 Jack Webb (right) appears as sqeaky-clean Los Angeles police Sgt. Joe Friday in the 1950s television drama ‘Dragnet.’ His partner, Bill Gannon, was portrayed by Harry Morgan. The series portrayed stony detectives who wanted ‘just the facts, ma’am’ and solved their cases before the last commercial. (NBC) I’m working on a long-term project about police shows, movies and novels, and so I’ve been rummaging around in Hollywood’s back catalog and watching a lot of “Dragnet” and “The Naked City” (as well as old Buster Keaton shorts and Keystone Cops stuff). And while there are a lot of threads I’ll be pulling on and writing about, the thing that’s hit me hardest about these early cop shows is this: the extent to which characters like Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) in “Dragnet” or Lt. Dan Muldoon (John McIntire) in “The Naked City” were members of their communities rather than at war with them. Take the pilot episode of “The Naked City,” in which Muldoon and his new partner, Detective Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) have to chase down a young Latino immigrant, Arturo Gutierrez (Pat DeSimone), who gets himself involved in a robbery, but turns against the other teenager who recruited him and helps the police to rescue the boy’s hostage. The show sympathizes with Arturo from the beginning: "Arturo Gutierrez is not a bad boy,” narrator and producer Bert Leonard insists. “He's a poor boy. A hungry boy. Perhaps even an impatient boy. But he's a divided boy, like this morning's breakfast. A quart of milk, divided seven ways." And after the robbery goes wrong and Arturo helps the police, Muldoon, who has been tasked with teaching Halloran how to do detective work, tells Arturo, "I like that, lad. We won't forget it when the time comes." He’s warm, and kind, and invested in the possibility that Arturo can do the right thing. There’s a similar idea that winds through the early seasons of “Dragnet.” In one episode, Friday and his partner Frank ( Ben Alexander) spend much of their time trying to help a woman who had a child with another man after her husband took a two-year deployment overseas, presumably to fight in the Korean War. There’s no crime at stake, but the cops help the woman through a mental crisis and encourage her husband to be forgiving and accept the child. In another, a stick-up man who Friday and Frank sent to jail after a shoot-out involving tear gas is paroled on the condition that he accept military service. Before he’s due to be shipped overseas, the man stops by the precinct to visit the cops and to ask them for a few bucks so he can celebrate with his new squadies before he’s shipped out. And, amazingly by today’s standards, they give him the money and celebrate that he seems to be turning around. That the robber turns out to be a bad egg in the end isn’t the point; it’s that Friday and Frank are so optimistic about the prospect of a criminal’s reformation. It’s a long journey from this to the much more adversarial relationships between citizens and cops that defines both our pop culture and, so often, our headlines, today. That’s a lot of what I’ll be exploring. But looking at where pop culture was is a shocking and immediate barometer for how far it’s traveled in the years since. |
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