Peeping Tom (1960)

  For nearly twenty years Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with their production company The Archers, were some of the most dependable British filmmakers around. Powell would direct and co-write and Pressburger would write the other half and produce. Their classic films include 1943’s ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,’ 1947’s ‘Black Narcissus,’ and especially 1948’s ‘The Red Shoes.’ Unfortunately even the best creative partnerships eventually go stale and after a series of movies that underperformed they dissolved their partnership in 1957, although they remained good friends for the rest of their lives.

Powell followed up in 1959 with ‘Honeymoon,’ based partly on the ballet ‘El Amor Brujo’ by Manuel de Falla. To directly quote Wikipedia, “It is one of Powell's least regarded movies.” The next year he decided to make the script for ‘Peeping Tom’ written by Leo Marks, a former cryptographer turned writer who would also go on to script 1968’s ‘Twisted Nerve.’ Financing was secured through Anglo-Amalgamated, a somewhat downmarket maker of B-grade crime movies who were hoping for some more high-brow success by partnering with Powell. Actors sought for the lead role of Mark Lewis, the film’s protagonist and killer, included Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, but due to scheduling conflicts they went with Karlheinz Bohm, a German-Austrian actor who talked with a noticeable German accent which is never addressed in the film.

It’s important to note that upon release this movie was so despised by British critics as unacceptable filth and borderline pornography that it basically killed Powell’s career. It was so badly received that it convinced Alfred Hitchcock not to have any press screenings before the release of ‘Psycho’ later that year. A critic in The Tribune wrote that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” The Observer wrote that “It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom.” It was a bomb in the UK and barely released in the US. Frankly Hitchcock was correct to keep his movie from the tender sensibilities of professional film critics.

It wasn’t until the 1970’s, with a new generation of filmmakers taking over the industry, that the movie’s reputation started to be rehabilitated. This came about largely due to the influence of Martin Scorsese, who started singing the film’s praises as soon as he gained some success. He’s quoted in The Telegraph as saying “I have always felt that ‘Peeping Tom’ and [Fellini’s] ‘8½’ say everything that can be said about filmmaking, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two.” It’s now seen as a rich text both for its psychological depiction of the killer with his traumatic background and the metafictional way it indicts both him and the audience with its depiction of voyeuristic violence. It now regularly appears high up in lists of both best horror films and best British films of all time.

The movie is not particularly interested in soft-peddling its themes or what it’s about. The movie opens with a closeup of an eye opening wide, that of Mark Lewis, our killer. The movie then cuts to an obvious sex worker on an obvious set. A shadowy figure steps out of the bottom of the frame and walks towards her. An insert shot shows he’s holding a camera underneath his coat with the lens poking out. The figure then moves forward, the lens of his camera coming directly towards the lens of the audience’s camera, as it were. Then it cuts to what his camera is filming, framing the street walker with its artificial eye. This is the movie directly telling the audience that the point of view of our main character and the point of view of his camera are, in a very real sense sense, the same thing. This movie is our first (but not the last) instance of a killer protagonist this month. Most of the scenes are told from his point of view and often from the point of view of his camera. The movie is telling the audience that seeing and filming are going to overlap significantly in the movie as that’s the way our main character views his life.

We watch as the woman tiredly states that it’s going to be “two quid,” which if my online calculations are correct translates to about fifty dollars in today’s money, which seems about right. She leads the camera view down the street, into an apartment building, and upstairs to her flat. The camera watches as she starts to undress, then it dips down and to the left as the killer adjusts something that makes a metallic noise. The sex worker immediately looks frightened and then terrified as the camera moves closer and closer. Eventually she screams directly into the lens as she’s killed. The scene abruptly cuts to a projector showing the footage the killer captured, in black and white and without sound. The credits roll over this footage as we watch the film along with Mark.

I want to focus on the framing here because every onscreen kill we see (which is actually only two, although another happens offscreen) ends with a terrified woman screaming directly into the camera lens. This is exactly how all of the deaths in ‘The Lodger’ were filmed, as were the deaths in countless other horror and crime movies in the decades leading up to this movie. The industry hadn’t yet shed its puritanical reluctance to show blood and gore in movies, instead defaulting to keeping violence offscreen or simply having their leading ladies’ screams imply all manner of dreadful things happening just outside the frame. This is a movie where the killer is deliberately creating movie deaths in real life. He will later be shown to compulsively rewatch the films of his kills and it’s implied that he finds sexual release in reliving it this way (it’s not shown on screen but I think seeing Mark bolt upright at the moment of death is pretty easy to interpret). It’s no accident that he also works in the film industry and says he one day hopes to be a director. The movie is not trying to be subtle.

The next day Mark is filming the police response to his killing. It takes a minute for us to see his face. First the camera is obscuring it, then we see through his camera lens. Eventually a member of the public notices the filming and wanders over to ask what paper he’s with and it’s very interesting to watch how he responds. First he slowly lowers the camera, giving us our first glimpse of his face, and his expression is stricken as he stammers out, “I beg your pardon?” The man repeats his question and with an almost mechanical click Mark’s expression softens and he’s able to give a fairly casual answer of “The Observer.” He smiles slightly but a noise from the police investigation offscreen instantly makes him step away, adjusting his camera. He moves to get a different angle of the police carrying out the body and loading it into a van. 

Mark then drives his sweet cherry moped to his job at a sleazy-looking newsagent’s. The walls are covered with pin-ups taken from magazines. They all seem to be of semi-naked women, which makes some of the rest of the movie confusing about what is and isn’t considered pornography. A quick internet history search implies that images of mostly-nude women were legal at the time of filming as long as there was no public hair displayed, and of course no sexual activity was allowed. We see a customer come in and ask, slightly embarrassed, if the shop has any “views” for sale, which the shopkeeper brings out from behind the counter. Presumably these show either pubic hair or sex acts. After he buys and leaves the owner waves Mark upstairs where two women are waiting to be photographed in apparently an apparently illegal manner.

The movie associates pornography and murder in interesting ways but never really comes out and says that one contributes to the other. On the one hand Mark is mostly business during these photo shoots and seems completely uninterested in the women’s nudity. When a new model is revealed to have a cleft lip this does excite Mark and causes him to insist on filming a closeup of her face. On the other hand the third murder in the movie, the one we don’t actually see, is of one of the other models who gets fully nude on screen in the first instance of frontal nudity in British cinema. At no point does Mark refer to the pornography he produces when he eventually explains what drives him to kill, but it’s certainly not an accident that the film introduces it to the narrative.

The heart of the movie really involves Mark’s relationship with a tenant in his house, Helen. As he’s coming home that night he peers into a ground floor window onto her twenty-first birthday party. Everyone notices him so he ducks away, enters the house, and tries to hurry upstairs. Helen catches him at the bottom of the stairs and invites him to the party. He stammers a polite refusal and continues up to his room. Later that evening she knocks on his door with a piece of cake. They talk and he reveals that he’s actually the owner the house and thus her landlord. She laughs and says that with the way he carried himself everyone thought he was just another tenant who was always late with the rent. He explains that it was his father’s house and where he grew up, which will be very important later.

Thus begins an awkward kind of courtship between Mark and Helen, though I don’t really understand what she sees in him because at the best of times he still gives off intensely creepy vibes. At one points she justifies her interest by saying he has “a quality.” Her mother, a blind woman constantly pounding whiskey, doesn’t trust him as she says she doesn’t trust a man who walks quietly. She’s played by Maxine Audley and her character is a lot of fun, if a little too close to the cliche of having a disabled person gain basically supernatural powers. Over the course of the movie she’ll reveal she can hear when someone is standing outside of a window or sense when people are looking at her. Despite her mother’s misgivings Helen visits him in his apartment and marvels at his room of filming equipment.

