'The Chasers' (but perhaps they should have called this one "The Perils of Pepper").
On her way to Scottsdale, Arizona for vacation, Pepper briefly calls Crowley from a pay phone to taunt him with again not telling him her destination for fear he’ll follow her.
Seconds later, Pepper "foils" a purse-snatching by getting knocked-down in a parking lot, falling into a fountain pool, and her obvious stunt double getting hit by a truck and collapsing on the pavement.
On vivid DVD, it’s more evident that the shoppers at Joseph Magnin’s are bemused at the brouhaha --- Angie Dickinson from TV wrestling a teenaged boy over a handbag.
I recall Angie discussing with Johnny Carson on THE TONIGHT SHOW the filming of this moment, when a passerby who thought it was a real crime chased the boy down and retrieved the purse, and they then had to explain they were shooting a movie. Angie being Angie, she swooned to Carson, “...and we just
luvvvvved him for it!”. But how embarrassing!
A gang of insurance swindlers, “ambulance chasers,” led by Ida Lupino and Ian McShane, when not trolling emergency rooms, spend their free time around their office belittling an aging, alcoholic lawyer (Edward Andrews) who helps them with the legal dirty work. They also agree that Roman Washington (Paul Benjamin) the guy who considers himself “the Leonardo” who sets up the fake car wrecks they rely on to pay the bills, be denied his request at full partnership in their little criminal agency.
They seem rather ugly people.
In the hospital with a rag on her head and having regained consciousness, Pepper overhears the ambulance chasers pressuring other patients on the ward to sign with their firm, then acts clueless when Hilda Morris (Lupino) sets her sights on her.
Out of the hospital, Pepper is awaken early one morning with the sound of something breaking downstairs, followed by the whirr of the vacuum cleaner. Descending her townhouse steps with her service revolver drawn, she finds Bill, making himself to home. Refusing to leave, Bill sets her down on her own couch and offers her a breakfast of sugar cookies and bad coffee, ostensibly to discuss what they’re going to do about the insurance scammers –- but he’s really just trying to find out where she’s going on vacation (if she ever gets to go at all).
Was there really enough cause to mount a major investigation at this point?
Regardless, this scene can be overheard in the background during a night scene in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Which is nice.
Pepper arrives at the L.A. mall office of Mr Markson (McShane) and charms him into instantly telling her all his secrets, she’s just so frikkin’ attractive. Much to Lupino’s warranted chagrin. And, just as fast, a security guard quite unconvincingly blows Pepper’s cover in the parking lot by insisting he hadn't seen her since he retired from the force--- all within earshot of repressed and bitchy Ida.
Exposed but seemingly unaware, Pepper still thinks she's undercover despite being told by the suicidal lawyer that they're onto her. And, in 1970s TV cop tradition, the revelation that she's got a badge doesn't guide the crooks to get out of town but instead to kill her with a drum of gasoline in the trunk of a car, despite the additional legal scrutiny this would invite. When she tells the driver, Washington, they're being set up for death, this being a ‘70s cop show, he simply pushes her out the car door onto the street and then angrily drives into oblivion, intent on completing is assignment.
After being scraped off a side street where she was dumped, Pepper joins Bill and the squad as they chase Washington onto the highway where, instead of causing the planned fender-bender, Washington (and the two bums in the backseat) find themselves exploding into smithereens after tricking a couple of dithery little old ladies in a station wagon into back-ending them.
Washington having threatened to take his telephone tapes to the authorities if not given a full partnership, Ida and Ian had hoped to kill two birds with one stone with this accident. But Pepper has escaped.
Pepper then goes to Washington’s apartment to inform his wife Myrna (Vivian Bonnell) of the disaster, that very same minute the new widow coincidentally en route to the police station to tell the cops all about her dead husband’s activities (and those of his homicidal friends). Once entering Mrs Washington’s home, Pepper promptly gets shoved into a closet and the room is set on fire by a stooge from the firm in search of Washington’s revealing tapes.
But fear not: Crowley being Crowley, he arrives just in time, shooting the arsonist, and breaking Pepper out of the closet in the back of the smoke-filled room. He then has time to bake a cake over the flames, he's just so able-bodied.
Mrs Washington then meets Lupino in the darkened mall, intent on exchanging her late husband’s stack of audio cassettes for 10,000 dollars cash. Never generous by nature, Lupino instead knocks Myrna over the head, grabs the tapes, and then starts shooting at any badge that moves; Pepper being Pepper, she has no gun.
