Dragnet - ‘The Big .22 Rifle for Christmas’ (1952) / ‘The Big Little Jesus’ (1953)

               Despite its reputation, “Dragnet” was not the first radio or television procedural that claimed to accurately portray the activities of a police department. It’s not even the first to do so for the LAPD. “Calling All Cars” was a radio program that ran from November of 1933 to September of 1939 that advertised itself as dramatizing actual police cases handled by the Los Angeles Police Department. “Gangbusters” drew its cases from police departments nationwide and started on the radio in January of 1936. It made the jump to television in March of 1952, but despite decent ratings was cancelled after “Dragnet” became such a hit that it was seen as unnecessary. This is pretty indicative of its general reputation, it succeeded to the point where people forgot its predecessors.

              There were also a number of movies that claimed such authenticity, including one that directly led to the creation of “Dragnet,” the 1948 crime drama ‘He Walked by Night,’ in which Webb had a small part. He was already an established radio presence by that point, having hosted a few short-lived programs during the war as well as starring in the private-eye crime series “Johnny Madero, Pier 23” and “Pat Novak, for Hire.” In the film Webb played the minor role of police forensic scientist Lee Whitey. The movie itself was loosely based on the criminal activities of former police officer Erwin Walker and was shot in a quasi-documentary fashion. It was during production that Webb met the movie’s police consultant Marty Wynn, a sergeant from the Robbery Division of the LAPD. Together they came up with the idea of a police procedural that aimed to portray the duties of police officers without the bombast and hysterics of other programs. They specifically wanted to include more non-dramatic storylines and cases, as well as show the more hum-drum day-to-day activities of the officers.

              What I didn’t realize until doing research is how much of an overlap there was between the radio and television versions. For some reason I assumed that when the show made the jump from radio to tv they would have discontinued the original, but in the early 1950’s radio was still a viable competitor to tv so of course they made both. The radio show ran from June of 1949 through February of 1957 for a total of 240 episodes, and the tv show ran from December of 1951 through August of 1959 for 276 episodes. Naturally there was a lot of overlap between the two with repurposed scripts being very common. They kept the same titles between the two versions and most of the script adjustments were only due to the medium change. They even sometimes managed to use the same actors.

              What I also didn’t realize is that the episodes are only half an hour long. For a while the show was paired in its timeslot with the aforementioned “Gangbusters,” also just half an hour, but after that show’s cancellation it was often paired with programs such as “Ford Theatre (in Color)” or “You Bet Your Life.” It seems a little weird at first that a dramatic police procedural would only take half an hour, but it becomes clearer when you realize the show is just the first half of “Law & Order” with the entire second half dispensed with by a couple of lines at the end assuring the audience that they caught the bad guy and he totally went to jail. I can’t independently verify this as I haven’t watched every episode but according to the wiki no criminals apprehended by the characters on the tv show were ever found not guilty, although this rule was bent for the radio version. This dovetails nicely with the police never shown as doing anything wrong.

It occasionlly looks all right.

              In every important respect it doesn’t matter what Jack Webb intended when he created “Dragnet.” As always a system must be judged on what it actually does instead of what it was meant to do, and what this show did was teach police departments the value of good propaganda. From the little research I’ve done I think that Webb really did see dramatic potential in a more stripped-down, drier police procedural that could boast about its authenticity. This quest for realism in some areas, including basing many if not most of the cases in the series on actual police files, meant securing the cooperation and eventual endorsement of the LAPD itself. This also meant agreeing to certain limits on the way the show portrayed the force if it wanted to keep that access, which quickly led to a fictional portrayal of the LAPD that was wildly divorced from reality. James Ellroy has spent much of his career trying to show the parts that “Dragnet” left out. L.A. Confidential is set during the exact time period of these episodes and is basically a book-length tirade against the image that Webb spent his life building up.

              By all accounts Webb was a stickler for accuracy and verisimilitude. They used actual LAPD call signs and internal police terminology to accurately portray the structure and operations of the police department itself. According to some the foley for the radio show even correctly recreated the number of steps between various offices in the main precinct. Webb frequently rode along with officers on their patrols and was given extensive access to all areas of the LAPD once the officers in charge understood what he was trying to do. All of this is meant to bolster the show’s credibility, but for me it quickly curdles into yet more evidence that everyone involved must have known of the deep rot at the center of the force but deliberately chose not to include it. As evidenced by his involvement in later shows such as “Emergency!,” which covered the newly created California EMS service and is credited with familiarizing the public with the services of the department, public education was very much on his mind. I simply question what he did and did not choose to educate the public about.

