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.

S.W.A.T. – ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night’ (1975)

               SWAT, meaning Special Weapons and Tactics and referring to a specially trained division of a police force, was created as a term in 1964 by the Philadelphia Police Department. It came in direct response to a series of violent bank robberies that the city was finding difficult to respond to. This escalation of force proved unsurprisingly popular with other police departments, with the next major association to take up the unit being the LAPD in 1967. Tellingly one of the key implementation managers for Los Angeles PD, inspector Daryl Gates, wanted the acronym to mean ‘Special Weapons Attack Team,’ which I think gives a good idea as to where their heads were at. This adoption was made after the widespread freakout in law enforcement circles after the Watts riots in 1965 and was sold to the public as a response to lone-gunmen scenarios and a direct counter to the increased firepower available to civilians. I’ll just note that one of the first uses the newly formed unit was put to was to ‘oversee’ the ongoing strikes of the United Farm Workers union led by Cesar Chavez, including crowd control and the placement of snipers ‘just in case.’

Trivia: the audience never sees or hears the driver.

“S.W.A.T.” came into this world as a back door pilot disguised as a two-part episode of “The Rookie” during its third season. In fact the first episode of the two-part pilot was broadcast only six episodes after the Christmas episode I just wrote about. The only character appearing in these pilot episodes that made it to the series was the main character of Lt. Daniel ‘Hondo’ Harrelson as played by Steve Forrest. The entire concept of a SWAT team was introduced to the established characters in the episode, with some of them questioning its tactics and usefulness, but luckily their worries were proved fully unwarranted by the end and everyone was on board for more officers lugging around military weapons for use on civilians.

The show was instantly controversial due to its amount of violence and graphic (for the time) depictions of drug use and other societal problems. Having previously reveled in the gritty details of “The Untouchables” from over a decade before I question whether it was really an escalation or if the show got caught up in one of the media’s semi-recurring fits of puritanism. Its first season was a mid-season replacement and thus only twelve episodes long, with the second and final season being twenty-five for a total of thirty-seven episodes. Some claim that it was this inclusion of violence and the ongoing controversies around it that led to its cancellation, but I tend to think it’s more likely that the controversy caused the show’s move to a Saturday night time slot and a subsequent dive in the ratings, which was the ultimate reason for its demise. Of course it’s almost impossible for a piece of media to be too violent nowadays so it’s only fitting that it was revived both as a 2003 film and an ongoing tv remake that started in 2017.

Although it spun off of “The Rookies” it was a very different show from its progenitor, both structurally and tonally. Instead of more picaresque adventures paired with soapy personal drama it focused on a single case each week which somehow involved the SWAT team. In the real world such units are reactive in nature by design, called in when the regular officers find themselves overwhelmed or when a particular situation needs some specialized equipment or knowledge. They are not an investigatory unit and would have little to no interaction with the general public. If it’s made up of permanent members they would likely wait on-call until needed like the staff of a firehouse, making it somewhat more complicated to generate enough stories for a long-running weekly series.

They save the budget for action scenes.

It's not impossible, of course, the current remake series is on 149 episodes and counting. What’s surprising about the original show is how quickly it got downright goofy with its setups. Here’s the wiki summary of the 19^th episode of the modern remake series: “The S.W.A.T. team is assigned to protect a high-profile Russian journalist who is visiting Los Angeles from assassins but, when her unwillingness to cooperate results in a shootout, Hondo forces her to reveal that she is on the verge of uncovering a massive weapons smuggling operation and is trying to meet a source who will provide the final key.” Here’s where the original had gotten to by then: “Two teenagers seeking shelter in the warehouse of Colby Electronics anonymously alert Olympic SWAT after a group of criminals break in and kill two police officers. Before they can escape, a teenager sees the face of one of the criminals—former U.S. Senator Greg Colby.” Those are two pretty different scenarios, tone-wise. Other episodes of the original cramm the team into situations such as: criminals loading up a stolen tugboat with dynamite and holding a Nobel-prize winning marine biologist hostage for a million dollars, or a guy avenging his dead wife by listening in on police scanners to snipe suspects. Quite a lot of episodes revolve around the team either protecting someone they don’t want to protect or assaulting a location containing boarded-up gunmen with sympathetic backstories.