It’s during one such visit that we start to learn about Mark’s backstory. He shows Helen old recordings of his childhood, where his father would constantly torment him in his sleep in order to film his reactions. Lights are shown in his face, lizards are thrown onto his bed, that sort of thing. Mark explains that his father was a psychologist who wanted to study fear reactions in children and thus used him as a kind of guinea pig. He grows pretty agitated when he reveals all of this and Helen is very sympathetic. His father even filmed his reaction to visiting his mother on her deathbed. The film shows a brief seaside vacation with his father’s new wife and then footage of his father gifting a young Mark his own camera. As I said the movie isn’t trying to be subtle.

We see Mark at his main job, which is as a focus puller for feature films. He gets along relatively well with the other crew members on the job and confirms with Vivian, the main actress’s stand-in, that they’re still on for that evening. Later on, when everyone’s left and the studio is shut down for the night, Vivian sneaks out of her hiding place in the dressing room and goes to meet Mark on the main stage to film surreptitiously. Apparently they reached a deal where Mark wanted to direct something and the stand-in wanted to be filmed as a lead. Vivian is played here by Moira Shearer, the star of Powell’s previous film ‘The Red Shoes.’ This scene is the centerpiece of the movie that goes through several stages. First Vivian sneaks onto the soundstage and starts looking for Mark. As she calls out for him the overhead lights start turning on one by one, blinding her and following her around the cavernous room. Mark eventually reveals himself atop a catwalk and the tension releases. She’s manic as he starts setting up the camera and adjusting the smaller lights. She talks a mile a minute about the opportunity to act. She turns on her portable music player and dances around the set. Mark indulges her a while before he eventually insists she start the scene, which involves her acting terrified. She tries to get in character but is having trouble figuring out what would frighten her to death and asks him to set the mood.

At this point Mark becomes fully menacing. He slowly walks toward Vivian and softly says as he does so, “Imagine someone coming towards you who wants to kill you.” He’s fully in her personal space at this point. “Regardless of consequences.” She asks, “A madman?” He answers, “Yes, but he knows it and you don’t. And just to kill you isn’t enough for him.” She asks a question but he puts a hand to her throat to stop her. “Stay there. You’re just right.” He backs away, his breath heavy, then raises one of the legs of his camera tripod towards her. “Imagine this would be one of his weapons.” He removes the end with a metallic squeal to reveal a long knife underneath. He begins to slowly walk toward her, filming, as she realizes what he intends to do and tries to back away. She’s stopped by a prop suitcase and screams as the scene fades out.

There’s a slightly funny scene that evening as Helen visits while Mark is developing the film of this latest murder. He keeps looking at clocks and rushing back to his lab to start the next step while also trying to maintain his composure with Helen.

The next day we’re back at the movie set, shooting the next scene. Someone wonders where Vivian is but they filming anyway. As it becomes clear that the scene is going to involve opening the trunk containing Vivian’s body Mark takes out his camera and surreptitiously films everyone’s reactions when it’s opened. The police are called and as it happens the officers assigned are also investigating the murder of the streetwalker from the beginning of the film. They instantly notice that the terrified expression of the victim’s face matches that of the earlier murder and decide they’re connected. This is one of the few movies where the police are pretty competent and on the ball early on. They start interviewing the cast and crew and Mark continues filming it all. He explains to another crew member that he’s filming a documentary, though he declines to say what it’s about. After his brief police interview he climbs into the rafters to film the police canvassing the crime scene.

Things kind of start falling apart for Mark after that. Before their dinner date Helen introduces Mark to his mother, who seemingly confirms her bad impression of him. It’s worth mentioning that on their way out Helen convinces Mark to leave the camera behind. During their dinner Helen says she’s writing a children’s book about a magic camera and wonders if he could possibly help with the pictures. He’s delighted by the offer, although he still checks his watch to see when his latest film will be fully developed and available for viewing. They return home in high spirits, Mark reclaims his camera, and goes upstairs. He threads his new film in the projector and starts to watch when he hears a noise in the room. He shuts it off and turns on a light to reveal Helen’s mother standing in the darkness.

Their confrontation is odd. Since the movie’s silent and she’s blind she has no idea what’s on the screen but wonders aloud what’s so important about it that he felt compelled to turn it on the instant he got home. After briefly breaking down about how his latest film is a failure, that the lights fade too soon, he removes the cover on his tripod leg and for a moment considers killing her before relenting, putting the cover back on. She threatens to move them out of the house and he promises to never film Helen. As he shows her out she says he needs help and he’ll eventually need to tell someone about what’s going on.

The next day there’s a shrink on set to help with the cast’s nerves. Mark pulls him aside to ask if there’s a cure for people who are peeping toms, to which the psychologist replies that it would take several years of intensive therapy. Mark wilts at the news and briefly rests against a camera before apparently making a final decision. As he leaves the police decide to put tails on all of the staff members, just in case. On his way over to the newsagent’s he spots the police tail behind him and smiles in grim amusement. Since it’s after hours the owner gives him the key and tells him once he and the girl are finished to lock up behind him. Mark goes upstairs and much to the girl’s annoyance starts filming the officer waiting outside, saying only that it’s for a documentary. Eventually the girl lies on the bed, ready to start the session, and Mark stands menacingly over her. Before we can see the murder we cut to Mark leaving and putting the key through the newsagent’s letterbox. He glances again at the officer and hops on his moped.

Meanwhile Helen is waiting in Mark’s room. She gets curious and starts the film in the projector. Instead of seeing the footage we see Helen’s reaction as she grows nervous and then frightened. She starts to back away only to run into Mark. She desperately asks him to explain what she just saw and he does so. He haltingly explains that while she knows some of what his father did she doesn’t know everything. He reveals that in addition to filming him his father also wired the entire house for sound and plays recordings of himself at different ages wailing in fear and terror. He says the house is still wired and plays a tape of a conversation between Helen and her boyfriend in her room. He reveals his full setup, brandishing the knife at the end of his tripod as well as a concave mirror attached atop the camera itself. He explains that he wanted to see the most terror possible in his victim’s faces as they died and the most frightening thing is your own face as you die. He comes close to killing Helen but can’t bring himself to do it. 

He hears the police arrive outside, who have discovered the body at the newsagents and have come in force. Almost manic he shoves Helen aside and starts adjusting a bunch of flash photography cameras set up around the room. He attaches his main camera to a wall in a move he’s clearly practiced many times. He tells Helen that his death will be the end of his documentary. She grabs at him and begs for him to simply turn himself in but he refuses. As he stumbles towards the spike the various cameras go off. He pauses at the last moment, looks directly into his camera, and says he’s afraid. We watch as he pushes the spike into his neck, He grabs the camera from the wall and staggers backward, keeping the lens pointed at his face, before slowly sinking to the ground. Helen collapses with him and that’s how the police find them. As they lead her away one of the tapes plays a final recording of Mark’s father saying, “Don’t be a silly boy. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Then as the movie fades to black we hear young Mark say, “Daddy, hold my hand.”