              I should address the naming convention first. From the beginning the radio program would occasionally have episodes entitled ‘The Big _,’ with the blank being whatever the episode was about. Starting early in 1950 they began naming all the episodes this way, which carried over into the television show. The late 60’s revival didn’t keep this practice. Both of the tv episodes I’ll be looking at started as radio episodes, the first being ‘.22 Rifle for Christmas’ which originally aired December 22, 1949 and was adapted for television on December 19, 1952. Fans were likely very familiar with the episode by then as they’d repeated the radio version each subsequent Christmas. ‘The Big Little Jesus’ aired on the radio December 22, 1953 and on tv just three days later. This episode would go on to replace the other one as the annual Christmas episode for reasons that will become clear later.

Retail used to be a lot goofier.

              There are very few differences between the radio and tv versions in terms of subject matter and dialogue. The biggest ones I noticed were the radio broadcast including both sides of telephone conversations and having to verbally establish scene changes, while the television version just shows one side of these conversations and works in the missed details through added dialogue. In terms of what I’m concerned about there aren’t any important differences between the two. Other than Joe Friday the show’s characters don’t matter a whole lot either. Their personal lives are alluded to but never intrude into the episodes. The only character that lasts for the entire series is Webb himself as Friday. Early in season two he gains a permanent partner in Frank Smith, played by Herb Ellis for a handful of episodes until he was replaced by Ben Alexander for the rest of the series. As luck would have it our first episode is Ellis’ last.

              ‘The Big .22 Rifle for Christmas’ was somewhat controversial when it was first broadcast as it managed to upset the NRA. Back then it was a much different and less influential organization than it would become, but the episode explicitly comes out against buying guns for children which, up until fairly recently, was the standard stance of police forces nationwide. After a strident sponsor message from your friends at Chesterfield Cigarettes the episode opens with the standard stentorian voiceover telling the audience they’re watching “Dragnet.” Then Webb comes on with his typical faux-Chandler dialogue over some very interesting shots of Christmas in 1952 LA. “This is the city. All year round it wears work clothes, on holidays it dresses up. To most people Christmas brings happiness and prayer. To some it brings heartbreak, and my job gets tougher. I’m a cop.” Friday and his partner would get shuffled around the various departments as the episodes demanded, and he informs us that this week they’ve been detailed to homicide.

              I’m not going to lie, this episode’s a bit of a downer. They get a call from patrol about a young boy who’s been missing for a couple of hours. When Friday asks why homicide is being bothered they’re told the officer answering the call found blood at the scene. Soon enough a gaggle of middle-aged white guys in suits and hats are wandering around some lady’s backyard. The episode takes a good minute and a half to show a forensic tech testing for blood and gathering a .22 rifle casing left nearby. It seems like wasting time at first, but this was fairly new technology they’re showcasing to a public who is still getting used to the idea of fingerprints. Friday and partner wander inside and talk to the kid’s mom, who over the course of a couple of minutes’ conversation with actual cops manages to start working herself up into a worry. They ask about any guns in the house, which naturally makes her suspicious, and she tells them that in addition to her husband’s .45 there’s a wrapped rifle in the closet that’s meant as her son’s Christmas present. She digs around in the closet and finds that the box is there but the gun is gone. The music dun DUNs into commercials at the reveal that the rifle is a .22.

Bit darker than I expected, to be honest.

              It soon turns out that another child in the neighborhood has gone missing, and soon after they meet with his mom they’re told that the original kid has returned home but won’t talk to anyone. Short story shorter it turns out that the kid found his present in the closet and while he and his friend were playing with it in the woods out back his friend tripped and shot himself dead. He leads the officers back to where he hid the body with leaves, so a few days before Christmas in 1952 one of the most popular shows on network television broadcast a dead kid into living rooms nationwide.