The show wasn’t on air long enough to cycle through its main talent. It was led by the aforementioned Steve Forrest as ‘Hondo’ Harrelson and featured four other SWAT officers: T.J. McCabe, played by James Doleman, Dominic Luca, played by Mark Shers, David ‘Deacon’ Kay, played by Rod Perry, and Jim Street, played by Robert Urich. It also had a few recurring characters, such as Hondo’s wife Betty, played by Ellen Weston, and Rose Marie as a kind of mobile lunch lady named Hilda, who features in today’s episode. Secondary stories in the episodes would rotate between the cast’s personal lives, with most of the attention going to Hondo. Urich was the only real breakout star of the series and we’ll see him again when I take a look at an episode of “Vega$.”

What first struck me about this episode is that it has the premise of a mid-tier episode of “Columbo” with the brains of a cocker spaniel. I want to give the show some credit for winding it’s A and B stories together by the end but the way they get there is convoluted to the point of annoyance. I’ll summarize the B story fairly quickly, since it’s basically an episode of “The Love Boat” set in a children’s ward.

Yeah, that's how that works. Totally silent.

Like just about every episode I’ve watched so far the members of the SWAT team have been raising toys and funds for charity, in this case presents and a party for the children who are going to be in the hospital on Christmas day. This is what ropes the lunch lady Hildy into their plans as they lean on her to help with the catering. While they’re visiting the hospital to prepare, Hondo runs into the hospital’s main rich benefactor, Doris Wainright Bristol, played by guest star Anne Francis. It turns out she’s spending the holidays at the hospital undergoing cosmetic surgery. She claims its because they pamper her so much but it becomes clear very quickly that she’s desperately lonely. She and Honda have a bit of history together so he keeps checking in on her, gently urging her that maybe volunteering to help with the children’s Christmas party might be more fulfilling than another round of facial peels. While she’s happy to write a check to help offset the cost of the shindig she resists attending until the very end of the episode, where she happily serves food to the children and marvels about how they don’t know she’s rich but like her anyways. It’s a very predictable, sappy story that wraps up complicated emotions in a tight little bow.

It's the rest of the episode that is annoyingly stupid. It doesn’t necessarily start off that way: a career criminal with a doctor girlfriend gets her to admit him as a terminal patient under a false identity because he knows that rich lady Bristol always insists on wearing her jewelry around, including when she’s checked into the hospital. He plans on laying low until Christmas Eve, when activity at the hospital is at a low ebb, in order to steal the jewelry and flee with his lady overseas. The plan diverts from any possible cleverness when it’s revealed that he and another associate are just going to bust into her hospital room with guns and take them by force. It also has wonderful sections where the girlfriend will act controlled and intelligent when she’s being a doctor but the second she’s alone with her criminal boyfriend she starts simpering and hanging on his every word. At one point she starts to point out problems with the plan and he shushes her and tells her to stop thinking already. I’m a little surprised that the episode even acknowledges that women doctors are a thing that exists.

              What this means is that we have a trio of thieves planning a crime in the same hospital where a group of SWAT officers are putting together a children’s Christmas party. I’m willing to buy that as a small enough coincidence to swallow for a 70’s cop show. Where my suspension of disbelief starts to become strained is when the head of those same officers just happens to be social friends with the target of the thieves, a key fact in their eventual downfall. There are less stupid ways to accomplish this end.

Pulse-pounding stuff.

              Being a rich white lady of course Bristol brought her personal staff at the hospital, including a secretary and a bodyguard who’s a retired police officer. When the third member of the thieves turns up at the hospital to supposedly visit the guy who was admitted, the bodyguard recognizes him and starts poking around. There’s an odd but necessary scene where he tells the secretary that he’s going to warn their employer and call the cops but she says he’s just being paranoid and should keep his mouth shut, which he does. I have no ability to justify this decision to you, it’s just as stupid as it sounds, but the episode wouldn’t have happened without it. Even more stupid is that when the bodyguard was nosing around he asked the accomplice doctor about the visitor, who of course tipped off the other two, who then decide to keep going with the plan anyways. I almost threw my pen at the screen. Eventually the bodyguard just barges into the room of the thief admitted under a false identity and recognizes him. As he’s telling them all how he’s going to blow the whistle on the whole operation the main bad guy shoots him with a totally real and not wildly inaccurate silenced six-shooter. Those things totally exist.

