Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 82386" data-attributes="member: 57984"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/angie_cranberry_zpse07299f1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 551px" />'Warning: All Wives' The first episode actually shot for the new POLICE WOMAN series is “Warning: All Wives,” written by story editor Ed De Blasio. The installment opens up on an exterior shot of the anonymous “Memorial Medical Center” building with composer Pete Rugolo’s jazzy take on Morton Stevens’ theme tune for the show. We see Elinor Donahue (of FATHER KNOWS BEST ‘50s iconography) smooching with her husband just before she leaves; he’s having an operation, and they promise one another sex upon his release.Turns out Donahue is the first wife who needs to be warned. Later, while hanging a banner in her living room in anticipation of her husband’s return home, an off-camera voice begins screaming at her to take off her blouse and to dance in her bra. She reluctantly complies, a brassiere still a shocking thing to see on TV in 1974 –- especially when it’s Elinor Donahue. For someone so terrified and clearly staring into the Face of Eternity, her pre-mortem rug-cutting displays an unexpected chutzpah: she’s about to be slashed to death, sure, but that’s no reason to boogie without sincerity.Vinnie’s, the bar the entire LAPD seems to frequent, makes its first appearance in this episode, with Earl Holliman's Sergeant Crowley less soft or polished than Bert Convy. Anticipating chemistry from a distance, Angie helped handpick Holliman as Convy’s successor --- and while that word, “chemistry,” tends to be obnoxiously over-used when describing two actors cast together, sometimes it does indeed apply, and Miss Dickinson and Mr. Holliman seem to have it; it’s an intelligence and an innate yin-yang awareness of each other which helps the scenes gel in a way they otherwise might not: Holliman’s Clint Eastwood face and natural authority, and Dickinson’s instinct for coquettishly prowling and navigating around his and everyone else’s expectations will become the dynamic which defines this show immediately --- at least during the first season…<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 762px" />The growling boss both enamored and strangely contemptuous of his vulnerable, melancholy-but-upbeat feminine underling. It’s not Marshal Dillon and Miss Kitty; it’s Lou Grant and Mary Richards.Crowley informs the team in Vinnie’s that another woman has been found raped and slashed to death. “I wonder what kind of freak we’ve got this time,” Pepper queries as if Crowley hadn’t just told them what kind of freak they have this time.After talking with Donahue’s grieving, still-hospitalized widower, Crowley and Lieutenant Marsh (Val Bisoglio) hold court in Crowley’s office, Pepper making the very to-period TV observation that a single girl gets to the point she can tell a killer rapist on the other end whenever she picks up the phone. Pepper also learns in this meeting that she’s going to be the rape bait, as per viewer expectation.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 776px" />At this point in the series and for a few months, POLICE WOMAN will be photographed in film noir style, or as that style could be manifest when shot in color: deep shadows, sun-streak rooms with venetian blinds cascading across the walls, Angie gently lit and soft-lensed just exactly to the correct degree… It’s a look and an approach to filming that seemed to come back into vogue on the cusp of the ‘60s and ‘70s and is terribly effective for mood and focusing the drama, and yet Hollywood tended to repeatedly forget about it; it would be gone again by mid-decade when flat-lighting would return to series television.It works so well for POLICE WOMAN in particular, that the show should have hung onto it even as the rest of the industry was forgetting it again.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 755px" />Pepper shares a brief scene with her autistic daughter, Cheryl (Nicole Kallis, who was young enough to be attending school with Angie’s real life daughter, Nikki) and then finds her way to the hospital where her hubby, Crowley, has already checked himself in and sent himself flowers. He and Pepper makes small talk with two aging nurses (Martha Scott is one of them) who warn Pepper to be careful with a maniac on the loose.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 771px" />Pepper then posts a 3x5 ad on the hospital bulletin board to sell a dog and therefore establish herself as bait, while Joyce Bulifant bids adieu to her patient husband and then drives into oblivion, the killer’s next pawn.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 774px" />Pepper makes herself seen around the hospital, making love with her eyes to all staff and passersby, becoming nervous as she arrives home, paranoid she might have been followed. Illogically, she neglects to lock the apartment door behind her before calling Crowley from her home phone to find out if he’s placed anyone on her tail; even more illogically, he says, “no.” No matter. The suspicious car contains only young lovers who fondle each other on the sidewalk outside her window.