In the end Mark was recreating the movies from his youth, when he father was investigating the effect of fear on him. He became fascinated by the most terrifying thing he could think of, the realization of his own death. He filmed the death of three women before finally filming himself. The movie gives a few hints that his compulsion is sexual in nature but it doesn’t lay it on that thick. He doesn’t respond to a kiss Helen gives him, instead pressing his camera to the spots where her lips landed, and while walking to their dinner date he passes a kissing couple and instinctively reaches for his camera. His victims are all women, one a sex worker and one working in pornography. Something’s going on here and I think the movie pushed it about as far as one could in 1960.

On the one had it’s hard to understand the critic’s visceral rejection of the movie as filth when there are only two deaths on screen and we see absolutely no blood. By its very nature the film is interrogating the portrayal of violence on screen and arguably implies that an association with pornography can lead to depravity, a stance that you’d think these conservative voices would appreciate. I think they rejected it because in its structure it involves the audience in the violence the film is committing. It kind of rubs our noses in the fact that we’re watching the movie for the same reason that Mark is filming these deaths: to see women screaming into the camera. Easier to call the whole film pornographic than grapple with the deeper issues it raises.

As I said the movie has since been reappraised and judged to be of high critical worth. It’s got a Criterion release and everything and I can see why. The movie is very aware of what it’s doing and deliberately grates against audience passivity at times but it’s shot and staged incredibly well. Mark is a fascinating protagonist and we understand by the end why he’s compelled to do what he does. This is the first of these movies that interrogates the reasons for the actions of our killer instead of just writing him off as a maniac. Looking at the movies ahead I think there’s going to be a growing divide between those movies interested in getting inside the head of our serial killers and those that are just going to use him as a monster. I think either approach can work pretty well depending on the intention of the movie, and for a movie that’s more than sixty years old I think this one succeeds pretty well.

M (1931)

  It’s genuinely hard to believe that this movie was made only four years after ‘The Lodger.’ The technical advancements in camera movement and editing alone are staggering, never mind the clear grasp of the ways sound can be incorporated into a film. In some ways this is unsurprising as director Fritz Lang was a veteran of the German silent film industry, having made fifteen films between the years 1919 and 1929. He’d already made ‘Metropolis’ and the first two Dr. Mabuse flicks by this point. It’s heartening to note that it was also seen as an amazing leap forward in film making at the time, with critics especially hailing his layered used of sound. Nice to know I’m correct to be so impressed. Most talkies in those early days of the audio revolution were trying to recreate the theatrical experience, using it mostly for spoken dialogue and not having much in the way of off-screen sound. Lang was one of the first to use it to motivate the actions of the characters and to use extended silences interrupted by sudden noises to create unexpected shocks. He also realized that the inclusion of sound would also affect editing as there was no need to cut away to written inserts for spoken dialogue, thus allowing for longer, more natural takes.

Lang’s early directing years were during the Wiemar republic and the buildup to the Nazi takeover and it definitely shows in his films. Many of the political ideas expressed or interrogated during his movies directly reflected debates going on inside of Germany at the time, and this film is no exception. The positions of various characters regarding the death penalty for the killer directly mirrored both the pro and anti positions of then-current political parties. His next movie, ‘The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,’ was banned by the Nazi authorities in 1933 for being critical of the party, although Goebbels himself is said to have been a fan of his work. Lang fled to Paris not long after and was working in Hollywood by 1935.

The inspiration for the child-killer at the center of this movie is generally regarded to be Peter Kurten, the notorious Vampire of Dusseldorf, who murdered at least nine woman and young girls and attempted to kill many more in the later 1920’s. Lang himself disputed this and said he based the character of Hans Beckert on a number of German serial killers including Kurten, Fritz Haumann, Carl Großmann, and Karl Denke, all who were active in the decades just before the film. It’s more than a little bracing to come from a more Anglocentric film background, where until more modern times serial killers kind of start and end with Jack the Ripper, to learn in quick succession about a handful of genuinely disturbing men running around Germany at the very beginning of the twentieth century.

We’re still in the more genteel era of films where the atrocities committed by these killers are more implied than anything else, any violence kept off screen and the exact nature of the crimes never specified. As notorious as those killers mentioned above were, though, I suspect a German audience had no trouble filling in the blanks on their own.

The structure of the movie is interesting in that there aren’t any lead characters and it isn’t quite an ensemble cast. Instead the film shows two systems of people and power slowly organizing themselves to deal with a problem in their midst. There are individual leaders on both sides who make plot-important decisions but Lang is careful to show back and forth debates between numerous people as the characters jockey between themselves in an attempt to rid the city of a disruptive element. Hans Beckert, killer of young children, is considered embarrassing by the police and bad for business by organized crime, so both race to catch him in order to return to the status quo.

The police are ostensibly led by Inspector Karl Lohmann, played by Otto Wernicke. He’s a constantly smoking, strutting character who contemptuously deals with criminals and sees no reason that every business, hospital, and private residence shouldn’t be open to the cops to search whenever they want. The criminals are equally organized, lead by a ring of elite thieves in charge of specific areas of crime, lorded over by The Safecracker, played by Gustaf Gründgens. He’s a strict, precise man who holds himself with such authority that everyone instantly defers to his orders. Oddly enough this formal structure of crime was apparently based in reality, specifically the Ringvereine, or ‘ring clubs.’ These were formal groups where members provided each other with alibis and contacts and also financially maintained the wives and families of members currently serving prison sentences. Lang was apparently so fascinated by the story potential of these groups that he was severely worried that someone else would get a movie about them made before he did. However fact based they are the existence of this well-organized criminal group, extending down to a spreadsheet-making guild of beggars, gives the movie a faint tinge of dreamlike logic that I find appropriate.

Lang himself doesn’t give much away about how he feels about either group through his staging or directing, treating both fairly evenly. Originally I thought the movie was going to portray the cops as clumsy based on how they’re introduced. After several scenes establishing that the killer has claimed his ninth victim and that the citizens are starting to give in to mob violence and paranoia we see a high government official on the phone to the police commissioner demanding to know why they haven’t caught the killer yet. The commissioner tries to justify the actions of the force by saying their men are working around the clock and that the homicide division can barely find time to sleep. This happens over footage of cops yawning in the staff break room and detectives hunched at their desks grimly smoking. But then he starts talking about how impossible it is to catch a killer who doesn’t leave clues and as he explains the number of men he has picking through garbage and taking statements we see just that: officers finding trash in bushes, tired men with notebooks taking statements, searching fields, etc. He also explains the general uselessness of witnesses and public tips, showing two people almost coming to blows over the color of a girl’s hat and an irate family yelling at an officer after a pointless house search based off of a random tip. The conversation ends when the commissioner states that they’ve been sending nightly raids into all of the criminal dens they’re aware of.

We cut to an underground saloon where it’s made obvious everyone there is involved in crime to some extent, from streetwalkers to thugs. Then wave after wave of police vehicles come down the street and as they march down the stairs to confront the patrons we meet Inspector Karl Lohmann at their head. Someone in the crowd calls him “Tubby Lohmann” and the rest of the crowd start jeering at him, but he yells at them to be quiet and they are. The next scene is a nice little bit of business as the patrons have their papers checked, which clues us in to the fraught but somewhat collegiate relationship between the police and professional criminals. Most of the ones caught with fraudulent papers grumble but seem to admit that fair’s fair, one drunk happily admitting he doesn’t have any at all and happily being led off to jail. Lohmann is also established as being fairly clever, catching several people in lies and commanding grudging respect.