              They dump the body at the back of the hospital where it’s quickly discovered. There’s now a whole other set of detectives at the hospital looking into the murder but after she learns of his death the secretary decides to take her story to Hondo and his team of SWAT agents instead. So I guess there’s just an extraneous group of police officers wandering around the hospital taking statements during the climax of the episode? After he talks to the secretary Hondo takes his concerns to Ms. Bristol’s doctor, who’s more than happy to supply him with the name and chart of every patient admitted within a few days of her admittance. I was winding up to do a whole rant about how inaccurate this was when I realized I don’t actually know the relevant rules governing the divulgence of medical records in 1975 and do not care to do the research to find out, so we’re just going to blow past all that. After spending about five minutes making the slightest effort they recognize the doctored chart and the entire squad is called to the hospital on full alert. They pile into the van and head over, sirens wailing, then split up once they arrive: sniper to the roof, one to the parking lot to cover escape attempts, and two inside to back up Hondo, all lugging military rifles around.

              I’ll point out that the cops have no way of knowing that the criminals are already on the move and this is a wild escalation. They turn out to be right, but that’s no excuse.

              Perhaps all of the criticisms about violence were affecting the show because for a wham-bam climax the ending is pretty tame. The bad guys threaten Ms. Bristol into giving up the jewels. The doctor accomplice sees Hondo tearing around the hospital and warns them that the cops are onto them, so they grab Ms. Bristol and the secretary as possible hostages and head for the service elevator. As they’re waiting for the elevator Hondo finally huffs his way up the stairs to their floor and yells at them to freeze. They hide behind the hostages, fire some laughably fake shots, and take the elevator to the ground floor where one of the other officers is waiting for them. They toss off a few shots and get back in the elevator and go down another floor to the basement. They send the doctor out to grab the getaway car since she’s not burdened by a hostage and then get pinned down by Hondo and the two backup officers. The non-doctor accomplice quickly breaks and runs out of the hospital where he jumps into the getaway car. The doctor just starts screaming for her boyfriend as they peel off only for the sniper to apparently wound the driver, causing him to crash. The officer in the parking lot quickly takes them into custody.

Yeah, make the sick kids stand up and sing.

              There was a line in the wiki where it claimed that the LAPD itself was supposedly concerned about the amount of violence portrayed in the show, worrying that it would make people think less of the department, and while I scoff at that idea in general if the next scene is characteristic of the show in general I will grudgingly concede the point. The main bad guy is now by himself with two hostages, one of which he has under either arm with his gun pointed at the officers. He starts shuffling the three of them towards the door when the supposedly highly trained SWAT officers start firing bullets a few inches to their side. He creeps towards the door, they keep shooting. This is revealed to be a distraction so that Hondo can crawl around some boxes unseen and leap onto the criminal and subdue him. The amount of sheer stupidity and recklessness displayed by everyone in this scene just poleaxed me. Of course it works on the television show but I can see even the 70’s LAPD objecting to a portrayal as dumb as that.

              I can’t call this the worst episode of tv I’ve watched this month because “The F.B.I.” exists, but I kind of think it might be the stupidest one so far. I suspect that I put my finger on something when I mentioned that centering a traditional crime show on a SWAT team, with the inherent limitations of such a specialized force, seemed likely to cause problems for the show’s writers, since the premise became strained way earlier than it should have. I guess they didn’t have the ability to shift tones to being a full-on action show likes its contemporary remake, either due to budget constrictions or it just not being feasible with 70’s television production. None of the characters are particularly memorable, even by the low standards the shows have set so far, and it has the emotional intelligence and sophistication of one of the cheaper Hallmark cards. I was all set to rail against a show glorifying one of the single greatest escalations of force against the civilian population in US history but based on this episode it doesn’t have anything interesting to say about it, not even in its defense. I really think that a bunch of tv writers read a couple of magazine articles about this new police force called a SWAT team, learned they could dress up some actors in body armor and haul around big guns, and shoved that into an otherwise anodyne policy procedural. I’m willing to bet that the modern version has a whole lot more going on that’s objectionable, but this show just isn’t worth getting that upset about.

