The Gun

A young Japanese woman who's husband was killed in the Vietnam war and who has a five-year-old daughter who's staying with her mother was raped and found dead. This upsets the usually stoic Friday to even more intense feelings. When a photo is shown of this woman more than once, one can see why. I'll just now say this was one of the more dramatically compelling eps of the show that definitely gave me the feels by the time it ended. Perhaps one of the best eps of "Dragnet" ever! Among the guest cast is one Kathleen Freeman who's done quite a few of these eps. She also did some Jerry Lewis films as well as appeared with Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers and his comedic version of Dragnet from 1987. So that's a high recommendation of "The Gun".

Overall, this episode is very good but I have one reservation. Like CC's review, I thought that the hyper-religious woman was like a walking stereotype--a negative but hardly believable person. If, as the show says, that this is based on a real case, I have a hard time imagining a person THAT awful hiding behind God. Sure, it can happen in real life, but it also seemed more like a caricature than a real person.

Aside from this one complaint, this is one of the better episodes. What made it more enjoyable to watch was seeing how the usually imperturbable Joe Friday was on edge--being eaten apart by seeing one too many good people killed needlessly. In this case, a very nice young widow with a beautiful young daughter. This mother was raped and shot through the head by some scum-bag and Joe was having a much tougher time than usual separating himself from his work.

Another nice aspect of the film was the very touching scene at the end. It is a tad schmaltzy, but good schmaltz!

Stoic "Joe Friday" (Jack Webb) gets out-of-character and gets emotionally involved with this crime. Why, it's never stated but he's very edgy and frustrated as he and his fellow Los Angeles policemen can't seem to get some clues to help catch a murder. Somebody shot a pretty 26-year-old Japanese woman named "Reisho Hashimoto." Her husband had been killed in Vietnam and she had a five-year-old daughter who was staying at her grandma's at the time of the shooting.

When they finally catch the killer and the grandma asks why, Webb responds, "I don't know, ma'am. Some people just like to kill."

Along the way we meet a bunch of neighbors interviewed and, sorry to say, one of them is pictured as a "religious" person always reading the Bible. Naturally, she's depicted as a total nut case. If you've watched as many films as I have, this is no shock. This kind of stuff began showing up on TV in the mid '60s.

Another of the neighbors was played by a well-known actress: Kathleen Freeman.