It takes an unconscious person on the floor, Myrna Washington, to stop near-elderly Lupino by tripping her and causing her to fall. The brittle con queen is promptly arrested, but not before Mrs Washington gets a few licks in.
Pepper and Crowley show up at a fancy restaurant (this is the ‘70s, so "fancy" means no paper napkins) and arrest McShane who’s dining with a Senator, a close personal friend. Weaseling out of buying Pepper dinner, Crowley makes a joke about his wearing a bikini, and the show ends.
This is the first episode where I remember thinking that something was now wrong with the series.
Barry Shear is one of their better directors and it's still breezy enough, but the Pepper-As-Incessant-Victim pattern is now arising –-- yes, there are plenty of taut action sequences, but all of them serve to diminish Pepper in some way, deliberately or not: the initial purse-snatching scene doesn’t make her look all that accomplished, but any arising issues about her competence are accentuated by her later being shoved out of a car effortlessly when she proves unable to articulate just why the impending planned accident is “a set up,” immediately followed by her need to be helped off the sidewalk by Pete (who has to jump out of another car to do so) though she’s essentially uninjured; and then there’s her foolishly-easy imprisoning in that apartment closet, unable to fight off her assailant almost at all, as she’s dragged thirty feet from the front door and spends what seems like several minutes yelling, “Let me out –- let me out
of this place!!” sounding more like an indignant housewife than the professionally-trained police officer she supposedly is, with only Crowley, emerging from the patrol car several floors below, to save her from the flames after noticing smoke billowing from a window he correctly assumes from experience must be Pepper’s present location; and finally, that night fight at the shopping pavilion, during which Pepper never draws her weapon at any point, despite Ida Lupino spraying the architecture with hot lead –- even shooting directly at Pepper herself.
Any one of these might be tolerable in a single installment – but
all of them??
Is this the tough, raspy-voiced, steely lady cop –- coquettish but capable -- from the previous season?
As the undercover officer, it's reasonable that she might sometimes need to be extricated from some sticky sting operation once her identity is discovered. But guilelessly stumbling into one vat of acid after another and displaying no propensity whatsoever for self-defense just undermines the drama and insults the viewer as much as it does Angie.
Vulnerability is one thing; complete helplessness is another!
-----------
"Cold Wind"
Easily one of the better episodes of Season Two is “Cold Wind,” moodily directed by Alex Singer and one of those mature psychodrama entries which the show does well and should have defined this year more than it did.
This is also one of only three episodes (two on DVD) which uses the new funkadelicious version of the opening theme composed for Season 2 but which was quickly discarded, that regrettable decision a metaphor for other creative problems and conflicts in the show as S2 set sail. (Yes, the original Season 1 version of the theme was terrific, but its use subsequent to the first year has always felt anachronistic.)
“Cold Wind” begins at the Valiant Beverage company late at night when two employees are shot from cover by an unseen sniper. Quickly on the scene, Pepper and the squad begin asking around about the victims, who the suspects might be, the bitter strike dividing the workers.
An agitator named Ganz (John Quade, who looks like he must be related to Randy but apparently isn’t) who has issues with the two dead men is interrogated, but his alibi clears him in the killings.
One employee who neglected to show up for work the morning after the murders is Mort Barker (Kenneth Mars) a vulnerable, roly-poly mess of a fellow with a safety pin in his black horn rimmed glasses; he resists arrest and stammers through an excuse when Pepper and Crowley question him, until admitting he was out late the night of the killings, gambling –- an addiction he’d been treated for, and one he’s convinced his wife will leave him over if she finds out he’s again fallen off the wagon.
Barker’s story is not unbelievable, but he blubbers so much, Crowley feels compelled to hold him overnight -– guaranteeing his wife will indeed learn the truth.
As incongruities build up in his story, Barker ties his hands behind himself in his jail cell and hurls his hulking frame off the top bunk and onto his head. On-screen suicides seem big this year on POLICE WOMAN. (Why, then, the odd sanitized closing to “Paradise Mall”? Perhaps it was because that one was a respectable cop we kind of knew?) Although Barker survives the fall -- for a while.
The next suspect employee who also never showed for work the day following the shootings is Stuart Borchers (Daniel Benton, son of the show’s line producer who would appear in three additional episodes, though never as notably as in this one). Interrogated by Joe Styles, strange and wiry Stuart coolly claims his innocence, expresses a repulsion for killing, and even his polygraph testing is suspicious but inconclusive. Yet he chortles on about his favorite book, ’Le Vent Froid’ by Baudelaire.