The Rookies – ‘Blue Christmas’ (1974)

               I usually dislike clever nutshelling of pieces of entertainment by describing them as combinations of other works. “Monk” is ‘Rain Man’ meets “Sherlock Holmes,” that sort of thing. It’s usually lazy thinking. The problem is that “The Rookies” really is “Adam-12” meets “The Mod Squad” because that was literally the intention behind the producers, combining the supposed realism of the former with the melodrama and focus on contemporary issues of the latter. I really should have known what to expect when I saw Aaron Spelling’s name in the opening credits. We might as well dig into his background because I’m going to be watching quite a few shows with his involvement this month.

              I’ve mentioned prolific producers before in Jack Webb and Quinn Martin, but it’s no shame to either of them to say there really is no comparison between their careers and that of Aaron Spelling. He was hugely successful in four different decades (depending how generous you feel like being you could argue for five) and was unironically referred to as ‘the king of television’ by people who wouldn’t usually write such a stock phrase. He got his start as an actor with minor roles in shows such as “I Led Three Lives” and “Gunsmoke.” After he sold a script to “The Jane Wyman Show” in 1956 he started working full time as a writer on the Western anthology series “Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre,” which is such a great title. He then helped produce the Western detective series “Burke’s Law” for Four Star television, a show which was one of the first to rely on a guest-star each week. You can draw a direct line from this series to later Spelling efforts such as “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.”

              In 1965 he set up Thomas-Spelling Productions along with comedian Danny Thomas. In addition to “The Danny Thomas Show” they made “The Guns of Will Sonnett,” “Rango,” and their breakout hit “Mod Squad.” They also produced a number of insane sounding tv movies, such as 1969’s “The Pigeon” starring Sammy Davis Jr., the tagline for which reads, ‘He's been beaten up, almost run over by a car, accused of an inter-racial romance, and beaten up again...all for a client he doesn't even have.’ There was also 1970’s ‘The Love War’ starring Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickson, the summary of which is ‘Aliens from two planets at war come to Earth, assume human form and continue their battle.’ The latter is up on YouTube, the latter is up on one of those sketchy Russian streaming sites. You’re welcome.

              In 1972 Spelling set up a different company, Spelling-Goldberg Productions along with Leonard Goldberg, then an executive at Screen Gems.  Their first show out of the gate was “The Rookies” and it would later produce “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fantasy Island,” and a bunch of tv movies including “Satan’s School for Girls.” Another company of his, Spelling Productions, later to be renamed Spelling Television, would go on to make “Dynasty,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” and some unexpectedly highbrow efforts like the 1993 HBO film adaptation of “And the Band Played On.” To give you some idea of the size of his influence in the industry of the entire list of 31 different television shows I’ll be looking at this month he was directly involved in six of them.

What a lovely decade.

              With all this talk about Spelling, though, I’m in danger of overshadowing the actual creator of the show, Rita Lakin. Lakin was the story editor and head writer of “The Mod Squad” and has the story credit for the tv movie-of-the-week pilot episode of “The Rookies” which was broadcast on March 7, 1972. She also created a couple of other, shorter-lived series such as the prime-time soap “Flamingo Road” and the medical drama “Nightingales.” According to the wiki she’s credited with 464 episodes of television, eight tv movies of the week, and two miniseries. She also wrote a series of mystery novels starting with Getting Old is Murder in 2005.

              The pilot movie had the same basic premise as the show but with some cast changes. The movie featured five brand new officers while the show pared it down to three, ditching the characters of Jared Whitman and Kevin Lassiter. The other three were kept, those being Mike Danko as played by Sam Melville, Terry Webster as played by Georg Stanford Brown, and William Gillis as played by Michael Ontkean. Ontkean left after the second season and his character was replaced by Chris Owens as played by Bruce Fairbairn. The character of Mike Danko was the only married officer and in the pilot his wife, Jill Danko, was played by Jennifer Billingsley, but was recast for the series by a pre-“Charlie’s Angels” Kate Jackson. Their commanding officer, Eddie Ryker, was played in the film by the great Darren McGavin but was recast for the show with Gerald S. O’Loughlin.

              Functionally the show was just “Adam-12” with another half an hour added to the episode to focus on the personal troubles of the cast members. The premise of the show was to follow a number of rookie cops just out of the academy as they experienced life as beat cops, all the while being sternly mentored by their boss Lt. Ryker. The idea was to focus on a new generation of young people entering the service with different backgrounds from previous cop shows, involving such things as the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, while also digging into contemporary social issues that the Webb-produced shows were completely uninterested in. Format-wise this meant the show could continue the more-or-less random series of incidents approach to episodes based on supposedly real police cases but could also have the kind of soapy interpersonal conflicts that Spelling’s productions would come to be known for. It was a decent enough formula that worked for four years and 93 episodes. On a side note this is one of the few successful Spelling productions that doesn’t seem to be available for streaming in any way. It also only received a DVD release for the first two seasons so unfortunately the third-season episode rip I’m working from was obviously taken from a relatively recent broadcast, channel overlays and everything. I’ve worked with worse.

