Dragnet

During my childhood the staccato musical "sting" could be heard anytime and any place that there was a parody of a detective programme or even between kids if there was a minor mystery, someone would hum the theme.

Actually watching it for the first time many decades later in very bleary prints shown on the most obscure satellite channel to fill the gaps between adverts early in the morning, its brilliance still shines through. "Everything you see is true". But how true and how was it actually made? There doesn't seem to be any authoritative account of how the scripts were written so I can only guess. Two things however strike me: firstly there is a precision and sometimes quirky individuality about the portrayal of the suspect, small but striking details of their manner and behaviour. Secondly, the calm reasonable and utterly professional cops who at all times remain dedicated, fully human and humane, sympathetic yet not presented as superheroes.

My feeling at least is that the source of the materials was not just the files but the actual cops involved who related things they'd remembered but which would not have seemed significant enough for them to include in a written report.

The most impressive was Lee Marvin playing a violent killer who combined calm petty self-absorption with lying, and unconcerned matter-of-factness about his murders. He's just violently attacked a cop, is now handcuffed and about to be taken down to the station yet calmly says he wants to clean his teeth and expects the cop, who's still got a bloody face, to hand him the toothpaste and turn on the tap. He's not trying to wind the cop up, he just wants what he wants. During questioning he says that he's hungry, is taken to a cafe and carefully chooses a meal with a special salad. Once finished he is confronted with compelling evidence, and casually confesses to a string of brutal and almost motive-less murders, then calmly turns to a discussion of how a little salt is vital to fully enjoying lettuce. It's his last meal outside jail and probably not far from his last meal on earth yet he remains calm and self-absorbed. It is the perfect outline sketch of a psychopath.

Dragnet, Mulholland Falls and L.A. Confidential

I've done some reading over the years about Dragnet. Jack Webb was making a movie called "He Walked by Night" in 1948 when the technical advisor, LAPD detective Marty Wynn, expressed exasperation that Hollywood never depicted police work as it actually was. the cops were always hard boiled tough guys, crooked or buffoons. Webb, after thinking about it, asked to accompany Wynn and his partner, Vance Brasher on their nightly rounds and became fascinated by police procedure and the way the real policemen talked. He suggested the radio series that became "Dragnet". The LAPD was enthusiastic because they found the way they were constantly being depicted as distasteful. Webb's police went by the book, spoke "like doctors would to patients". He also eschewed violence except in rare instances, usually showing it after it had taken place and depicting it as the human tragedy it actually was. Webb closely co-operated with the LAPD, using their files for stories and filling his shows with praise for Chief William Parker, who had been hired in 1950 to clean up and give a new image to the department.

The Watts riots were the first chink in this image. Many analysts blamed them on Parker and his department, which was said to enforce racist unofficial rules about which part of town blacks could be in. In recent years, two films have been released which seem to further undercut the image of the LAPD that Webb created, Mulholland Falls, (1996) and L.A. Confidential, (1997). Mulholland Falls introduces us to the "Hat Squad", which is said to be non-fictional. Nick Nolte and his gang report directly to Chief Parker, (who is played briefly but perfectly by Bruce Dern, judging from newsreel clips I saw on his biography). He hired them to rid the city of mobsters and other criminals and to stay above politics. Nobody, but nobody is allowed to operate in L.A., not even the FBI, without going through Parker. The Hat Squad makes their own rules to do their job, including throwing a would-be mobster, (played by CSI"s William Peterson), off a cliff on Mulholland Drive they have given the title name.

In L.A. Confidential, the Hat Squad and Chief Parker do not make an appearance, although I wonder if James Cromwell's Capt. Smith is somehow supposed to represent him. We are introduced here to Jack Vincennes, who is a technical advisor on a show obviously intended to represent Dragnet, the star of which is a total phony. Russell Crowe's Bud White would look good in a hat and Guy Pearce's Ed Exley seems to have watched too many episodes of Dragnet.

These two films suggest that Dragnet was a phony, too, a public relations gimmick to make the seedy LAPD look good. Recent events have also not helped the image of the department, suggesting that planting evidence to help along prosecution and prejudice against African Americans is a long-standing condition. Maybe those melodramas of the 40's had it right about the LAPD.

But books about Jack Webb tell about him doing such extensive research into not only the methods of the department but also the details of a cop's life. I suspect that even Chief Parker could not have protected the Hat Squad once they attacked and brutally beat up an FBI agent, as Nick Nolte does. And are we to believe that Mickey Cohen was brought to justice so the LAPD could take over his rackets? Was there ever an Alamo-like shoot out between good cops and bad cops? Was it that bad? Or is Hollywood simply reclaiming the territory won by Jack Webb in Dragnet?

There are people who know. But I am not one of them.

Hipsters have a lot of fun turning Dragnet's Joe Friday into a kind of 50's style robocop. Too bad that the robotic side has come to define this signature series. Because in reality, the show was much more than what it's become-- the butt of comics from Dan Ackroyd to Jay Leno. Dragnet was much more because the show actually defined police work for millions of viewers during those early TV years. Friday was in audience eyes (mine too) the ultimate police professional. And if he seemed a tad stiff without any discernible personal life, that was OK since the law should be applied in a formal and impersonal manner. And if that also coincided with the civil liberties trashing Joe Mc Carthy, that's OK too because everybody liked Ike and Ike was president, not Joe Mc Carthy. In short, Dragnet was more than a TV event-- it was a cultural reflection with a long-lasting impact on how Americans pictured law enforcement.