Ralph L. Kelly is credited with writing “Cold Wind” but one has to assume that story editor Ed de Blasio is heavily influencing the script. This is not the first Baudelairian referencing the show has done, and there’s lots of pretentious Parisian chatter.
Pepper reads the book at home in the nude and convinces Crowley that although Stuart Borchers has no obvious motive, he is the boy to look into.
Seated next to Stuart in his art class the next day, Pepper (with one of those names she uses, “Tessa”) gently charms the kid, and they wander somewhere off campus to have lunch.
During their flirtatious chatting over uneaten sandwiches, Pepper reveals she has a brutal ex-boyfriend, Bill, who beats her and whom she’d sometimes like to kill. She then brings up this book she once read which describes a gun murder “almost sensually” but she can’t remember the title. Unsuspicious, Stuart offers up ‘Le Vent Froid’ and Pepper pretends to be impressed that he could actually read it in French.
It’s a good scene, the moment in the bistro, vaguely unsettling and scored with pensive psychiatric disturbance by Gerald Fried. The actors are good, too: this is the kind of scene Angie Dickinson excels at -– creating the illusion of casual intimacy while she plants seeds and extracts data, an instinctive
femme fatale (more French!!); Daniel Benton, too, is well cast, believably communicating that focused, demented sexuality so common to caucasian males under age 25. They don’t go into much detail, but you know he’s a perv... He recommends she buy a gun, but Tessa admits she can’t because she’s been busted for possession of marijuana (“Who hasn’t?” she shrugs philosophically) and because “you can’t scare Bill...”
Eventually meeting for dinner in “a nice dump” Pepper and Stuart’s latest meal is interrupted by boyfriend Bill who, presumably stalking her, shoves Stuart back into his chair, claims he makes Pepper “heave all the way to the bedroom” and, despite her protests, whisks her off as she apologizes helplessly to her young dinner companion.
Darkly enraged at his treatment, Stuart cuts art class the next day or so, but shows up afterward to take Tessa on a little ride, the guys from Pepper’s squad in their shadow. Arriving at the home of his kindly, professorial firearms supplier for whom he occasionally gardens, Stuart obtains a pistol for Tessa to protect herself “from rapes and stuff.” But before the transaction can be completed, Pepper’s cover is once again blown by her co-workers: Stuart glimpses Pete in the bushes rushing past the sliding glass door, finally recognizes what’s been going on –- and so Stuart starts shooting. Pepper dives over a desk, the Geppetto-like gun dealer dives behind a wing chair, Pete throws some lawn furniture through a window, Pepper takes cover in a nearby bathroom, Bill comes barrel-rolling over a hedge --- and Stuart fires away at all of it.
It’s a pretty decent pandemonium action sequence, ending in Stuart squealing like a pig in pain in the chrysanthemums he’d planted, having been shot in the leg by Crowley.
Joe Styles chides Geppetto for his “ridiculous” trading guns with kids. And in an ambulance, delusional Stuart asks Pepper not to let them show his body on TV if he dies –- but there’s no guarantee she can pull this request off since she seems unable to even prevent her own indiscreet hair pin from appearing on TV when it wasn’t supposed to be in the frame.
The case closed, back at the station Pepper and Crowley find Mort Barker’s angry wife in Bill’s office; they apologize pleasantly for Mort’s suicide attempt, but Mrs Barker is inconsolable: Mort began hemorrhaging again last night and died. She leaves in an accusatory huff, Crowley hardens, and Pepper returns to her desk in a cloud of ambivalence and diffused lighting.
-----------
Silence.
Glenna Burns, an angular blonde in the form of Joanna Pettet, gets off the plane at LAX and takes a cab to her brother in law, Julian Lord's (Robert Webber's) house. She's looking for her sister, Beth, missing six weeks.
In his study, there's the woman's portrait, looking suspiciously like a brunette version of Pettet --- they are sisters after all.
Mute from a childhood growth and resulting surgery, the sister can only communicate thru sign-language which just makes her creepier (No Offense, Anybody). Her brother-in-law's secretary, his lover, makes their relationship obvious by her unsuspecting, "Darling!", as she enters the study (this was written by DYNASTY's darling Ed DeBlasio, remember), and Beth's sister leaves in a huff.
While in the middle of another fur-heist investigation (a glamorous crime) Pepper gets drawn into the case of the missing sister as Pepper, mistress of all trades, can read signing. After jiggling down a corridor enthusiastically at the LAPD.
