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Dragnet 1967: Public Affairs: DR-07 (1968)
The Great Rhabdouchophile Weighs In
Sergeant Friday and Officer Gannon kick off the third season with a broad-brushed, almost ham-handed defense, not only of policing in general, but also of then-current law.
For those of you asking, "Rhabdo-what?": a rhabdouchophile (from the Greek "rhabdos" a rod, "echo" I have or hold, and "phileo" I love as a close friend) is one having an intense, and sometimes unhealthy, love for the police in general or for police officers. The earliest policemen, in fact, were a cadre of municipal slaves in ancient Athens, armed with rods, and tasked with crowd control at public events. The word "rhabdouchos," literally "rod holder," became the ancient word for a policeman.
And here Producer and Star Jack Webb shows off his love for the police--who they are, and what they do.
He faces some of the worst-drawn characters ever to appear on this series, or any series Jack Webb had a hand in producing. "Johnny Fever," of WKRP in Cincinnati, shows up here as a bitter hippy. Next to him is an all-too-typical university professor. He, sad to say, is a realistic example of university faculty, both then and now. Those two constitute the panel in opposition to Friday and Gannon. The moderator is a sick joke: think Jerry Springer twenty years ahead of his time. From the get-up he has on, to his clear slant against the cops, he is just another straw-man idiot (in the correct sense of "in a world of his own").
The audience questioners are a motley crew, and include one (Harry Wilson, combat veteran) who seems oddly out-of-place with the others. He is there to stand up for the Constitutional right of every American, per the Second Amendment, to arm himself at least as well as, if not better than, an infantry soldier. Jack Webb, at least at the time, flatly disagreed and seemed to think only the police, the military, VIPs, or their bodyguards should pack heat. And it shows. It is the most jarring note in an otherwise watchable episode. First, the officers say, "If you have time to reach for your gun, you have time to call us"--never mind that police response time typically runs to 45 minutes or more (as I personally have reason to know). And then, the kicker: Friday and Gannon shake their heads at Wilson's scenario of an invading army "go(ing) to the files, and then go(ing) around confiscating all the weapons," and dismiss it with the "in this nuclear age" argument.
Happily, the attitude of many police and sheriff's departments seems to have changed since then. So as you watch, remember this is a snapshot of police and public attitudes in 1968, not 2018.
So much for the right-wing opposition. All the rest of the opposition comes from the left wing. Here you have a mix of hedonists and outright anarchists. The character Mondo Mbamba looks to a modern viewer like someone who traveled back in time from a BLM rally.
Which brings me to sum up: this show puts those concerned with basic constitutional rights in the same category as anarchists who seemingly want freedom to steal from you without opposition. I find that grossly unfair. Which is why I can rate this episode with five stars out of ten.
Reducing (1952)
Tells only half the story
This short film tells only half the story--how *not* to reduce. It shows plainly that dieting alone never works. Unless you address the source of the cravings, you'll still crave. When you crave, you cheat. It's that simple.
But good ol' Pete didn't tell *how* to beat the cravings. Maybe his advisers didn't know enough. But the jokes wear a little thin after awhile.
His "Let's Talk Turkey" short was a lot better. Even before he told all the jokes about "how not to carve a turkey," he called in an expert to show us how it's done. Not so here.
Just so you know: the secret is to start lifting a few weights--not the really heavy ones, but just enough to start building a little muscle. While you're doing that, you want to knock off the sweets but not the meat and (healthy) fats. A few good choices, and after a week or so, those cravings would have vanished. Then this could have been inspiring.
But Pete had a problem. Like everyone else, he assumed that once you got fat, you'd stay fat. To paraphrase George Gershwin, it ain't necessarily so.
Storefront Lawyers: The Truth, the Whole Truth - And Anything Else That Works (1971)
Franz Kafka meets Ted Bundy
In the early Seventies, nothing struck more terror into a woman's heart than knowing a sex-crazed homicidal maniac might lurk in every shadow. But in any age, nothing could be worse for an ordinary citizen than to find himself under suspicion for a string of such murders.
This show proved the greatest value of the new format. Sometimes even a better-off person needs a lawyer desperately, not over what he did but over what somebody else did that yet another person *says* he did. To say nothing of the attitude of police and prosecuting attorneys, facing the political embarrassment of a string of unsolved *very* personal crimes, seeking to vindicate their institutional existence by nabbing any suspect, guilty or not, just to get a favorable headline.
Here the former Storefront Lawyers take on their most difficult case to date. They dare not impeach the prosecution's chief witness. But that witness made a terrible, though understandable, mistake. How do they finesse this?
Star Trek: Voyager: Darkling (1997)
Inner Villains, Round Two
Regular actors in TV series hit their best strides when they can, however temporarily, turn bad. Jennifer Lien took her turn in "Warlord." Robert Picardo takes his turn here--and ironically (or perhaps not so ironically), Jennifer Lien is along--unwillingly--for the ride.
