The Blue Knight

Truly one of the best mini-series ever, with a monumental, Emmy-winning performance by William Holden. I sure wish I knew who to bug about getting this out on DVD, because if you weren't around in 1973, you missed a wonderful, gripping series. Holden is fantastic. Please, please put this on DVD!!!

I saw this mini series when it first aired back in the seventies before the days of the vcrs. The only time I ever saw it again was after it was cut down to a 90 min. TV Movie with most of the "bite" taken out of it. I think that it was this movie that made me realize how good an actor William Holden was. I certainly would like this entire min-series put on a DVD. I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Director Robert Butler concocted together this 188-minute TV series, which may have been the blueprint for the better known and orchestrated HILL STREET BLUES series that enjoyed some considerable success in the 1980s.

Cinematography is strictly competent and fitting, featuring mostly drab surroundings and down and outers in the seedier parts of a major US city.

William Holden holds those 188 minutes together thanks to a masterful performance and dry delivery. It is a pity that an actor of his immense quality should have made so many poor choices, but certainly THE BLUE KNIGHT deserves watching for his contribution alone.

The script is rather thin. Nothing much happens. The character of Bumper Morgan, the street cop played by Holden, is fairly well etched and credible. I found it more difficult to understand Lee Remick's part. Beautiful woman that she was, a university lecturer to boot, why would she bother with a bottom of the barrel cop struggling with ghosts from the past like his failed marriage and his dead son? And when he seems to have made a place for her and a kid in his life, he kicks it all out and goes back to his lonely street cop job even though he is on his last day and about to hang up holster, gun and badge. Baffling, to say the least.

I give this a very generous 7/10 because of Holden. The rest is completely forgettable.

William Holden makes a very credible character out of the aging policeman who after twenty years decides to retire, although he knows nothing else. Yes, he has a girl, Lee Remick, but the job gets between him and her. It's an interesting almost documentary study of regular policeman's work on the off beat streets of Los Angeles with hookers and drug dealers and bookies and what not, and he finds it his mission to keep the crap at bay. It is a rather bleak story and typically melancholy for a William Holden film, and he makes it one of his best films, although there are so many of them. It is in a way a study of life in the gutter, and someone appropriately tells him that he is married to the gutter. He wants to leave it and get away from it, but the film and the story never tells if and in that case how he really succeeds. It is actually two films that can be watched separately, but watching them in one stretch is fully rewarding. The music by Nelson Riddle is excellent and adds to the fascinating genuineness of the whole. It is not an edifying film, no entertainment, no great action, but the more interesting for actually being profoundly human providing an indispensable insight into the truth of a naked city.

I also saw this NBC mini series in its original uncut network run in the fall of 1973 and then saw it repeated in 1975, but that's it. Yes, it needs to be released on DVD or VHS in its original state because this is classic landmark adult TV. This was the re-birth of William Holden's career and he was beyond memorable as Bumper Morgan. The characters ran better here than in print and that was hard to top because Wambaugh wrote a great first person character analysis with his novel of the final works days of a dinosaured LAPD street cop. Overlooked was the supporting mastery of Joe Santos, Vic Tayback and Sam Elliot. Along with KOJAK, this was TV's best of 1973.