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.