Briefly, The Doctor tries to borrow personality traits from such historical figures as Lord Byron (Earth) and T'Pau (Vulcan; cf. "Amok Time" in ST:TOS). But, as Robert Louis Stevenson (or maybe Sigmund Freud) could have told him, all great people have a dark side. When all those dark sides come together, watch out! Robert Picardo here takes his opportunity to be as bad as he knows how to be. Very entertaining to watch. At the same time we see Jennifer Lien clearly anticipating her last episodes.
One problem: the capabilities of Federation medicine to bring a man back even after someone has thrown him off a precipice suddenly look dreadfully contrived. And transporting two people in mid-fall from that same precipice...! Can we say, "Deus ex machina"?!? That aside, this episode stands alone as one of Voyager's best.
Blue Thunder (1983)
Watch it now while it is still fiction!
Blue Thunder is a rarity in film. When it first came out, it packed them into theaters with the wry humor of its characters and dialog, and the white-knuckle action for which everything else is a set-up. And once that action starts, it does not stop until the very end.
Still, it explored a theme that, to some viewers (including me at the time), seemed far-fetched and typical Hollywood political. But today I watched it again, on the Sony HD Channel. It could have been made today! In short, this film was thirty-one years ahead of its time. And when you watch it, and consider modern headlines and recent history, you find yourself leaping out of your seat and shouting, "They knew then!"
"Blue Thunder" is, of course, the name of the world's first police SWAT helicopter gunship. The name is slightly ironic, for reasons you will have to watch the film to catch. More to the point: the filmmakers built a truly frightening piece of machinery, and one of the things that makes the lead character such a hero is that he discovers, to his horror, what Blue Thunder is really meant to be. Had the developers of "Blue Thunder" the helicopter simply taken a Cobra helicopter gunship and painted it police blue (or maybe Mountie red), instead of Army green, the results would be no more chilling to anyone who thinks that maybe--just maybe--the government is not his friend. But of course the concept developers didn't do that. They built something that looks far more fearsome than an Army Cobra ever looked.
And no one embodies the cynical thrust of the project better than Malcolm MacDowell (Col. F. E. Cochrane USA). He is villainous almost to insanity, as cinematic villains almost have to be. He gets to be as bad as he can be, and clearly enjoys it.
Nor can you imagine a better hero than Roy Scheider (Officer Frank Murphy, ASTRO Division). And very early in the film you will know why he is the only one who would want to, and be able to, expose "Blue Thunder" and its underlying project for what they are.
For this much I will reveal: Blue Thunder the film exposes the awful over-militarization of municipal police departments in the United States over the last half-century. That's what John Badham (director) and his writers dared expose in 1983. Blue Thunder the project is the logical endpoint of that over-militarization (and you will readily accept that logic before the film is halfway over). That might have seemed far-fetched in 1983. Today, as the Department of Homeland Security (in real life) sells or gives away Army surplus Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs) to police SWAT teams, you can only wonder whether police air-support divisions will soon turn into "Air SWAT" forces. If a killing/snooping machine like Blue Thunder the helicopter was feasible then (and I have confirmed it was, from military sources), imagine what a modern-day Blue Thunder could do! Which means: as you watch this film now, you might forget, except for one temporal reference to a then-upcoming event in Los Angeles history, that you are watching a thirty-one-year-old film set in 1983. This film will have you checking the sky to see if anything like Blue Thunder the helicopter is looking at you (and listening, too).
Warren Oates provides almost comic relief as a boss who hears the immediate complaints and doesn't understand what Murphy is trying to tell him. Candy Clark, as Murphy's girlfriend, provides more comic relief--but also sets up her part in the wild adventure of the last act in a way that Anton Chekhov would stand in awe at. The two TV reporters will have you wishing more like them were "in the business" today.
One last bit of advice: after you see this film, get active to make sure it stays fiction. Do not, in other words, be a "JAFO." And you'll have to watch the film to get *that* reference, too.
Blue Thunder (1984)
A cop-out
Though this show was named after the movie, and even used the same model helicopter as the movie, it was nothing like the movie.
The whole point of the movie was to warn people about the over-militarization of big-city police departments, and about the dangerous scapegoat treatment given to the residents (usually minority residents) of a city's poorer quarters. In the half season this series ran, none of that survived. Instead, a sympathetic crew takes on the kind of case you never hear about in real life, because it never happens.
What a cop-out. At least Airwolf had a more believable basic premise, and ironically came closer to the premise of the Roy Scheider movie: just because the government has a cool gadget, doesn't mean what the government means to do with it is just as cool.