The scene ends with the bartender chastising the police for wasting their time when they should be catching the killer and then the scene switches across the street to the head criminals. Four of them are waiting on the fifth, the leader. They complain about the raids and how pretty soon it’s going to really eat into their business. The Safecracker finally arrives and before setting foot inside angrily demands that they close the blinds, which they immediately do. Thereby established as both careful and fully in charge he calls the meeting to order. The Safecracker gives a short, angry speech about how important it is to draw a line between criminals such as themselves and monsters like the child killer.

As he waves his arm to invite the other members to give suggestions a very clever match cut takes us to police headquarters where an almost identical gesture by the commissioner to his men starts a separate brainstorming session. The scenes will cut back and forth like this throughout. The officers start to suggest useless plans such as even more raids. Back to the criminals where one suggests that they start honey-trapping officers to find out their plans ahead of time. A cop says they should search every house and apartment in the city. A criminal proposes writing a letter to the papers saying that they totally hate this guy. An officer says they should ask for even more tips from the public. It goes back and forth like this until The Safecracker finally lifts his head and intones that the criminals will have to catch him themselves. Then the cops stumble across the idea of checking up on everyone who’s been discharged from a mental health facility in the last five years. The criminals decide to involve the city beggars, who are seen to be ludicrously organized in a scene where they count and log the bits of cigarettes and sandwiches they’ve managed to scrounge up during the day. In the meantime the cops have analyzed a letter they’d previously received from the killer and specify that during their searches they need to start looking for old wooden tables and red pencils.

At this point we start getting scenes following the killer himself, Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre. Although he’d been a stage comedian for a while previously this was his first substantial film role and it shot him to instant stardom in Germany. He also fled the Nazis soon after and found plenty of work in Hollywood for decades. He plays Beckert as a man consumed by his drive to kill, nervous and jumpy at the best of times but able to put on a child-friendly facade when necessary. He’s only seen from the back for the first fifteen or so minutes of movie, his face only showing after he’s scrawled a gloating letter to the papers, something the real-life killer Kurten actually did. We see him smile dissolutely at himself in a mirror, then tug at the corners of his mouth and bug out his eyes.

As the two systems starting moving towards Beckert’s end we follow him as he idly buys fruit from a stall, wandering and window shopping until he sees the reflection of a young girl. His face instantly goes slack and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand like a small, messy child. His eyes close and he sways forward as a sudden wave of clearly sexual longing surges through him. He starts following the child, whistling the melody to ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ to himself, something like his leitmotif in the movie. The camera starts following the girl as she wanders down the street, the whistling coming from off-screen to let the audience know that Beckert is always just behind.

Luckily the girl comes across her mother so Beckert is forced to break off and steady himself with a couple of cognacs. He soon spots another one and as he’s leading her off his whistling becomes his downfall. Near the beginning we’d watched as he bought one of his immanent victims a balloon while whistling his signature tune to himself, and now that same balloon-selling beggar, part of the criminal network, hears it again and identifies him. Soon the network of near-invisible men are trailing behind him. One of the men writes a large letter “M” on his palm in chalk then pretends to stumble into Beckert, leaving an imprint of the letter on his shoulder, thus the title of the film. Beckert finally twigs to the group of men trailing behind him and runs, panicked, into a nearby office building to hide. The beggars alert the rest of the criminals and they resolve to break into the building that night to find him.

In the meantime the police have already identified Beckert through his medical records and have been unsuccessfully staking out his flat. During the raid on the office building, which ends when the criminals manage to find and subdue Beckert, they let one of the night watchmen pull an alarm. When the police arrive they find one gang member accidentally left behind who eventually folds and gives away the location of where they’re holding the killer.

While the interrogation is going on the criminals decide to have themselves a trial. It’s held in an old disused factory’s basement with rows upon rows of stone-faced criminals sitting in judgment. At first Beckert blusters that they can’t hold him, what they’re doing is illegal, they have no proof of anything, to which the gathered criminals give a hoarse chorus of laughter. The stark reality of the hardened faces in front of him soon puncture his bluster and he starts ranting about how they don’t know what it’s like to have urges inside that he can’t deny, how he can’t stop himself and is always amazed later at what he’s done. The Safecracker says that since he himself admits that he’s never going to stop they have even more reason to simply kill him and end things. He derisively describes how if he was committed to an insane asylum he’d just be released after a few years and be free to start the killings again. He’s been assigned a desultory defense attorney who states it’s not their place to kill an obviously unwell and insane man and that he should be turned over the authorities. The sides yell at each other stridently until the crowd decides they’ve had enough and start to move forward as one towards Beckert, at which point the cops show up and take him into custody. The movie never does come down on a side of the issue.

The movie wraps up extremely quickly after that. The first ten minutes or so of the movie are made up of a sequence tracking a girl never getting home from school. We cut between her mother, waiting at home, and flashes of the killer meeting her on the street and buying her little gifts. It also ends with a brief flash of trial judges getting ready to pass sentence on Beckert before ending with a trio of weeping mothers looking directly into the camera and intoning, “This will not bring our children back. One has to keep closer watch over the children!” Which is a bracing invective in these days where we’re constantly debating about helicopter parenting and the proper amount of independence to give kids. I suppose in 1931 Germany the idea that people needed to keep track of children and be aware of what they were doing was a relatively new one.

This movie was hailed at the time and continues to be considered a masterpiece and I’m forced to agree. I found ‘The Lodger’ a chore to sit through but ‘M’ was compelling from beginning to end. The camera work, editing, staging, and especially the sound design were modern enough that I had to keep reminding myself that in a movie made a hundred years ago a lot of this was revolutionary technology and film technique. Movies didn’t really look or sound this way until this was made. It doesn’t dwell too much on the psychology of the killer, possibly because the crimes that inspired him were so heinous that it’s likely that no interpretation would seem to suffice, so he killed because he was simply compelled to. We don’t get a backstory, we don’t really get any details, at no point does Lorre even attempt to portray him as sympathetic or understandable. The sequences where he’s stalking children remain as unsettling today as ever and I’m sad to say that its unresolved debate over the death penalty is still raging to this day. Amazing film.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

 

    In 1913 English author Mari Belloc Lowndes published her bestselling novel The Lodger, inspired heavily by the crimes of Jack the Ripper. It’s arguably the first piece of published fiction to be directly inspired by The Whitechapel Murders, so it’s interesting that it focuses more on the psychological effects of the murders on her characters rather than the killings themselves. I’ve only skimmed the book so I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure that all of the violence is kept off-page, as it were, referred to by the characters rather than directly described. It focuses on a married couple, the Buntings, suspecting that their new lodger, Mr. Sleuth, is a mysterious serial killer of women calling himself The Avenger. While never stated outright it’s heavily implied by the novel’s end that the titular lodger was indeed the murderer, although it’s never confirmed.

    Before Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 version it had already been adapted into the play ‘Who is He?’ by Horace Annesley Vachel, a performance of which Hitchcock reportedly attended in 1915. A 1932 sound adaptation (starring the same lead as this one) changed the ending of the book to reveal the killer as the lodger’s brother. In a 1944 version, simply called ‘The Lodger’ with no fog mentioned, the titular character is confirmed to be the killer but escapes the grasp of the police by throwing himself out of a window to his death. There was also an American film released in 1953 starring Jack Palance as the suspicious gentleman, more or less keeping the changes from the 1944 update. In 1965 the ITV anthology program “Armchair Mystery Theatre” broadcast its adaptation, and in 1967 a German TV movie entitled ‘Der Mieter’ was aired. There was even an update in 2009 with Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, and Simon Baker which moved the setting to modern day Hollywood.

