Bulletin compared Badge 373 unfavorably to Dirty Harry in that "unlike Siegel, Koch fails to put his hero's activities in any kind of perspective; and even though the violence is kept in check, its ambiguities leave a somewhat repellent taste.