Then again, the movie was thirty-one years ahead of its time. This series was a product of its time, just as shallow, and suffering even more for its hackneyed writing and the wooden performances of its regulars.
Mission: Impossible: The Falcon: Part 3 (1970)
Topkapi meets The Third Man
The Falcon was the only episode in the Mission:Impossible series to run to three parts. Three parts were definitely necessary, because the stew of palace and diplomatic intrigue was easily enough for a 135-minute motion picture. And even when the story is finished, it leaves a lot of loose ends untied, with a lot for an imaginative viewer to wonder about.
The mission parameters are simple enough: Prince Stephan (Joseph Reale), the rightful ruler of an unnamed Balkan country, is believed killed. But he is not dead. His chief-of-staff, General Sabattini (John Vernon), is holding him to force his fiancée, Francesca (Diane Baker), to marry him. This will give him a legitimate claim to the throne, whose present occupant, Prince Regent Nicolai (Noel Harrison), is a child-like fop who spends all his time (and much of the country's treasury) indulging his hobby of clock-making. (If that sounds familiar, it should. Louis XV indulged in his own hobbies of lock-making and masonry while pre-Revolutionary France descended to rack and ruin. No wonder France exploded in bloody violence later on!) Here simplicity ends. Sabattini's second-in-command, Manuel Vargas (Logan Ramsey), thinks Sabattini is a fool for not cutting an easy deal with the Chinese. Vargas also knows that selling off the crown jewels, as Sabattini plans to do, won't make a dent in the country's debt. So Vargas and Buccaro (Jack Donner) would love to bump Sabattini off and run things on their own.
What a stew! And into that stew jump Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) and company, with both feet each.
Regrettably, Peter Graves never does the impersonation thing well. He's always wooden and one-dimensional, and this is no exception. Leonard Nimoy's Paris is much better. Reale, Baker, and Harrison are in top form, portraying their respective characters--or IMF team members who have taken their places.
The IMF plays the evil Sabattini, Vargas and Buccaro like violins. Before they finish, the have Sabattini thinking that Stephan managed to scam him and steal the crown jewels before he, Sabattini, could put the bag on Stephan. Worse yet, they get Vargas and Buccaro thinking that Sabattini is planning to shoot them the first chance he gets. (Which might not be so far from the truth.) And, as is required in a long, drawn-out story like this, things go sour. Not just in incidental fashion--like Barney (Greg Morris) bumping his head, losing his eyesight, and needing Jim to talk him through so that he can free Francesca after she has been buried alive. Oh, no--when they go sour, they go S-O-U-R. Vargas and Buccaro try to bump Sabattini off, all right--only they not only fail, but manage to implicate two IMF agents, though nobody knows who they really are. Of course, Sabattini is the paranoiac's paranoiac, and, as you might expect, he shoots his officers. But his is a total downward spiral. His final scene, when he sees that even his prize prisoner has gotten away from him, is one of the best villain-death scenes in the whole franchise.
So, again as expected, the good guys get out with their skins intact, and the royal family is safe and sound. But hey, dude, where's the money? The country is still broke at the end. Can Stephan manage to get his country out of the hole, after his own cousin spent the public's money on clock parts? Will the people be glad to have Stephan back--or will they run riot when they hear about Nicolai's excesses? Will Stephan wind up coming to America, hat in hand, for a loan from the OTHER IMF--International Monetary Fund? Considering the current (2011) controversy on that line, it is perhaps just as well that the writer of this script never talks about the solution. But what a shame. After doing such an excellent job of laying out the problem, the story ends with clearly unfinished business. Exit Impossible Missions Force, enter Nice International Bankers. So long, it's been good to know ya, but we're outta here! Hmmm--somehow that doesn't satisfy.
But give the writer this much credit: he pulls no gods out of the machine to solve that. And by the time you watch the whole thing, you at least have something to wonder about, something that isn't too absurd for words. You HOPE that King Stephan will have sense enough not to let, say, George Soros advise him how to solve his country's financial problems--but you have no trouble believing that a Stephan might be real, along with the mess he still will have to clean up by himself. Some missions really are impossible--for other people to do for you.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
This story stands alone, and well
The true test of any work of literature, or any theatrical performance in any medium (be it stage, film, or TV), is: Can this story stand alone, and impress those who have never before seen this story told in any other medium? In the case of Andrew Adamson's adaptation of C. S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the answer is an unqualified "Yes!" On one level, this story is an entertaining and indeed rousing story of action, adventure, and suspense. It takes a very common children's fantasy--climbing into a confined space, like a closet or, as in this case, an armoire--and having all manner of adventures without ever actually leaving that space. That is a game that all of us have played as kids at one time or another. But this time it's different. This time it's for real--and some elements of the adventure are not very nice. But then again, that's what makes it satisfying--it presents our heroes with obstacles to overcome.