    Hitchcock himself remained interested in the material for many years. It was adapted several times for his radio series ‘Suspense,’ including the very first episode in 1940 which actually kept the novel’s ambiguous ending, and then again in a 1948 episode entitled ‘The Black Curtain’ starring Robert Montgomery. In 1942 it was stated in the trades that Hitchcock wanted to do a new sound and color adaptation of the film but was unable to secure the rights.

    This is the first film Hitchcock made that he later considered to be worth anything. It was the third film he ever directed, having made ‘The Pleasure Garden’ in 1925 and ‘The Mountain Eagle’ in 1926, the latter of which has been lost to time. Production took six weeks, which was considered notable at the time, the long shoot blamed on Hitchcock’s interest in the contemporary German Expressionist film movement which necessitated much more time to set up shots and lighting than the nascent British picture industry was used to. It was his first thriller and first commercial success. It’s also the first time on record that he arguably abused one of his female stars, Daisy actor June Tripp blaming his insistence on repeated takes for aggravating a previous surgery and requiring a return to the hospital.

    The actors run a fairly interesting gamut. The couple renting the lodgings are only credited as The Landlady and Her Husband, played respectively by Marie Ault and Arther Chesney. Ault was a prolific character actor, her career stretching from 1921 to 1951, and Chesney had been a stage actor for many years before the film industry even existed and kept acting until his death in 1949. The character of Joe, the rather thankless role of both suspicious police detective and jilted fiance of the female lead in a nice bit of plot compression, was played by Malcolm Keen. Keen started acting on stage in 1902 then transitioned to films in 1916 and played many roles before retiring in the early 1960’s. Daisy, the daughter of the Landlady and Her Husband and the Lodger’s love interest slash potential victim, was the aforementioned June Tripp, credited under the stage name of just June. She only starred in a handful of films before her retirement in 1951, having married a department store heir in 1937 and apparently deciding to just enjoy herself.

    The ostensible star of the movie and the titular Lodger himself was played by Ivor Novello, a name possibly still familiar to a British audience but almost certainly completely unknown to an American one. Born in 1893, he would go on to be a stage and film actor, a lauded composer and songwriter, and one of the biggest stars of the early years of British cinema. He first rose to prominence in 1914 by composing the patriotic song “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” a British anthem during the First World War. He contributed songs to a number of successful stage revues and eventually started writing his own, such as “Symphony in Two Flats” and “Glamorous Nights.” He was a contemporary of and a friend to Noel Coward and the corresponding social set and has been stated by some to be one of the preeminent British entertainers of the twentieth century. He also had an intensely brooding air about him in addition to his very good looks, having been cast in his first film role in 1920 based soley on a publicity photo. As openly gay as one was allowed to be at the time, he remained vital in the industry until his sudden death from coronary thrombosis at the age of 58. He’s remembered by The Ivor Novello Awards, established in 1955 (and still running) to honor the best in British songwriting and composing.

    The only problem with casting Novello as the titular Lodger was that it was quickly determined that such a big star would have to be shown as innocent of the crimes by the end of the film, so the producers mandated to Hitchcock that there would have to be a happy ending which showed his character as fully exonerated. While he reportedly bristled under the mandate Hitchcock did comply, and although I watched the movie after having this production fact already spoiled for me I don’t think the movie ever really tries to paint his character as particularly suspicious. I haven’t done the research but all of this had to have influenced the production and ending of 1941’s ‘Suspicion.’

    Before getting into the film itself I have a confession to make: apparently I don’t like silent films. I’m able to intellectually admire them for their imagery and ability to convey character and meaning through physical acting and film language, but in the end I prefer my characters to be able to speak with their words. At no point during the movie was I lost or having trouble with a character’s motivations, but I often interpreted the broad acting as mugging and the interpersonal interactions as arbitrary when I didn’t have access to any of the conversations these people were silently having. I’m more than willing to chalk it up to a fault within myself.

    The movie opens very directly: we open to a flashing sign in lights announcing ‘To – Night “Golden Curls.”’ Cut to a crumpled dead woman in the street, then to an old lady giving witness testimony to an English bobby taking down her statement while a reporter stands next to him making just as many notes. The camera makes a point of showing a piece of paper on the body with block letters reading The Avenger, surrounded by a drawn triangle. Soon the officer takes the lady to get her a calming drink while the reporter rushes off to a phone booth to call the story in. They leave the lady lying there unattended, completely swarmed by the curious public. We then get a set of newspaper headlines stating that this is the seventh victim of the killer known as, guess what, The Avenger, and that all of the victims have been young blonde women killed on subsequent Tuesdays.

    We then cut backstage at a fashion show where we meet Daisy, one of the models. In the opening credits the character is listed as being ‘a mannequin,’ which apparently was an old-timey term for fashion model. Many future adaptations would change these to be brothel workers, but that didn’t exactly fly in 1927. Daisy is blonde and upbeat and seems like a perfectly nice person. She hurries home where her parents are entertaining her boyfriend, Joe, a police detective. They joke around in the kitchen when the gas lights go out, and while the father is getting them relit there’s a knock on the door.

    Our eponymous Lodger thus enters the house under cover of darkness, dressed in a black coat with a scarf wrapped around his lower face, matching the description of the killer given by the witness. He inquires after the ad in the window offering a room for rent, and after the lights go back on the mother is happy to walk him up to show him. At this point I got very confused about the class status of the family, because everything up to that point made me think working poor but it’s now revealed they live in a three story house where the room for rent is in fact two massive rooms, a bedroom and a parlor with a working fireplace.

    There’s also ample furniture, a chess set, and numerous paintings hanging on the walls. Of course the lodger says he’ll take the place and nonchalantly pays an entire month in advance. His first request is to get rid of the paintings. They’re all portrait of young women with blonde hair, which is supposed to make us suspicious of him but made me wonder where the family got them all and why so many. Also removing the paintings reveals clear spots showing how soot-stained the rest of the walls are, which I guess is what you get when a society has been smoking non-stop for several hundred years. Daisy is instructed to go upstairs and take down the paintings, and from the moment she and the Lodger lock eyes the rest of the story becomes fairly predictable. The family’s first moment of unease happens when they’re all back downstairs in the kitchen, listening to him pace back and forth above their heads. Hitchcock has a neat little effect where he has a shot upwards at the kitchen ceiling showing the swaying chandelier which fades into an upward view of the Lodger pacing on a glass floor.

    Of course Daisy and the Lodger start spending time together, flirting over chess games, making eyes in the hallway, that sort of thing. Joe starts growing slowly disgruntled by the stranger’s attentions to his girl. We’re shown the Lodger doing supposedly suspicious things, like hiding a bag in a locked drawer and carelessly leaving money out, but nothing overt until late at night during the first Tuesday after he moves in. The Husband is out working late and Daisy seems to be at her jb as well so it’s just the Landlady who hears the Lodger stealthily slip out of the house at night. She takes the opportunity to snoop around his room and doesn’t find anything except the locked drawer, which she seems to think is suspicious in and of itself. While she’s doing that we’re shown a quick scene of the killer striking again. The Lodger returns around midnight and the Landlady worriedly goes back to sleep.