              The episode does try to end on something of a positive note. There really hasn’t been a whole lot for the officers to do up to this point as all they’ve done is wander around and ask people questions, but what they have done is strategically withhold information. They don’t tell any of the parents about the blood stains in the backyard for reasons I don’t quite understand, and when these parents naturally wonder why the police keep asking about gun models they lie and say its standard procedure. This changes when they find the body and the kid tearfully admits he feels like he killed his friend because he’s the one who wanted to play with the gun. They handle this part all right, reassuring the kid he’s not going to go to jail, but then there’s a very odd section when they have to break the news to the dead kid’s father. He’s been offscreen this entire time and when he gets home he immediately asks whether his son has come home yet. We’ve seen this scene a thousand times in the years since this episode aired so I was just floored when Joe Friday, our stoic hero, only drops his eyes at the question and doesn’t say anything. When the father asks if they’ve found his boy he just nods. The dad calls out to his son and asks again where he is, again Friday lowers his eyes and says nothing. The father asks him whether he’s hurt, Friday quietly says “Yes,” the father again asks where he is, Friday says he’s “hurt pretty bad,” and after a couple more stuttery questions the father realizes his son is dead. And then walks into the next room where the dead kid is lying in his bed. Considering the amount of pride Webb took in being authentic I guess this means that this is just what the LAPD did with small corpses back then.

              The father breaks down over his son’s body, going on about the wonderful toys he bought him for Christmas. He asks what happened and Friday is suddenly able to talk again, letting him know it was an accident he had while playing with another kid. The father immediately stands and says he wants to see that boy and strides out of the house and down the street. Friday and his partner are completely at a loss, just trailing along behind the father as he marches to the other kid’s house. Friday even tosses in the voiceover line “We had no idea what the dead boy’s father had in mind. We didn’t feel we should try to restrain him.” Keep this in mind for later. The dad bursts into the house and upon seeing the still-crying kid tells him he knows it wasn’t his fault and that he’s going to give all of his dead son’s presents to him. Everyone tearfully smiles at the gesture. I question whether this happened in the actual case file but I can understand why they ended the episode this way.

Happy ending?

              The second Christmas episode, “The Big Little Jesus,” is an altogether lighter affair. It’s essentially the Dragnet version of a distaff funny one. This time around they’re attached to the robbery division and get a call on Christmas Eve that a Jesus statue has been stolen from a Catholic church’s nativity scene. Here’s some trivia: the interiors for the church were shot at Old Mission Plaza Church, which a caption proudly states was founded in 1781. It’s a nice looking church. Friday and his partner travel around interviewing people including the priest, some parishners, and the eccentric owner of a religious supply store before getting a tip from one of the altar boys that they saw someone taking a small package away from Mass that morning.

              They quickly track the guy down to the cheap lodgings he’s staying in and find that he’s out at the moment. The manager lets drop that he was arrested for burglary sometime in the past and thus they’re sure they’ve got their guy. Friday even drops a clever little line to that manager about how this guy’s apparently remembered his old ways. They go back to the station just long enough to have what I will bet any amount of money is a completely fictional conversation with their chief. He wants them to follow up on a tip about a wanted man, they want to keep following up on the missing Jesus statue. The chief asks how much the statue is even worth when Friday genuinely says the line “When’s the price determine a case?” Uh, since forever, Joe? They get one over on the chief by telling him to call the priest and say he’s out of luck, which shames the captain into letting them continue. Luckily they get a call that the guy is back at the lodgings and they go and grab him.

              This is the only interesting part of the episode as it’s the only one that shows them interacting with a suspect. When they identify themselves and say they want to take him downtown he directly refuses, saying he’s not going to go anywhere or say anything. Friday just grabs his arm and marches him out of the door. We cut to the station where the suspect is sitting at their desk, silent, as he has been for several hours. Eventually they wear him down and he admits to a fender bender but insists he had nothing to do with the stolen statue. They believe his story and let him go, then glumly return to the church to admit they failed. While they’re talking to the priest a little kid comes in pulling a wagon, inside of which is the statue of the little baby Jesus. The kid explains that he prayed really hard for a wagon for Christmas and promised to give Jesus the first ride if he got one. All of the adults smile and the episode ends on a high note.

Webb knew where to put the camera somtiems.