When the blonde sister, Glenna, winds up stabbed in the shoulder in her hotel room and found by a maid, she claims her brother-in-law is responsible. In interrogation by Pepper and Crowley, the brother-in-law irks the pair by calling the mute sister "pathetic" (which offends Pepper's sense of political correctness), and questions Crowley's authority and competence (which offends Crowley's ego, always a mistake). The brother-in-law denies responsibility for the stabbing.
Glenna leaves the hotel (a stabbing can really ruin your visit) to stay in Pepper's apartment. Despite having a couch that pulled out into a bed for Ruby Dee months earlier, it wont for Miss Pettet, even though it appears to be the same piece of furniture. But before they can escape the hotel lobby, a cute, tiny ginger boy with a dubbed voice and a collie stops both women to inform them how pretty they both are; structurally, the scene occurs so Pepper can wind up with Glenna's phone bill haphazardly, but the moment is so quease-inducing, it threatens to undermine the mood of the story (the scene was cut for time for ages in syndication, and I'd forgotten about it, so it's a shock to see it sandwiched between the interrogation of her brother-in-law and the next scene at Pep's apartment).
On Pepper's all-purpose, morphable terrace, Glenna reveals letters that sister Beth wrote her seeming to implicate the brother-in-law in something unwholesome. These lead the squad to find a decomposed, decapitated body buried in Northern California they think may be the sister, Beth.
During an inquest, Lord's secretary admits to the "most flagrant love affair" with her boss, lip trembling in excessive shame the entire time; Beth's ladies-who-lunch buddy volunteers private conversations in which Beth confessed wanting to save her marriage yet feared for her life; and the pompous D.A. verifies that Robert Webber sometimes has the opportunity to use lye ("lye", the D.A. repeats, expecting the homonymn/homophone's double-meaning to settle in) in his business, the substance used to speed up the body's decomposition.
Webber looks pretty guilty, until Pepper, at home with Pettet downstairs on the couch, gets a call from Crowley: the forensic lab has determined the body is that of an elderly woman much older than Beth. That, and the hotel phone bill revealing a call to Glenna's native Nova Scotia, prompts Pepper to dial the number... The fussy Nova Scotian housekeeper in brades is irritated by the late-night call. And when Pepper asks for Glenna, she's informed Glenna died six months ago but that her sister, Beth, is out in California.
Or vice versa. I get confused.
Pepper smells a rat, and goes downstairs to find the sister off the couch doing midnight dish duty. Pepper realizes that the sister is, indeed, Beth herself, and has dyed her hair and adorned contact-lenses and probably had surgery in order to pull the ruse...
Pettet/Beth remains silent to keep the mood going.
Pepper explains everything in a 3-minute monologue, including Beth's jealousy over Julian's secretary and the likelihood that Beth just killed an old woman in northern California who answered an ad for a maid, in order to provide a dead body.
Unable to coax her to put down the loaded gun she's had stuck in Pepper's face for several minutes, Pep jumps her, they fall behind the couch; the gun goes off, and Pepper gets up --- then promptly collapses in a louder thump than you'd expect skinny Angie to make.
The guys get there and receive an improbable call from the airport revealing that the sister's flight out will be delayed by a few minutes. Everyone recognizes this as the unlikely plot device it is and they rush for LAX, leaving wounded Pepper behind.
Why not have Pepper receive a call that Pettet's flight has been cancelled, or changed? That's unlikely enough, but why try and convince us that people actually get phonecalls at their homes from airlines telling them their flight is a few minutes late?? I mean, it only takes two seconds to think of a better reason to have the call come in.
At the airport, Bill, Pete and Joe spot Joanna Pettet and chase her down, knocking down travelers as they go -- but only black ones, so it must be okay. Upon catching her, Crowley pulls the fake scar from Pettet/Glenna/Beth's throat, thus permitting her to scream.
At the hospital, the gang makes jokes about Shelley Winters, and Sergeant Crowley flirts with a common-looking nurse. In mock-rage, Pepper throws a bouquet, manhandles an oversized bag of popcorn, draws a pistol from her holster, and practices with her drill team baton -- all within a matter of minutes, her right arm showing no limited range of motion whatsoever despite having a bullet removed from it only hours earlier.
But that's why she's Police Woman.
