"This is Jim Rockford. Leave your name and message and I'll get back to you."

Kevin Wolf has been watching the best of the best TV detective shows on DVD.

The Rockford Files - before non-laughtrack sitcoms, and gritty cable dramas with their higher gore and profanity quotients - is unavoidably the product of another era. The lapels on men's suits, the haircuts (or not, sometimes) and sideburns - even the wallpaper - you name it, it screams "the seventies" at you.

This is precisely one of the show's strengths. Rockford is, along with rare treats such as Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, a facinating portrait of southern California in the mid-seventies as the final vestiges of flower power were buried and a new, corporate, monied outlook was being built on its grave. (Put away your Gram Parsons albums and start buying The Eagles, as directed.)

Kevin mentions an episode with Joyce Van Patten as a police buff who keeps getting in Rockford's way on a case.  I remember that episode vividly, probably because of the virtue Kevin identifies.  The writers recognized that Van Patten's character was troublesome, annoying, dangerous to herself and others, a problem who had to be solved and was solved finally in a way that was brutal to her feelings, and yet they still made us feel sympathy for her.  This respectful, complex treatment of female guest stars was the name of the game on Rockford.  They weren't on the show just to be Jim's girlfriend of the week.  Rockford's love life took place mostly off-duty which meant off-camera.  They were there as characters and it was their story that drove the episodes.  Kevin reports that Ross MacDonald, creator of the fictional detective who, even before Philip Marlowe, ought to be the standard for fictional detectives, Lew Archer, liked Rockford a lot.  I'm not surprised because The Rockford Files followed the Archer model.  Archer and Rockford were on the scene to witness the other characters' stories.  In MacDonald's novels there would be five or six such stories in each book.  In an hour TV show, The Rockford Files could only deal with one at time and the result of this was that just about every week there was a wonderful opportunity for a guest star to strut their stuff, and very often this guest star was a woman.

But male guest stars had it pretty good too.  Kevin hasn't gotten to it yet, but one of my all-time favorite episodes had Tom Selleck, just before he became Magnum PI, guest starring as a private eye named Lance White.  Something about that first name I like.  Lance was the willing knight in shining armor that Rockford did not want to be.  Lance also had all the luck that Rockford never got.  The episode was a neat little parody of The Rockford Files itself by misdirection.

Go read Kevin's post here.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

Selleck's character was everything Rockford wasn't: lucky, charismatic, heroic, and because of (*not* in spite of) all that, someone you could take only in small doses.

[TCinLA]

As someone who writes in Hollywierd, I constantly hate the Seventies, because that was when I could have written what I like to write, and gotten away with it,unlike nowadays when the only things I do that get made have to tunnel under the wire and present their forged documents to the Volkssturm guard at the bahnhof to get away and get seen.

Seventies TV shows, seventies movies - the least of them light years better than the "product" the multinationals dump on us nowadays.

I think Rockford can be successfully held up to The Shield for good writing and good work. Certainly not the same stuff, but definitely equally-talented.

[Mudge]

Does anyone really give James Garner the credit he deserves? Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford are two of the most indelible male characters of television. You cite below that Roger Moore brough his baggage of Beau Maverick (among others) to James Bond. I think Garner transcended his Bret Maverick baggage in Rockford. Some will argue it's the same character, but I don't agree.

Also, Noah Beery, Joe Santos and especially Stuart Margolin (Angel) form an excellent supporting cast.

It was a well written, well casted show.

[Jennifer]

The Lance White character was great.

[mndean]

The Rockford Files was one of the delights of the '70s. Not only was it my favorite show of the era, it was one of the few shows where the protagonist lived a truly American bohemian existence. I don't think anyone else could make living in a trailer seem so attractive. Strangely enough, it reminded me of not only The Long Goodbye, but an earlier TV PI show called Harry O. While Harry O wasn't nearly as good (I'm relying on 30+ year-old memories here), it did have an oceanfront California atmosphere similar to Rockford, albeit without the humor, but with the compensation of having Anthony Zerbe as a regular. Janssen was more of the tough-guy Mannix-type detective, so the charm was lacking, and IIRC the cases were seedier, but Zerbe could make me smile at the most banal line of dialogue, just by his delivery. Even in his heyday he was criminally underused.