              This particular episode takes the format I’d described above, one half random vignettes and one half interpersonal melodrama, and separates the cast very neatly between the two. It’s Christmas Eve and the department has allowed all of the married officers to take the night off to spend with their families while the others have to work OT to make up for it. This means that cast members Mike and Jill Danko get to spend the episode dealing with her never before (and never again) mentioned sister and niece and their family drama while officers Webster and Owens get to have a normal episode of the show with a Santa hat tossed on top. We also continue the tradition of seeing LA in wintertime, and I have to admit that all of the California jokes I complained about in those old celebrity Christmas specials are starting to make a little more sense.

              Let’s focus on the family drama first because while it’s interesting it doesn’t really have much to say about the role of cop shows in contemporary culture. It’s mostly just a pretty standard episode of 70’s soapy ‘issue’ television. Jill’s sister and niece, Amanda and Tori (they don’t have credited last names), are visiting for the holiday as Amanda has recently separated from her husband Paul. This makes both of them fairly depressed about it and so Mike and Jill spend the episode trying to cheer them up. This eventually involves roping in their stuffy and prickly boss, Lt. Ryker, into playing Santa for Tori’s benefit. He eventually agrees but in the end it’s the errant husband Paul who turns up in the red suit for a supposedly joyous family reunion.

              For anyone else who perked up at the niece’s name, yep, Tori Spelling was born on May 16, 1973, about a year and a half before this episode aired. I think it was just a production in-joke or maybe even a complete coincidence, I can’t find any real parallels between the episode and anything in Aaron Spelling’s life. What’s interesting about this part of the episode is that it’s about the concept of divorce and not in any way about this specific divorce since they never actually say what the conflict between Amanda and her husband is. It’s implied that he works too much and she mentions that he’s been difficult to get in contact with since they officially separated about a week before the episode starts but that’s as detailed as it gets. Mike and Jill are hopeful that they’ll reconcile and neither says anything bad about him, so it’s at least implied that it’s nothing too bad. In a way I’m not surprised that none of these people have last names because they’re not really characters, they’re just placeholders for the ideas of Wife, Kid, and Husband. The show bends over backwards to avoid giving any specifics and even things that are problematic on their face aren’t seen as problems, such as that joyful family reunion taking place at around one o’clock in the morning because that’s when Lt. Ryker found the guy lurking outside in the hallway of the apartment building. The show isn’t actually interested in having an episode that looks at divorce, it wants to have A Divorce Episode. I found the simple assertion that any couple having problems just need a few days apart to realize how much they love each other somewhat lacking.

Pfft, silly woman, people in their forties can't be sexy!

              The other half of the show is the usual series of wacky hijinks for the other two series regulars with occasional tonal whipsaws as it randomly decides to work in some death and darkness to keep the audience on its toes. The first stop on their shift is answering an alert at a bar when a guy quietly drinking had suddenly started yelling and throwing stuff around. After they calm him down he apologizes and says he just got laid off two years shy of his pension and couldn’t handle going home to break the news to his family. The owner of the bar decides not to press charges since nobody got hurt and the guy’s so relieved he thinks he can go home to face his family now. This section is fine. In the next vignette they spot a kid working as a charity Santa on a rough street corner and stop to talk to him. He says he’s filling in for his dad who took a few bucks from the kitty to go buy “his medicine.” I didn’t realize that any shows ever actually used that euphemism for drinking, so points for that I guess. They escort him home off screen. In the next one they respond to a distress call from some other officers who are dealing with a crazy, shouty guy in a church. They quickly restrain him but one of the officers is extremely distraught, shakily talking about the things the guys was saying, about how he’d killed God and other blasphemous things. I was confused about why he was so upset until he and the camera dramatically swing around to show a priest shot dead on the floor, DUN!

