L'assassin est-il coupable?

What can I say. Just bought the DVD for the all-star cast. Out-dated story of a LA police detective who shoots a Beverly Hills doctor who he claims pulled a gun on him, but no one can find the gun. The rest of the movie shows the detective trying to prove he is not guilty, and that the well-respected doctor was really a bad-guy after all.

Lots of well-known stars in the movie, but the standout is the Elenor Parker who looks very sexy and plays the part of a sexed-up, drunken widow to the tilt. Aside from that, and a few laughs regarding butter milk, this 1966 Who-Done-It is bested viewed on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the one which I'm having right now.

During a 1966 break from filming The Fugitive TV series, David Janssen joined with producer-director Seymour "Buzz" Kulik and screenwriter Mann Rubin to film Warning Shot. The film finds Janssen in familiar territory as a man wrongly accused and having literally no recourse but to defend himself, and his performance as LAPD Sgt. Tom Valens can be seen as another alter-ego of Richard Kimble. The presence of Fugitive alum such as Carroll O'Conner and Ed Begley Sr. adds to the familiarity for Fugitive fans.

Jerry Goldsmith composes a strikingly strong score for the film, from the mildly bombastic opening theme through its more mournful renditions throughout the movie.

Janssen's performance as Richard Kimble made The Fugitive a television clasic, and here he imbues Sgt. Tom Valens with identical sympathy. Valens, on a stakeout for a prowler, encounters a doctor, James Rustin, who pulls a gun on Valens and is shot. The gun flies out of Rustin's hand, and is lost.

Because the gun cannot be found, Valens is suspended, and faces even greater trouble because Dr. Rustin has earned a striking popularity with neighbors of his for his medical efforts, both in LA and in his frequent flights to Baja. When Valens digs into Rustin's past, he finds some discrepencies with the doctor's image, but it all blows up in Valens' face in the death of a model Rustin was having an affair with.

Nonetheless, despite persistent pleas from his friends to admit to guilt, Valens pushes his investigation of Dr. Rustin, and he hits paydirt when he finds a curious truth about one of Rustin's elderly neighbors (and her dog), and when someone tries to kill him and then Dr. Rustin's nurse is found dead, leading to a confrontation between Valens and his ex-partner.

Janssen shines in this film, but gets superb help from his supporting cast, including George Grizzard as a playboy pilot who is always missing out on the action - or so he says.

You can take Buzz Kulik's Warning Shot one of two ways. It's either a crackling good cop show, filled with procedure and great pacing, and David Janssen at his most heroically pathetic (and empathetic) as an LAPD detective facing a manslaughter charge or the movie is an over-clichéd snapshot of forced topicality in the Mirandized late '60's. It's really your call.

I'd like to think of Warning Shot as both, the way The Detective and Madigan mixed the vulnerable with the vulgar. After about the fourth time Janssen's character, Tom Valens, gets abused or beaten or gassed by the well-to-do slimeballs he's sworn to defend, you might start to notice how he'd probably be better off copping a plea for shooting a philanthropist doctor. Instead he swears grimly that he's going to defend his own honor to the bitter end (and repeatedly almost gets his way).

Warning Shot is packed with cameos, people who were legends when I was a kid, and now, forty years after its release, most of the performers are unrecognizable, which makes the story more accessible and less of an exercise in "Hey, look--it's . . . "

What makes the movie work is that David Janssen, looking ten years older than 35, is so very real as a man of good character with no excess intelligence, just grim determination.

A key figure in the story refers to Valens as "Sgt. Gumshoe" or something like that. It fits. Janssen's Valens is ordinary and vulnerable to the hyperventilating police-haters all around him. He can't do much more than reel and lurch from one disaster to the next, while awaiting his guaranteed-to-be-convicted trial. At one point, he gets the stuffing kicked out of him and doesn't even lay a finger on his attackers.

His ex-wife (played by the reptillian Joan Collins) tries to screw him while busting the very organs she's depending on for their quickie. The District Attorney (the equally scaley Sam Wannamaker) announces to Valens that he likes to crush solid and stolid cops whenever possible. By the end, Janssen has no one to turn to for even the most rudimentary support, not even a union rep (a very young and lovely Stephanie Powers, the dead doctor's nurse, can do no more than cluck over his sincerity and give him a ride home).

Nobody can help this poor shlub except himself.

Which brings me back to why Warning Shot is a mixture of reality and topical paranoia. Often, in crisis, people have to revert back to their core values to save themselves. Either they don't have anyone to help them or they don't trust anyone and decide to go it alone. Janssen's Tom Valens does just that.

Yet, at one point, he's told that his career is through no matter what happens. You can see the pain of this reality on Janssen's face as he surveys the damage he's done at the end of Warning Shot. He tosses his piece on the hood of a police car (no gun love here--it's just an ugly tool he wants out of his hand) and looks almost ready to cry from frustration and exhaustion. Like Frank Sinatra's Joe Leland and Richard Widmark's Dan Madigan, Tom Valens needs to get as far away from police work as possible.

Warning Shot is a good, old-fashioned movie. David Janssen is the star, and acts in his usual style, like a cross between Alan Ladd and Jack Webb. The film is a murder mystery about a cop who claims to have killed a man in self-defense, only he can't find the gun he said the man was aiming at him. Buzz Kulik was a gifted director, and he handles this one well. Some people don't like this movie because it resembles a television show, as it does suggest in its visual style and art direction an episode of Mannix. This is too bad. It doesn't bother me at all, and the film is a hundred times better than Mannix ever was. Janssen was always at his best when hunted or woebegone. There was a quality to him,--I wouldn't call it sensitivity exactly--vulnerability, "hit-ability"; whatever it is, it's on full display here, and he does get badly beaten up at one point. The supporting cast is outstanding, with Ed Begley, Eleanor Parker, Keenan Wynn, Stefanie Powers and George Grizzard all first-rate. There's less for Walter Pidgeon and Steve Allen to do, though it's always nice to see them in anything. George Sanders has a small part as well, though he doesn't get a chance to shine, he seldom did in his later years.

The movie was one of several attempts to revive the forties crime film, whether of the noir or detective variety, probably inspired by the burgeoning Bogart cult of the sixties. Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin appeared in a few like this, and Warning Shot is Janssen's crack at it. This is my favorite of the group. It's lean and fast-paced, a bit episodic, but in a good way. There's a lot of exposition, and a few false leads, but it's never tedious. I like the downbeat, depression in the orange groves, west coast Chandleresque aspect of the film, with palm and stucco everywhere, and cars that seem the size of today's SUV's only they're just Fords and Plymouths. Warning Shot's a period piece, but an entertaining one.

Despite making a few lousy films, such as DONDI and THE GREEN BERETS, I've always liked David Janssen. He was a pretty good actor and I like seeing movies featuring relatively unattractive people because they are much more like us, the average viewer, than the more glamorous stars.

WARNING SHOT is just one of the movies Janssen did that I really like. It's a seemingly ordinary story about a police shooting but it is so well-written and realistic that the film sucks you inside and keeps your attention. It has the look of a TV movie (with its production values) that is written for a thinking audience who doesn't just want to watch shoot outs and fights.