[fly on wall]

The best of Harry O was as good as the best of Rockford, IMO, and that's high praise.

The writing in most of the Harry O shows contained strong narrative and very much evoked a Lew Archer feel. Here's a couple of examples from one of the best of the series, Elegy for a Cop.

ORWELL, VOICEOVER: Any honest policeman knows that if he's shot and killed in another city where he's not supposed to be, and his body is found with $2400 on it, then there has to be a scandal, and people have to question his honesty. But he can't answer for himself when he's dead—-he knows that…$2400 is a funny amount of money: it's $200 a month, $50 a week for a year, like a cheap and rotten policeman on a weekly payroll. Not a big crook, just a little crook without self-respect.

and...

ORWELL, VOICEOVER [WHILE WRITING MANNY'S NAME ON BOTTLE OF LIQUOR]: My mother is dead, so is my father, and I never had a sister. Even Sherlock Holmes had a brother, but not me. All I have are my friends: you take one of them away from me, you steal a piece of my life.
ORWELL, to bartender: Put it up there by the light--I want to be able to read the name.
BARTENDER: Whatta we do, open it when he comes in?
ORWELL: He's not coming in, not in this lifetime…He had a previous engagement.

The episode was interesting in that the producers had moved the show to Los Angeles from San Diego to save production costs. Manny Quinlan (played by Henry Darrow) was Orwell's cop buddy in San Diego and was brought back to die in Elegy for a Cop. Orwell was certainly a wounded character (literally with a bullet lodged in his back)and the antithesis of Lt. Trench (Anthony Zerbe), the smooth organization man.

Harry O did fine in the ratings but Fred Silverman came to ABC and remade the schedule in his image.

Harry O repeats are running Monday nights on the American Life network, just before 77 Sunset Strip...

[mndean]

Thanks for that, fly on wall! Much more rushed back to me when I see the names of the characters. I remember the voiceovers now, as well as the bullet, and even his neighbor Farrah Fawcett. The move from SD to LA is much more hazy, though. My memories of the show were so old that I knew I couldn't trust them. I remember Henry Darrow's being killed off, too, but I liked the cynical Trench because of Zerbe. It may have been the first time I liked an actor rather than a role, but I was just a kid at the time. From your description, it really sounds more like the gritty detective novels I read than any other show I can remember. I also remember an ep with Sal Mineo playing a rather sleazy drug dealer(?) that I liked.

Damn it - if I only had cable, I could see these shows again. I remember liking them quite a lot pre-Rockford.

[fly on wall]

Well, the producers began to tinker with Harry O in season 2, bringing in an occasionally recurring guest character, Lester Hodges, for some humor. (The Hodges character was supposed to be spun off.) Those episodes really didn't work -- Rockford did humor much better than Harry O.

[mndean]

Wow, Lester Hodges doesn't register in my memory at all. Comedy on Harry O seems very out of place, maybe that's why I remember Rockford somewhat more fondly than Harry O - Rockford could do serious nearly as well as Harry O and was much better at comedy, although there were some episodes of Rockford that grated on me. At least neither was like the cop/PI shows I remember seeing prior to that, like Adam-12, Mannix or Hawaii Five-O. For all their stalwart knights of law-and-order act, the heroes seemed rather cold and inhuman to me, and I was often more amused by the crook-of-the-week on a show like Five-O (especially if it was someone like Khigh Dheigh playing the recurring arch criminal Wo Fat). For all the wit of Columbo, he was still Inspector Porfiry to me. Not until Harry O did I see something which felt like the detective novels I read. If they put that on DVD, they could make me a happy man. They've already put enough insipid tosh on DVD, how about something good for a change?

[Kevin Wolf]

Thanks for the link, Lance. But for days, I completely missed this post. I don't know how.

I'll probably post on Rockford again, since I'm just about obsessed. I hope to have more to say about the supporting cast, and I am very much looking forward to the Lance White episodes. The best features a whole gang of Rockford's fellow PIs; not just Lance but the return of Vern St Cloud (Simon Oakland).