    The next morning Joe, having been earlier assigned to the Avenger task force and forcefully bragging about how easy the madman was going to be to catch, is in a foul mood. It’s immediately made worse when they hear Daisy scream from upstairs. They burst into the Lodger’s room to find her laughing in his arms, apparently spooked by a mouse. This causes Joe to confront him and for the Lodger to demand he leave his quarters. He angrily tells The Landlady that is he’s interrupted like that again he’ll be moving out. Downstairs The Landlady finally brings up his absence the previous night to her husband, and they both grown fearful of their upstairs neighbor, vowing never to leave Daisy alone with him. There’s also the first scene that actually ties the Lodger directly to the murders: Joe is shown at police headquarters marking a map with the locations of the all the killings. He says it shows steady movement in one direction, allowing them to estimate where he’ll strike next. We then cut to another map in the possession of the Lodger with those same map locations marked.

    The next night the Lodger attends one of Daisy’s fashion shows. They flirt across the room at each other. The morning after a package arrives for her at the house, containing the dress she’d been wearing. She’s delighted, but when her parent find out who the gift is from the husband instantly packs it back up and then haltingly takes it upstairs. He returns it to the Lodger, shakily saying that they don’t allow their daughter to receive gifts from strangers. Later on the Lodger talks to Daisy through a bathroom door to confirm that she at least didn’t mind, and their flirtation continues.

    On what must be the next Tuesday, considering what happens, Daisy and the Lodger are both headed out of the house when they run into each other in the foyer. They decide to spend a little time together outside. When The Landlady notices that Daisy isn’t in the house she wails to her husband that the two of them went out together. The couple embrace under a streetlight, which is where Joe catches them during his patrol for the Avenger. He confronts the Lodger, only for Daisy to make it clear she’s tired of him and loves this guy now. They stomp away and Joe sinks to the bench under the streetlight, head in hands. He stares at a shoe print left by the Lodger when he suddenly sees within it a montage of previous scenes including the Lodger and Daisy embracing, the swinging kitchen chandelier, and the only bit of relevant information, the way he didn’t like the paintings of blonde women in his room. I’d spent the previously forty minutes waiting for The Landlady to tattle on him to the police in order to set up the film’s climax but apparently Joe just magically came to the exact same suspicion on his own.

    The Lodger and Daisy return to the house and make with the smooches up in his room, her parents crouched fearfully downstairs, until Joe shows up with backup and a warrant. They search his quarters, forcing him to open the locked drawer to reveal a satchel containing a gun, the map, newspaper clippings of the murders, and a portrait of a young blonde woman. The Lodger collapses at the sight of it, and after Joe snarls that it must be his first victim he turns to Daisy and tearfully admits it’s his sister. He’s arrested and marched down the stairs in handcuffs. The Landlady collapses and in the confusion the Lodger mutters to Daisy to meet him by the streetlight then runs off into the suddenly foggy night (this is the only time I recall seeing any fog in the entire film). The police run after him and Daisy runs after them.

    Daisy and The Lodger meet at the streetlight and he tearfully fills her in on his backstory. He and his sister were dancing at her coming out ball when the lights suddenly went out. When they came back up she was lying murdered in the middle of the floor with a note from The Avenger. The shock was terrible for their mother’s health and she made him swear to her on her deathbed that he would seek justice for his sister. He agreed and she died. He says he noticed the pattern of the killings and sought out their flat in an attempt to get ahead of the madman, thus the map and gun.

    She decides he’s in shock and that the smart thing for them to do would be to go into a bar to get him a drink. She drapes a coat over his shoulders to hide the fact that he’s in handcuffs and walks him into a busy pub. She buys him a drink and has to hold it to his lips, which seems to disturb everyone at the bar. It seems to me that a late night pub in 1927 wouldn’t really give a shit, but I guess I wasn’t there. They leave and mere moments later Joe and the police thunder in, asking if they’ve seen anyone in handcuffs as it’s totally The Avenger. Everyone instantly realizes the Lodger must be the guy and pile out into the night after him. Joe stays back to ring headquarters only to find that another patrol caught the real killer in the act less than ten minutes ago.

    To his credit Joe is horrified that he arrested the wrong man and, judging from the mood of the pub-goers, might have just gotten him killed. He rushes out of the bar to save him. We cut to the Lodger fleeing in the night from what suddenly seems like a couple hundred people. He eventually tries to climb over an iron fence but catches his cuffs on a decorative spike. He’s trapped as the crowd starts to pummel him while Daisy silently wails that he’s innocent. In a few moments the police are there and attempt to beat back the mob, but it’s a late edition of the paper stating that The Avenger is in custody that calms the crowd down and lets them rescue the improbably still-alive Lodger. It’s been maybe twenty minutes since the killer was caught, that’s some fast newspaper printing.

    We next see a hospital where a worried Daisy is at the Lodger’s bedside. A doctor briefly says he’ll be totally fine before we then cut to the interior of a stately manor, where Daisy and her nervous parents are waiting. The Lodger, all smiles and sharp suits now that he’s back to being rich and not grieving, sweeps down and embraces Daisy. He doesn’t seem at all resentful towards her parents, even after they flinch at hearing his footsteps then laugh as if it’s actually funny that they thought he was a serial killer. The parents make themselves at home on the fancy furniture while the Lodger and Daisy move away to a window to smooch in front of, though which we see a nice view of the city and also that flashing sign from the beginning advertising ‘To – Night “Golden Curls.”’ I’ve wracked and wracked my brain and I’m just not sure if that means anything.

    I was originally flabbergasted that we didn’t see the capture of The Avenger on screen, or get any kind of explanation for who he was or why he was killing. Aside from the two flashes of murder we were shown (and mainly it was just women screaming towards the camera lens) the movie was about another group of people that wasn’t involved at all. The only policeman we actually met wasn’t even part of the arrest. When I rolled it around later it did make more sense because the movie isn’t about the killings at all, it’s about the effect that paranoia can have on otherwise decent people. The Landlady and Her Husband turn completely against their guest based on nothing more than him leaving the house one night and pacing a bit loudly overhead. It’s implied at least that Joe suspects The Lodger because he’s jealous over Daisy. The instant mob that developed at the end is perfectly happy to beat a man to death just because someone heard he might be guilty. I can see why the story was of interest to Hitchcock with his lifelong fascination for wrongly-accused men.

    Hitchcock was only twenty-eight when he directed ‘The Lodger,’ which lines up nicely with my final impression of the film as an early sketch of what the director would go on to make. There were themes and images that are absolutely of a piece of later movies such as ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ ‘Notorious,’ and even ‘Psycho.’ Dialogue would only give him another tool with which to build suspense, and with higher budgets and larger crews his ability to create tension would only increase. I’m not sure how highly I regard the film itself but I’m glad I saw it. It’ll be useful to be able to watch later Hitchcock films and be able to use this one to judge his creative growth against.

Kojak – ‘How Cruel the Frost, How Bright the Stars’ (1975)

               On August 28, 1963 the bodies of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were found in their apartment in Manhattan. Both of the victim’s families were prominent and relatively wealthy and thus a media firestorm ensued. It was dubbed the “Career Girl Murders” because both of the young women had moved to the city and found jobs, which was apparently notable enough to justify the name. Months passed of intense investigation while the NYPD came under increasing media pressure to produce results. In April of 1964 a young Black man by the name of George Whitmore Jr. was accused of an unrelated rape and was found to have in his possession a photograph of a white woman that the police decided looked like one of the victims, despite the family’s denial and evidence of who the person actually was. After many hours of intense interrogation Whitmore was pressured into a confession. The police immediately announced that they’d found their killer and threw in another murder for good measure. Whitmore later took back his confession and plenty of evidence turned up of his total innocence, which prosecutors decided to ignore.