Or in one case, it teaches a lesson about letting yourself be seduced by someone who tells you what you want to hear, long enough to take advantage of you. In the classic "be-careful-what-you-wish-for" department, "special treatment" might not be at all what you thought you wanted.
On another level, it is--yes--a passion play. Christians will recognize at once which character makes the supreme sacrifice for another person's rather dreadful sins. And even if you don't know that story, perhaps if you hear the Christian story after watching this film, you will understand why it is so powerful. Have you ever wished that you could do something over? How grateful would you feel if someone were to lay his *life* on the line for you? C. S. Lewis also takes a jab at those who assume that a story is "logically impossible" just because it sounds fantastic. His point is that the credibility of the witnesses must sometimes trump even the "fantastic" quality of the stories that one witness tells, if that witness has never been known to tell a lie. Andrew Adamson has not lost that lesson.
Happily, the solid cast, and not the special effects or the fantastic story concept, carry this show. Georgie Henley makes an adorable Lucy, one that will always carry your sympathy. Skandar Keynes is equally excellent as Edmund, the mean kid who falls right into a trap laid by one who knows just how to play him. William Moseley and Anna Popplewell are incomparable as the older kids who learn the real meaning of responsibility. Seeing William Moseley's Peter confess his failings as an older brother before Aslan the Lion is almost alone worth the price of admission.
Nor should one leave out the villain in this piece. Tilda Swinton plays Jadis, Queen of Narnia, aka "The White Witch," like every schoolteacher in the middle grades who was ever accused, with any justice, of seducing the male students in her charge. To see her whisper sweet nothings at Edmund is to feel a chill up your spine if you have any relation whatever to a boy in "middle school" with a teacher with a reputation for...! Her abrupt change from the beguiling seductress to the harsh enemy has all the shock value that one could ask for--and to see how those two clash in the end will definitely give you a rich sense of irony. You will never want your son's teacher to offer your son a piece of "Turkish Delight," or any other kind of candy, ever again! And yet, for all that, it is entirely family-friendly and handled in the best possible taste--or as good as one can handle it when it includes a major battle. "Battles are ugly affairs," says one supporting character, and this is no exception, so beware allowing children to see this film who scare easily.
That aside, this film has something for everyone, adult and child alike. It makes a great start to what promises to be a very heartwarming series.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)
It grows on you
Those looking for an absolutely faithful adaptation have, of course, expressed their disappointment. But in fact, a faithful adaptation would never have worked. Adamson and his team did the best job they could have done, and have produced a work that offers a lot of sobering life lessons.
In the original, Peter and his siblings find themselves abruptly transported back to Narnia--hundreds of years after they left it--and are thrown into a war on the side of Prince Caspian, who has already lost three battles. That would have been supremely difficult for Adamson to portray. Instead, Caspian inadvertently summons the Pevensies on the very night of his escape from the Telmarine castle, and we cut back and forth between the Pevensie children trying to investigate what has happened to their beloved Narnia in their absence, and Caspian trying to stay ahead of the forces of his usurping uncle, Lord Protector Miraz, and win the trust of the Narnians, who have no reason to trust him.
Furthermore, Peter learns the harsh lesson of command by learning what it feels like to lose a major battle (and half his fighting force), and also to learn that one bad general is still better than two good generals who argue.
All this might not seem to be a suitable story for children. In fact, Adamson obviously chose to tell the story on an adult level, as Peter Jackson did with his Lord of the Rings trilogy. And this story works--on an adult level, with characters who learn adult lessons.
The four actors who portrayed the Pevensie children are back, and they act like a family--and a family with a secret that none of their peers could possibly understand. Peter might not be so "magnificent" at first, but that only shows that he perhaps did not learn all the lessons that he ought to have learned the first time around. Georgie Henley more than holds her own as an older and wiser Lucy--and Skandar Keynes is excellent as Edmund, who is definitely not the same spiteful and selfish boy he was in the first story. Ben Barnes does an excellent turn as Caspian, who must prove to himself, his people, and his allies that he truly has the makings of a king--and can face a king's challenges when needed.
In addition, this film has other truly delightful characters who provide just the right amount of comic relief. My personal favorite: Eddie Izzard's Reepicheep, who looks at life as one big battle until Aslan gives him some necessary perspective. My second favorite: Trufflehunter the badger, who offers his own unique brand of folksy wisdom.
Others have said elsewhere that this story was probably the most difficult of all the Narnia stories to adapt to film. That's probably correct. But the true test of any story is: Does it stand on its own, in the medium in which it plays out? For this film, the answer is: Yes. I liked it, and I suspect that you will, too, after you've seen it often enough.
Of course, I'm waiting for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is supposed to be the best of the lot. I can believe that--for I look forward to seeing a much-wiser King Caspian leading a quest at sea.