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives6.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 769px" />Crowley requests audience with the hospital phone operator (Joan Darling) and asks her to listen in for odd conversations; when she refuses out of professional integrity, he charms her with their shared Italian background in a scene they’d only attempt (and ever expect to work) in the 1970s. And with all that talk of pasta and Rigoletto, she is helpless not to comply.It's a moment terribly clichéd and transparent to the modern eye, but it's done with such innocent appeal it evokes rather sweetly the small-screen flavor of that era, its attempt to embrace ethnic-ky stuff and get around plot complications simultaneously.Pepper shows up later to report on the “kinky” garage ticket taker, Fred Asher (Don Stroud), a too-obvious suspect who puts the moves on all the hot babes. Like Pepper.When Bulifant’s body is found in a local park and Pepper’s puppy ad disappears, Pete and Joe show up at Pep’s apartment to tell her, once her joke about Steve McQueen taking a shower upstairs is over, that they’re staying the night. So why, then, leave her completely alone when she flirts with leering Stroud and rides with him all the way to her apartment the next afternoon? Anyway, she invites him in, dances alluringly with him, excuses herself to comb her hair, tells him (looking more like a smitten puppy himself than a psycho killer) to leave when he follows her into her bedroom as she clearly intended, and then, rookie that she is, pulls a police revolver and sticks it in his gut once he starts nibbling on her neck. “What the hell is that?!?” he squeals reasonably... Poor guy. He wont be scoring tonight, unless its with Bubba in the county municipal complex.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives7.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 776px" />Fred Asher has a solid alibi, so Pepper continues wandering the halls in her provocative getup until Martha Scott stops her to small-talk and to assure her that her grandson with “his ‘problem’ ... doesn’t get ‘that way’ ---- any more..." Edward de Blasio said the following year that he wouldn’t have written this script later because the series had “become more sophisticated.” Well, one would think so, as the revelation here comes all too giggle-inducingly easy. Almost like an Aaron Spelling device. But then, the hour is nearly up.The grandson’s shrink show up, explaining to the unit that Mama Was a Whore and that’s why the kid’s dun gone krazy.Now that we realize the grandson, Martin (William Katt), is the killer, he instinctively now knows to show up at the hospital midday to grab Pepper and pull her into an elevator at knife point, Angie setting her acting button on: ‘hyperventilation/fear’. And she’s pretty good at it.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives8.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 771px" />Benign pre-CARRIE towhead Katt seems the unlikely choice to play a babe-slicing nut job, but one guesses that’s the point: this cutie is no Richard Speck.In a mad search for Pepper, now missing, Pete Royster informs Crowley that a nurse saw Pep and whack-monster Martin on the elevator, “...and she thinks it was going up.” (Angie Dickinson and Earl Holliman have major fun with this line on the DVD commentary). In the boiler room, Martin tells Angie what a skank she is --- just like his dirty mama --- and turns on some music (which sounds suspiciously like the theme song) and demands that she dance, while Angie tries to look terrified, sympathetic and slutty all at the same time. And, again, she’s pretty good at it.Making their way up to the kind of sun-drenched rooftop that seemed so commonplace to the first couple of years of POLICE WOMAN, the golden-maned pair wait for Crowley and the squad, helicopters circling overhead. Crowley tries to make a deal with Martin who refuses the offers, so Pepper takes a dive onto the roof tar, Martin slices the strings of her flimsy top as she does, and Pete shoots William Katt off the roof of the high rise and he falls to his death, 200 feet below.<img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/Marky888/allwives9.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 773px" />Scrambling to keep her boobies off-screen (hard to believe this was titillating for TV ~40 years ago) Crowley places his jacket over her shoulders. Everybody gets a close-up as the sun goes down, and the episode ends on the master shot: Pepper braces herself against a wall in relief.Her first filmed assignment complete, this show looks like it has serious promise: the right casting, the right look, the right tone, a cozy Friday night timeslot right after THE ROCKFORD FILES…What could go wrong?--------</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?