              What’s interesting to me here is that I don’t know how legal it was at the time for them to haul that suspect in for questioning. I’m going to assume completely. The Supreme Court ruling establishing the Miranda warning didn’t take place until 1966. By happy coincidence this episode was remade in 1967 during the show’s revival under the episode title ‘The Christmas Story.’ The script is basically identical except for one key line: during the scene transition where they take the suspect to the station Webb inserts a line in voiceover: “5:15pm. We took Stroup to the office. On the way we advised him of his rights.” This is the only acknowledgement that the intervening decade and a half happened at all. A neat piece of trivia for the remake episode: with the exception of the actor playing the suspect all of the adult actors with speaking roles came back to play the same parts fourteen years later.

              In and of themselves nothing in either of these episodes is particularly alarming. The police are portrayed as professional and focused on serving the community. They are generally respectful and helpful and even decide to do a favor for a priest on Christmas Eve. Completely shorn of context these are even pretty good episodes of television. ‘.22 Rifle’ is structured very strangely, with too much time given over to unimportant forensics and a truly strange twist at the end, but it had a straightforward message that it conveyed simply and directly, namely that you shouldn’t buy firearms for children. ‘Little Jesus’ was much better in its structure and even had a couple of nice shots in it. Both were directed and at least co-written by Webb himself, and he had a decent ear for dialogue and a solid enough screen presence that his performance is still being referenced today.

              The problem comes in when you take into consideration that context. The success of “Dragnet” led directly to other programs under Webb’s Mark VII Production umbrella, including shows like “Emergency!,” “The D.A.,” and especially “Adam-12” that all crossed over with each other. In addition to that it provided a template for tv shows going forward. “The Lineup” started in 1950 and was produced with the explicit cooperation of the San Francisco Police Department. “Highway Patrol” sprung up in 1956 and claimed to be "based on authentic stories from the files of highway patrol headquarters throughout the country.” “Police Station” ran for 39 episodes in 1959 and portrayed the inner workings of, well, a police station. While the impulse to tell these stories varied from show to show the reasons behind the police departments supporting them was both easy to understand and completely out in the open: they wanted to get the public to view their employees as heroes and not the corrupt incompetents they’d been traditionally portrayed as.       

              It’s hard to remember because we’re living on the other side of a successful propaganda campaign but for the first few decades of motion pictures the police were usually portrayed as either indifferent, corrupt, or actively useless. This is one of the reasons film noirs have aged as well as they have, they correctly show police officers as either getting in the way or tools of a corrupt system. This is why it matters how the show portrays those small moments of interaction with the public as it’s teaching the public both what to expect from officers and how they should respond to them. Just as that first episode spent so long with the forensic tech to show the public how that worked, so too are the conversations between civilians and the cops teaching the public how they should behave. We’re so bombarded by mass media depictions of things we’ll never experience firsthand (to the point where we’re starting to lose track of the difference between fiction and reality) that it’s hard to remember that this show is likely the first time many of the viewing public had ever seen even a fictional police officer.

I know they meant this is a good thing, but sheesh.

              So little things like lying to a worried parent matter because what the show is doing it teaching viewers that the cops were correct to do that. Same thing with the suspect in the second episode, where Friday grabs his arm and marches him down to the station. They’re nice to him once he’s there and let him go, but he still lost a few hours to harassment and there’s every chance he’s going to get kicked out of his accommodations because of that snarky little line Friday dropped to the manager about the suspect’s rocky past. We don’t see any of that, though, we’re left with the cop characters beaming paternally at the rest of the characters at the end of both episodes despite the fact that, functionally speaking, the police didn’t actually do anything to help anyone.

              I’ve spent as long as I have on these two episodes because “Dragnet” really is ground zero for most of the rest of the shows I’ll be watching this month. Hopefully not all of them. It wasn’t the groundbreaking procedural it’s often made out to be, most of its ideas were already being played around with by other shows, but it was put together in a tight little package and was enough of a pop-culture phenomenon that it set the tone for so many other shows in the future. It’s also a fascinating little time capsule of LA in the mid-50’s, with mostly functional camera work and enough clipped dialogue that it feels like a nice little bit-sized capsule of noir. If it hadn’t set the template for so much cop-washing to come it would be easier to enjoy.