              Next they respond to a report of a prowler by entering a little old lady’s apartment with guns drawn and pointed forward, which I’m going to question as a policy. They even keep the guns out as the woman pokes her head around a doorframe. It quickly becomes apparent that she was depressed about not getting a phone call from her son  who lives in New York, where it’s already 1am. They comfort her a little and as they’re leaving her son does indeed call, which is nice. Next they pull over and arrest a drunk driver in an uncharacteristically aggressive way, only revealing at the very end of the scene that the guy had just run someone over a couple of blocks before, DUN! Then they answer a disturbance call at a low-rent strip club, which you could show on network tv by 1974, apparently, which quickly devolves into a joke about how old the exotic dancer is. Nothing interesting to say here.

Sure, end on a slasher killer, why not.

              The last segment’s a doozy, though. The two officers respond to another call about a prowler, this time outside of a sorority house. They quickly roust a middle-aged guy hiding in the bushes who admits he was peeping. He starts insinuating to the officers that he just likes to watch, like with those movies, and that it’s no big deal. I guess they can’t say the word ‘porno’ just yet but they make it clear that’s what he’s talking about, and as his insinuations gets sleazier and sleazier the officers get more and more uncomfortable. One of them rustles around in the bushes and finds a sack containing gloves, a ski mask, and a big butcher’s knife, which means that one of the final segments of this Christmas episode shows the main characters interrupting a psychopath just before the start of an incidence of spree killing. I’ll point out that seminal proto-slasher film ‘Black Christmas’ was released in the US just four days after this episode broadcast, so I guess something was in the air that year.

              The show ends on a happy note, with the weary cops returning to their shared apartment the morning after their shift to find Mike and Jill already there with breakfast waiting for them. They explain that after Amanda and her husband reconciled they let them stay the night at their apartment and thus had to find somewhere else to crash. The breakfast is by way of apology. Webster drops his usual wiseguy persona to give everyone a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” and the episode ends on a group hug.

              This was not a bad episode of television, but it’s also not something I have any interest in watching again. Everyone on the show was fine with the possible exception of Bruce Fairbairn as officer Owens, who I thought was a little weak. The only actor that popped for me was Georg Stanford Brown as officer Webster, and while it’s hardly a shame that he later moved into becoming a very successful television director I feel that he really could have anchored a more grounded dramatic show if given the opportunity. While it only lasted four seasons and has basically been forgotten by the larger public I can tell when a show has decent bones. This is the kind of ensemble crime show that’s going to show up again and again as I go through this month and it’s a bit of a shame that it’s as inaccessible as it currently is.

The F.B.I. – ‘Dark Christmas’ (1972)

               I spent a number of my formative years drinking from a modest firehouse of pop-culture references I had no knowledge of or context about courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This was before the internet and the show certainly didn’t pause to explain itself, so for every reference to The Hobbit or ‘Blade Runner’ I did get there were three or four I didn’t. Many of them were about the cultural detritus of the thirty or so years preceding the show, anything from the mid-fifties on, and it’s been surprising how often I’ll still run across a theme song or a line of dialogue and get a brief burst of recognition. That’s already happened a few times this month, especially during the “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” episodes (I finally get the Mark VII references during “The Day the Earth Froze,” for example) and normally I don’t see them coming, but when I was putting the original list together for this month I noticed during my research that this show was a Quinn Martin joint, a name that came up constantly while Frank Conniff was on the show, so I was already anticipating that little dopamine rush of recognition.

You're damn right it's a Quinn Martin Production!

              Not everything MSTK ever talked about was exactly to my tastes (don’t think I’m ever going to warm to ‘7 Faces of Dr. Lao’) but I could at least understand the appeal, so I was really looking forward to seeing why just about everything was referred to by the puppets as ‘a Quinn Martin production’ And now that I have I’m more than a little disappointed because it turns out that, judged by this episode, he made really bad television.

              Quinn Martin was genuinely quite a big deal in his heyday. What Jack Webb was attempting with his production company Martin actually achieved. He got his big break at Desilu Productions as an executive producer on the original tv movie pilot of “The Untouchables” and branched out from there. He set up his own shop in 1960 and had an early hit with “The Fugitive,” which ran from September of 1963 to January of 1967. Other series that were high-profile at the time but have largely been forgotten included “The Invaders,” “Cannon,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” and “Barnaby Jones.” For a comparison think of Stephen J. Cannell or Dick Wolf. He had a network television series running every year from 1961 through 1979, almost all of which were crime dramas in one way or another. They all had a common format, including an announcer who would invoke the title at the beginning of the show and title cards breaking the episodes into acts after each commercial break. That same announcer would also intone at the beginning of every episode of every show he made that it was “a Quinn Martin production,” answering that question from my childhood.