              In October of 1964 a drug dealer by the name of Nathan Delaney was arrested for the murder of another drug dealer, and in an effort to get a deal offered the identity of the real “Career Girl Murders” killer. He gave them the name of Richard Robles, an addict who had a habit of stealing to support his drug habit. This other set of detectives had Delaney wear a wire to record conversations with Robles and over the next few months they managed to get enough details on the crime to decide he was indeed the real killer. Robles was arrested in January of 1965 but don’t worry, Whitmore was still tried for the murders of Wylie and Hoffert in March of 1965. This ended in a mistrial. At that point the prosecution officially dismissed those indictments.

              Whitmore was later convicted on the other charges despite his argument that all of his confessions were coerced through intense and violent interrogations. The convictions were appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, the guilty verdicts being upheld at every step. Finally the preponderance of evidence that the police and prosecutors had knowingly withheld exonerative details from the defense and a believable account of the abuse he suffered during interrogation caused his convictions to be completely overturned and dismissed in April of 1973. The Wylie-Hoffert murders and the treatment of Whitmore were one of the key cases sited by the Supreme Court in its landmark decision in June of 1966 establishing defendants’ rights and the codification of the Miranda warning.

              In 1972 Universal Television approached author Abbey Mann to write a movie for them based on the original case. Mann had won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the 1961 film ‘Judgment at Nuremberg.’ He’d also written the 1968 Frank Sinatra film ‘The Detective’ as well as several other well-regard films. In 1973 CBS broadcast the television movie “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,’ a fictionalized version of the Wylie-Hoffert case. The film was a fairly typical gritty 70’s affair except for a conscious decision to also feature examinations of institutionalized racism and the civil rights of suspects. Ideas from the book Justice in the Back Room by Selwyn Raab were also included, to the point where Raab was noted in the credits. The main character for the tv movie was a composite character of the more sympathetic cops and journalists involved in the case by the name of Kojack, played by one Telly Savalas.

I’m not sure if its either very hard or very easy to explain the appeal of Telly Savalas to a modern audience not already familiar with him. I can imagine just a choir of confused looks when people realize that he was famous at least in part just for being Greek and bald. Aristotelis Savalas was born in New York in 1922, the grandson of Greek immigrants. After serving in a non-military capacity in WWII he got his bachelor’s degree in psychology. In the next few years his distinctive deep and smooth voice got him radio work, such as the host of a show called “The Coffeehouse in New York City.” He advanced into management and eventually became the senior news director of special events for ABC. He later moved into sports programming and gave Howard Cosell his first job in television. He fell into acting by accident, filling in for an absent actor he’d recommended for “Armstrong Circle Theatre” in 1958.

Who loves ya, milady?

Something about the man caught the public’s attention because he was soon an in-demand guest star for the burgeoning television industry. He started getting film roles and his friendship with actor Burt Lancaster led to his casting in 1962’s ‘Birdman in Alcatraz,’ for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He shaved his head for the role of Pontius Pilate in 1965’s ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ and since he was mostly bald by that point he just kept it shaved for the rest of his career. I need to emphasis that this shaved head was unusual enough that it was considered notable to the public. His star kept rising with prominent roles in movies such as ‘The Dirty Dozen’ in 1967 and he even played James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’

While he was just one of the characters featured in the tv movie, when it was decided to spin off an entire series based on his character the show was shaped around his bigger than life personality. His character was renamed Lt. Theophilus “Theo” Kojak and was very proudly of Greek heritage, like Savalas himself. The show leaned heavily on his charm as the character he played was very much an ideal version of the man himself. He was always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit and was shown to be incredibly smooth and popular with the ladies. He was portrayed as a friend to the underdog, always willing to give the benefit of the doubt to sex workers and the downtrodden (although those were not the terms used by the show, of course). His trademark lollypop, almost always included in promotional photographs jauntily poking out of one corner of his mouth, stemmed from Savalas’ own attempts to quit smoking.

What struck me as the first interesting thing about the show is how modern it feels compared to the shows I’ve watched up to this point. I can quibble with a few things here and there but for the most part this is the first time I can say that a show is recognizable as a police procedural as we’ve come to know them. The character of Kojak himself is central to the show but they also manage to populate the screen with a decent supporting cast. His right-hand man, detective Boby Crocker, is played by Kevin Dobson who would go on to play ‘Mack’ MacKenzie in Knots Landing for eleven years. His rather absent-minded superior, Captain Frank McNeil, is played by Dan Frazer. The other featured detective who tended to anchor an episode’s B-story is Detective Stavros, a portly, wild-haired but even-keeled officer played by Telly’s younger brother George Savalas. Detectives Saperstein and Conti tended to round out the cast as utility players, but the episodes typically revolved around those four characters.

Still better lighting than most modern shows.

The series focused on the Eleventh Precinct of the New York Police department. By this point in the evolution of television strict accuracy had long since been dropped as a selling point, but it did use the exterior of the actual Ninth Precinct for establishing shots and did film on real locations in New York City. It’s the first episode this month that looks like a Christmas episode, with visible cold and snow-covered streets. The crimes depicted in the show generally avoided the grand ambitions of either “The F.B.I.” or even “S.W.A.T.,” and generally speaking the episodes would follow only one or two mysteries over the course of an episode. Here are a couple of random summaries from the show’s second season: “A small time crook prepares to pull a big robbery to flee a pending murder charge,” “A psychopathic bomber targets people who hurt his friend, who is the wife of an adulterer,” and “Kojak has two hours to free hostages taken by robbers in an Army surplus store.” These are meat-and-potatoes crime show premises which gives the writers plenty of time to dig in, develop some characters, and let the scenes breathe. It also gives the show space for absolutely insane casting, as the notable guest stars for those episodes mentioned above include John Ritter, Dabney Coleman, and Harvey Keitel respectively. This was a mixture of Savalas’ industry clout and shooting on location in New York and taking advantage of the local pool of actors. It’s the same way that about half the actors in the country have appeared in a “Law & Order” episode by this point. We’ll get into the very special guests for this episode in due time.

This episode has a pleasantly traditional structure to it, with an A plot involving mainly Kojak and Crocker, a B story involving Stavros, and a minor C story that eventually matches up with the B story by the climax. I was annoyed when “S.W.A.T.” clumsily pulled this maneuver and while it’s almost as much of a coincidence here the show does a decent enough job laying the groundwork that I’m not going to complain about it too much.

The show does a cold open by showing a woman in a red dress with a white flower in her hair walking down the city sidewalk at night, followed by an older man in a trenchcoat who clearly means her no good. It’s New York in winter in 1975 so as she passes bars and storefronts we see signs and lights and decorations in a way that frankly the LA-set shows haven’t been able to replicate up to this point. She ducks into a bar and notices that her flower is askew. She briefly tries to fix it then just leaves it at the bar as she heads to the restroom. The bartender picks it up and gives it to another lady at the bar who’s also wearing a red dress and looks vaguely similar. This is our guest character of the week Loretta Kane as played by Jesse Wells, who worked a lot with Ralph Bakshi, of all people. The man in the trenchcoat enters the bar, mistakes Loretta for the other woman, and brings out a gun to take a shot. He’s jostled and misses and while he’s tussling with the other bar patrons manages to shoot himself in the arm. He then escapes having only hurt himself.