In fact, it's not a stretch to claim that Dragnet redefined the popular police image from what it had been. Consider, for example, how cops were portrayed in the 1930's. They were either three fumbling steps behind Bogart and Cagney, or played buffoonish comic relief for the likes of Boston Blackie and Charlie Chan. Still, depression era audiences didn't mind, since cops were generally viewed as adversaries who enforced bank foreclosures or busted up union rallies. A decade later, police largely disappeared from the screen as America went to war, but even after the boys came home, cops only existed around the edges. However, there was a development at 20th Century Fox that foreshadowed the rise of a Dragnet. And that was the use of a documentary style of film-making in movies such as Boomerang, and Naked City, to name two. Such films emphasized hum-drum real-life activities across a spectrum that often included police work. And audiences responded, since they were not used to seeing some of their own reality coming from Hollywood's well-honed Dream Factory.

Jack Webb's genius lay in seeing how this documentary approach could be applied to radio and then TV. Audiences really had little idea of how modern police departments worked, and no doubt many still struggled with the comic versions of the 30's. However, Webb made a fateful decision at that point-- he got the collaboration of the Los Angeles Police Department to give the show a stamp of authenticity. On one hand, the endorsement said to viewers-- this show is special since these are real cases and this is the way we really operate. On the other hand, it put strict limits on Sgt. Friday and how cops could be portrayed. Because now he was no longer just a working cop, he was a stand-in for the whole LAPD, and eventually for departments from Miami to Seattle. With that kind of responsibility, what show could afford to take chances. Thus was born Friday the law-and-order robot, while actor-Webb locked into a role he couldn't change even if he wanted to.

But you've got to hand it to the guy. In the spirit of real world appearance, he did his darndest to de-glamorize police work. There were no busty babes, no high-speed chases, no heroic shoot-outs, nor even bloody fist-fights. Instead, Friday plodded around town in the same seedy sport coat interviewing John or Joan Q. Public, making an occasional low-key arrest. And if the public seemed at times not too bright or not very cooperative or sometimes even criminal, he kept his cool. Sure, he could get riled and spit out a snarl, plus that annoying habit of topping comments he didn't like. But he was never flashy nor brutal nor egotistical. Okay, so maybe, despite all the official hype, Friday was still a pretty long way from a real cop. Nonetheless, he and his cast of ordinary-looking people did what the series set out to do. They were close enough to the real thing to make the audience believe.

The first few years were, I think, the best. After that, the show became too concerned with lightening the mood, and we got a lot of folksy humor from partner Frank Smith to make up for Friday's lack of a personal life. But those first few years brought forth some of the most memorable mini-dramas of the time-- a teenager accidentally shoots a friend, a cruel old man murders his wife, an adulterous wife abandons her wedlock baby. Many of the cases even concerned minor crimes far from the usual. And oddly, it was director Webb's much derided Spartan style that turned many of these cases into the powerful human-interest stories they were. The tight close-ups, the terse, understated dialogue, the spare sets, all worked to concentrate attention on the human side of the story. At such points, Friday often faded into the background, becoming, as it were, little more than a mute bystander-- an ironical outcome for a series that specialized in police procedure.

Still, the series was wedded to its time. Soon, the Eisenhower years turned into Vietnam, Jim Crow turned into Civil Rights marches, and social conformity morphed into a lively counter-culture. And many urban issues the show had avoided (police brutality) or underplayed (corruption) suddenly burst into headline stories. More importantly, cops were no longer viewed as impartial defenders of the law, but as agents of a hypocritical, repressive "establishment". The times had changed, yet Friday's 50's brand of unquestioning assumptions about authority hadn't. Thus, the 60's revival of Dragnet was doomed from the start. But that shouldn't take away from the show's genuine accomplishment of de-glamorizing real police work. Of course, the hipsters are probably right-- Friday did look a lot like a 50's robocop. But, they're also wrong. Because, at its best during those early years, the series was verifiably human, or as some might hold, all-too-human. Too bad the hipsters can't work that into their act.

Jack Webb set the standard for law and order police with the creation of Dragnet a show which impacted for better or worse every television police show down to this day. Webb who was a respected character player in the day vaulted to stardom first with the Dragnet radio series and then when it moved to television.

The show started in radio in 1949 and moved to television in 1951 where it ran for 8 seasons. Every story followed a rigid pattern where Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday and Ben Alexander as Detective Frank Smith start the day out working in one aspect of police work. They could be at a specific precinct or at a special command, narcotics, juveniles,homicide, etc. An incident would happen and for the next half hour these two followed the leads and made the arrest.

Webb's interrogation technique became legendary. One can still hear his staccato questioning and when someone got off point, he'd respond with the familiar catchphrase, 'just the facts'.

About the middle point of the show Webb and Alexander would be in their police car and this was where these two got humanized. Alexander and later Harry Morgan would talk about home and family. Webb would listen and smile and occasionally mentioned he had a date coming up. No relationsips though. The phrase 'married to the job' applied to Joe Friday like no other. What a spartan existence he led.

Dragnet was beautifully satirized in an 80s movie that starred Dan Aykroyd as Joe Friday and Tom Hanks as a young and hip partner. It was brought back by Webb for another run from 1968-1971 this time in color.

Webb did the same thing for uniform police with a show he produced Adam-12 which had a respectable run. And the show Emergency. his also, had some solid stories about EMS technicians done in Dragnet style.

Few shows for better or worse had the impact Dragnet has.

Several sources have stated that Jack Webb really wanted to be a Los Angeles policeman. The height restrictions of that time period kept him from qualifying for his badge. It also has been said that "Dragnet" is the closest to reality of all the police shows ever made.