              With a title as generic as “The F.B.I.” you wouldn’t think this show would be an adaptation of an existing property, but that’s exactly what it was. In 1959 Warner Bros. released the movie ‘The FBI Story,’ itself an adaption of the 1956 non-fiction book of the same name by journalist Don Whitehead. The film, starring Jimmy Stewart, was heavily overseen by the agency itself, with J. Edgar Hoover acting as an uncredited producer. Several scenes were reshot at Hoover’s direction in order to paint their operatives in as positive a light as possible. Two agents were assigned to oversee the entire production and the final film had to earn Hoover’s personal approval.

Um, thanks?

              This tight control over production was extended to the television version as well. An agent by the name of Clyde Tolson was assigned to oversee the show, a person that’s going to ring a bell with anyone even passingly family with the agency’s history. He was second in command of the FBI from 1930 to 1972 and rumors have long swirled about his relationship with Hoover. He was not a particular fan of the show and often attempted to get it cancelled over its inclusion of violence. He exerted control over every plotline and characterization, which included casting. To quote from the Wiki: “Actors playing F.B.I. agents, and other participants, were given background checks to guarantee that no "criminals, subversives, or Communists" were associated with the show.” This didn’t seem to impact it’s popularity as it ran for nine seasons between September of 1965 and April of 1974 and was in the top 30 shows in the ratings for seven of those years. Their one and only Christmas episode was during its eighth season, so its entirely possible that for the first seven it was a different, better show, but I somehow doubt it.

              This is very much a show of two distinct halves. One follows our main characters and the other follows the bad guys they’re after. This is an utterly standard variation on crime shows. So far this month we’ve only looked at shows that stick to their main characters as they either solves mysteries or respond to alerts, but having a guest star of the week that we watch perform nefarious actions as our good guys slowly close in on him is perfectly familiar to fans of the genre. What’s slightly different in this episode is that I couldn’t find a single interesting thing on either side of the conflict.

              Let’s get the side with the stars of the show over with first because I have no time for them. Despite having just watched the show I couldn’t tell you the name or position of a single character or even one distinguishing feature or personality trait between them other than federal agent. The FBI side of “The F.B.I.” is, as far as I can tell, a rotating cast of largely indistinguishable middle-aged white men who mill around desks and pass pieces of paper between each other before the scene cuts to awkward action, often but not always related to what they were talking about. People are forever explaining plot points to each other and thus the audience with no clear method established for how any of that information was obtained. They’re constantly handing over reports or getting anonymous tips from informants or departments about the things happening on the other side of the episode with no explanation on how they know any of it. Our bad guys will have a meeting and the FBI will be hot on their heels … somehow. At one point an assassin buys a gun from a guy in the middle of a random field and the agents have both arrived at the scene and set up a cordon around the area in the time it takes for a guy to eat a sandwich. The cordon doesn’t even work that well as the assassin needs to get away since we already saw him menace the target’s wife in a flash-forward during the cold open and that hasn’t happened yet.

They do not let you forget it's Christmas time.

              According to IMDB the main characters of the show were Lewis Erskine, played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Arthur Ward, played by Philip Abbott, and Tom Colby, played by William Reynolds. I’m sure that’s true. There’s an entire section of the opening credits that flashes both the names and faces of the actors and if I did a split screen of the episode and some headshots I’m sure I could even tell which was which, but as someone completely unfamiliar with the show before this episode the scripts and actors did absolutely nothing to distinguish one character from another. Some of them were in offices more often than some of the others, presumably the ones sitting behind desks issuing orders were in charge of the others but that’s just a guess.

              While it completely fails to work dramatically I guess I can understand the point of all of this from Clyde Tolson’s point of view. His job wasn’t to make the show more interesting or more dramatic, it was to make the public think a certain way about their agents: that they were smart and powerful, all knowing and all seeing. The idea that the agency had avenues of information everywhere, tendrils in every plot and informants around every corner, is a good image to get out there if you want to be thought of as an impressive and dependable arm of the federal government. Their agents are everywhere, know everything, and always get their man. What this does to a tv show is make it completely impossible to care about any of the characters because they don’t seem human. They don’t have failings, don’t have foibles, don’t have personality traits as far as I can tell. I’m sure there are episodes where the interchangeable men mention their homes lives, complain about their wives, do something other than discuss the case in front of them, but they certainly didn’t in this episode.

