Soon I’ll write about the brilliant highlights and complex flaws of the ‘Dragnet’ series which I adore, but this is a kind of preliminary appreciation for the fictional universes of Jack Webb through the first Dragnet full-length feature (1954). If you’re a fan of the radio or TV series you’re in luck, because this is essentially an extended episode in colour as Sergeants Joe Friday (Webb) and Frank Smith (Ben Alexander) solve a gangland killing mystery. This is a devoted portrait of ‘the city: Los Angeles, California,’ with many of Jack’s familiar favourites like Richard Boone (Paladin!), Harry Bartell, Olan Soule (Batman!). This is still hard-boiled police procedural at its most fresh and obsessive, as we watch Joe and Frank painstakingly, patiently take us though book procedure with classic terse dialogue, hardly any time for anything else. These are the everyday heroes as Jack idealized them, humbly dedicated to protecting the innocent.
In many ways though, it presents some interesting departures from the Webb formula. We take more time with the story and acting, even (see Stacy Harris, a genuine treat to watch and listen to, and Virginia Gregg in a touching cameo as the victim’s widow). Friday is his usual blank slate, tough, straight-backed, but in an unusual twist he and Frank get a little personal, ending up in a bar fight with their chief suspects. Jack also seems to stretch his director’s wings here, venturing into new cinematic territory (which we’d later see in ‘Pete Kelly’s Blues’). We still rely on those finely tense, close short shots, but you can admire quite a few unhurried long scene shots, beautiful top-down shots, and plays on angles, camera motion, and light, a noir in colour if that makes sense. In the end, Dragnet 1954 is classic Webb, comfortably in his idiosyncratic, unmistakably iconic world of cops and robbers, and I wouldn’t have it any other way Xo
Comments
Post a Comment