It's a pretty good installment, with a nice, slightly macabre, Poe-like flavor. It seems the producers were going for more of a film noir tone (although the cinematography looked a bit more noiresque in early S1) with a focus on mystery and atmosphere. That's a good idea and can focus a show, and it could have effectively replaced the toned-down sex angle from the previous year. But they didn't seem to quite keep it up, which is unfortunate; after all, "Silence" and "Cold Wind" were two of the better entries from Season 2.
airdate: 24 October 1975 (not December, as it was moved up)
-----------
'Blaze of Glory' (or is it
'Shooting a Star'?)
Originally scheduled for a Friday 24 Oct 1975 airing but delayed to 11 Nov 1975 because, as a strong episode, NBC decided to broadcast "Blaze of Glory" as only the second segment of POLICE WOMAN to air in its new, somewhat unfortunate Tuesday night timeslot against M*A*S*H.
While trolling the streets of L.A. as, what else?, a United States senator, Pepper is kidnapped from a bank during a hold-up by locally infamous crook, Vern Lightfoot (Don Stroud once again, reminding the modern viewer very much here of Stephen Dorff).
Pepper, under the guise of "Myrtle," immediately charms animally-magnetic Vern and his half-brother, Charlie Joe (Bill Lucking) with gushing praise ("...wait till my friends find out who picked me up!!" Pepper howls to their delight), but has less luck with Vern's sexy, hayseed girlfriend (Nellie Bellflower), jealous that this no-account hooker Vern seems so fond of has tagged along for a ride.
Much of the entertainment of the episode comes from Pepper's and Bellflower's rivalry and petty bickering, once the foursome switch from their getaway car to a van during a carwash, the van crashing thru a police barricade at one point, Pepper "accidentally" falling against Vern and preventing him from shooting a cop at the roadblock.
The action set mostly to a hillbilly music score composed by Billy Strange.
Meanwhile, Crowley and Pete leave an injured Joe at the scene of the original crime, in hot pursuit of hot-pantsed Pepper and her trio of outlaws.
Once he gets Bellflower and the brother he verbally abuses to run into a roadside shop to pick up some junk food, Vern closes the van curtains and puts the move on Pepper, her attempts to slither out of his clutches by re-opening the flesh wound he received during the hold-up successful --- until Vern goes rifling thru Pepper's purse and finds her handcuffs.
No gun accompanying them, I always wonder why Pep never claims the cuffs are for her kinkier customers, because Vern instantly realizes that "this fine hooker lady" is in fact an undercover cop "all dressed up to look like a human being", striking Pepper across the face. Hyperventilating with bravura as Angie always does once her true identity is discovered, she makes the mistake of telling Vern, when he accuses her of laughing at him behind his back, that she actually thought he was "kind of sad."
Now realizing that they've got a hostage the police may actually care about, the gang "buys" another vehicle off a pots-and-pans peddler, a station wagon, and heads deeper into the desert, Pepper talking them out of killing her beside the road with the assertion that the police helicopters will swoop in from their present height of 5000 feet and attack if Vern kills her.
Eventually, their car overheats amongst the yucca and, Pete and Bill right behind them, the two brothers and Pepper head away from the road on foot, leaving Vern's girlfriend -- in Pepper's hula hoop earrings -- with the defunct and steaming station wagon.
But as Crowley and Royster show up and start questioning the passive-aggressive Bellflower who has only jelly beans to offer them, a shot rings out nearby: Pepper has fallen, is being taunted by a rattle snake under a rock, and Vern and his brother get into a fight over who's a "dummy" and Vern's magical-thinking Dillingeresque fantasy of going out "like a shooting star." In response to the gunshot, Crowley quickly shows up, shoots the snake, is in turn shot by that snake Vern Lightfoot, and then Vern -- aiming for Pepper -- is blown away unexpectedly by his cuddlier half-brother Charlie Joe, Charlie Joe picking up Vern's not-entirely lifeless body and carrying him into the sunset, a country-and-western ballad composed for the episode warbling plaintively in the background in a most mid-'70s kind of way.
Aptly-named (because I think of this as the before-and-after episode of the series, the line in the literal sand for the "real" POLICE WOMAN" of Season 1 and early-S2, and what emerged once the show moved to Tuesday in the States, just two months into the second year), "Blaze of Glory" is perhaps the Season 2 entry most reminiscent of Season 1 in tone because, since Pepper is undercover as a call girl for the entire segment, they actually allow Angie to infuse all her dialogue with her usual, focusing charisma throughout.
It's just a very taut, likeably playful chapter.
And the show would never be quite the same again.