              If none of the main characters can be human because they’re too busy being crime-fighting machines you’d think they could beef up the bad guys and make them interesting, but they either couldn’t or were prevented from doing so by the cold hand of Clyde Tolson. If the heroes have to be good guys to the point of boredom, the bad guys have to be actually bad guys, or instead broken beyond repair. They can’t be attractive in any way. The main character that the feds are after, a professional killer by the name of Stuart Tilden (played by character actor Don Gordon, who’s vaguely familiar), ends up being slightly interesting seemingly by accident but in the end is revealed to be a small, empty man easily taken down by the super agents. He’s even fiercely told off by a housewife at the climax and then captured without a shot being fired.

What the fuck am I supposed to make of Sandra Locke with a blowtorch?

              The actual plot of the episode is genuinely hard to follow. As near as I can tell there’s a criminal based out of Puerto Rico who’s been smuggling gambling machinery into the United States. A high-level employee of the legitimate side of his business quit some time before the start of the episode and the bad guy is now worried, apparently for no actual reason, that he’s an unacceptable risk and hires Tilden to get rid of him. This involves the assassin tracking down and investigating known associates from city to city despite the fact that the employee’s not hiding, he just moved. I think my confusion about this part of the plot is mostly my fault as it didn’t occur to me for some time that it was genuinely hard to find someone in 1972 if you didn’t already know where they lived. The employee in question isn’t hiding and since he had no idea of the illegitimate side of his former employer’s business he doesn’t have the faintest idea that his life is in danger. Most of the episode is the killer slowly tracking down this guy while the FBI creeps up behind him while he and his family are blissfully ignorant.

              The episode spends a lot of time with Tilden and in a normal television show you’d think we’d explore his character. What makes a hired killer, how does he operate, what secrets does he know, that sort of thing. Turns out he had a sucky childhood which made him a loner and an asshole and there’s not a whole lot more to him than that. For a decent chunk of the episode he rents an apartment while he’s waiting for information and starts a very awkward flirtation with one of his new neighbors, played by a distractingly young Sandra Locke. They have what’s meant to be a meet-cute in the hallways that’s probably supposed to distract us from their eighteen-year age difference. He’s rude and borderline offensive to her and she just eats it up. There are a couple of scenes where she invites him over to her apartment where they spend some awkward time together under the distrustful eye of her mother. They make very fractured small talk while she uses a blowtorch to make glass decorations. In a later scene while Tilden is on his way to commit the murder it’s revealed that the mother has been faking her disability and just as Sandra is declaring her independence the FBI show up and tell her that the man she’s been crushing on is a killer and then leave. The two characters reconcile, the mom is now supportive, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of this.

The thrilling climax!

              Occasionally the show checks in on the target’s wife and kids, usually emphasizing that they’re waiting for daddy to get home for Christmas, and the final few scenes take place after Tilden has shown up and enveigled his way inside. Eventually the wife figures out what’s going on through the clever method of listening as he simply tells her. They send the kids to bed to wait for the target to show up, and while Tilden and the wife are arguing in the living room the feds show up, sneak the kids out the back, send a guy inside to pretend to be a stranged motorist, and easily apprehend the professional assassin. The episode ends with a happy little celebration as dad gets home and the feds smugly head out.

              I did not like this episode of television. One of the supposed advantages of a show about federal agents is that it can be set anywhere and the antagonists can be followed across state lines, but generally speaking you don’t want to fracture an episode by setting scenes in seemingly random places one after another. The show moves from New York to DC to Denver to Puerto Rico and from one office to another in such a sloppy way that I was completely confused about what specifically was happening at any given time. I understood generally what was happening and what the stakes are, but a lot of my notes are simply questions like: who the hell is Guido? How did they know where this house was? Why is the assassin happy to show his face to the wife and kids when he could just hang out in a car outside? Was it really this hard to get a gun in 1972? Between the disconnects between the two halves of the show and the inability to follow actions between scene transition I was utterly disconnected from everything that happened. If the show ran for nine seasons it was presumably popular for a reason but I find myself completely confused as to why.