Soon enough out hero Kojak is on the scene. I cannot stress enough that the show treated Savalas and his charisma as load bearing. He enters the bar in full regalia, three piece suit with matching fedora. He swaggers over the bar where Crocker is already pressing Loretta and her friend Jacky for details. Kojak gives a wide smile and drawls to the other cop, “7:30 Christmas Eve, in half an hour I’m booked for a swim in a bowl of eggnog, what’s the problem?” Savalas’ dialogue in the show is a weird combination of quasi-noir tough talk and vaguely hippy nonsense that mostly works only because he’s the one saying it. His catchphrase for the show in general was, “Who loves ya, baby?” Later in this very episode he’ll flash his badge to a witness and mention he’s with “the fuzzy wuzzy.” On paper it doesn’t work but I do dig what he’s putting down.

At least they admit some police shootings are suspect.

Of course Kojak knows Loretta and they flirt a bit as the detectives cajole the two of them to come downtown to look at some mugshots. It cuts to the precinct where our C-story gets going as a couple of non-recurring characters head out in disguise to start their shift staking out in a liquor store hoping to catch some robbers. Kojak mentions to the captain that one of them is a little too on the edge due to his wife’s murder the previous year. The girls are surprised to find they’ve arrived in the middle of the precinct Christmas party and the various regular and recurring characters get to crack cynical jokes at each others expenses for a few minutes. They even get Kojak an absolutely hideous Christmas suit vest which he instantly and without hesitation puts on, which honestly did more than anything else in the episode to endear the character to me. After about five minutes the party breaks up and the girls realize they’re going to be stuck in the police station for Christmas Eve. Loretta’s friend Jacky, played by Deborah White, was already depressed because they guy she’d made a date with had earlier stood her up at the bar.

After a brief scene at the liquor store where the cops become suspicious of a guy coming in looking for work we cut back to the station where Detective Stavros decides to catch some air. As he’s leaving the precinct he runs across a very worried young woman in the lobby named Allison and asks if he can help her. She introduces herself and manages to mention that her father is very rich and then says she’s worried about her boyfriend. She couldn’t help herself and bought him an expensive leather jacket and silk scarf for Christmas and is worried that he’s going to do something stupid to get money to buy her something back. This is the suspicious character from the previous scene. Stavros asks how long he’s been missing and after she says a few hours he gently explains there really isn’t anything they can do under the circumstances unless she wants to say he’s armed and dangerous. She angrily stomps out, claiming they’re all useless.

We next get a scene of Kojak heavily flirting with a Greek lady at a Greek restaurant. The show is very, very careful to stress the ethnicity of all of this. Her name is Elenora and is played by the decidedly non-Greek Veronica Hamel. She’s only been in the country three years which lets her ask leading questions about New York CIty, teeing up Kojak to philosophize a little bit about how much better it used to be. The 70’s was just starting it’s fascination with 50’s culture at this point, ‘American Graffiti’ had come out in 1973 and “Happy Days” had started in 1974, but Kojak’s reminiscing isn’t quite the usual boomer nostalgia. The Greek lady asks about the smog and he starts to reminisce about how there wasn’t anything like that in the old days, there was no such thing as smog and how you could swim in the rivers. He drones on, “Things have changed and nothing’s the same and Elenor this used to be a great city. Twenty or thirty plays on Broadway every season, great jazz joints, Eddie Condons, Jimmy Ryans, the Birdland. Summer nights, believe it or not, you could walk in the park, any park in New York. And downtown, the Lower East Side, great place, push carts and selling watermelons and pineapples and bananas and flowers and people and laughter and like that. We let the fun go out of this city, Elenor, and everybody is afraid of everybody else now.” When she mentions that it must have been a long time ago he says, sadly, “No, it wasn’t that long ago.”

This seems a pretty decent thesis statement for  the show as a whole, that New York used to be a great place but now it’s all violent and scary, and while I question how great it really was in the 1930’s when Savalas and likely the character of Kojak grew up that definitely was the feeling in the city in the 70’s, that a formerly great place had gone to hell. It’s echoed at the end of the episode, after all of the plot lines have been wrapped up, when a sad and slightly bitter Kojak calls out into the night streets, “Love thy neighbor, baby!”

The wistful philosopher.

The storylines mostly resolve themselves in predictable ways. Stavros runs across the distraught young woman again and is impressed by how sincere and worried she is. He takes her back to the station and she finally admits that her boyfriend once robbed a gas station. This concerns him enough that he ropes in Kojak to act as the bad cop, who in turn gets her to admit that he owns a gun. There’s a very interesting exchange where Kojak teases out that most of the reason she hooked up with this guy was to freak out her rich dad, which was just as much of a thing fifty years ago. They then put out an alert that he’s armed and dangerous. The boyfriend, who actually did make some money, gets jumped and robbed in an alley and so decides to rob the liquor store anyway, the same one being staked out by the cop of the edge from earlier. Stavros and the girl have been driving around looking for the boyfriend and mange to interrupt just when the robbery starts, which leads to him briefly taking her hostage. He quickly drops her and gets chased up onto a rooftop. When Kojak hears what’s going on he swears nobody else is going to die that night and takes over negotiations. He deescalates the situation and the boyfriend is taken into custody unharmed, his rich girlfriend promising to do everything she can to help.

During all of this the other investigation trundles on. It turns out that the killer with a case of mistaken identity had been following around his much-younger wife, who had recently left him. He takes his wounded arm to a pharmacy, where he gets some bandages and forces the attendant to give him a list of nearby doctors. The detectives fan out to go down the list and almost catch up to him while he’s holding a doctor and his family hostage but lose him when he runs out of the back. Kojak eventually decides to use Loretta as a kind of bait, taking her from bar to bar in the general area where they lost the shooter until they end up in a Latin dive where the bartender is played by baby Edward James Olmos. They needn’t have bothered with any of that though because in his despair and completely independent of the cops the gunman shoots himself in a nearby alley. Kojak and Loretta rush over where the dying man mistakes her for his wife and she pretends to be her as he passes. After this she’s super depressed so Kojak points her back towards the Latin bar and gives her his version of a peptalk: “Loretta, baby, I want you to go in there and dance. Dance as much as you can for as long as you can and that’s an order, ok? And do it for both of us, please?” Loretta struts over, flings open the bar door and announces to the crowd, “Don’t stop the music, muchachos! Here I come!” She then blows Kojak a kiss and sashays inside.

              There’s even a nice little coda with Loretta’s friend Jacky when her date shows up at the police station looking for her, played by a nigh-fetal John Larroquette.

               I’m not going to say this is my favorite episode so far this month, I really liked “The Untouchables,” but it’s nice to watch an episode of television that’s at least trying to be quality. I quite liked the supporting cast, especially detective Stavros, and I can tell that if I watched more I’d really start to get invested in the relationship between Kojak and his partner Crocker. The show makes a point that its sympathies generally lie with the lower classes and in choosing to show Kojak talking down the boyfriend and specifically stepping in between him and the on-edge cop to make sure he wasn’t shot it at least attempted to offset the inherent violence of a police procedural. My only quibbles with the episode it that it attempts a profundity that I don’t think the writing fully reaches. Kojak’s speeches are fun to listen to because they’re being performed by Telly Savalas but he’s not actually saying anything particularly interesting, just variations on the old “this used to be a great city” and “live life while you can” cliches. We are back to scripts that aren’t stupid and performances that aren’t only a couple of steps down from sitcom acting and for the first time I’m genuinely thinking about watching the series as a whole.