Season 1 episode re-watchings ...

All Wives' Tale

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…

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.


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.


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.


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.

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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.


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.


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.


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.

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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?

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The Beautiful Die Young/Seven Eleven/It's Only a Game/Anatomy of Two Rapes

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Fish

I know what a love like yours can do to a person...

The most controversial episode of the entire series (and recipient of an excessive level of criticism by the "gay-libbers" of the era, freshly enraged by a MARCUS WELBY, M.D. installment airing ony weeks earlier which compared homosexuality to child molestation) the moody, Poe-via-Baudelairian "Flowers of Evil" begins with a trio of unladylike ladies driving a dithery geriatric woman to a motel in the rain -- and, once there, one of them kills her.

The next morning, the motel manager seems overly emotional over the death of this woman he didn't know, in keeping with TV's endearing pretensions of the early-1970s.

Turns out that the old folks' home being run by these three women has seen an unusual number of residents dying off inordinately quickly after moving in, even in consideration of their ages.

Pepper goes under as a nurse, on-the-run and in need of hiding and a job. Cooing at her lesbian coworkers -- almost off-the-charts subject matter for TV in 1974 -- Pepper determines that the butch women are the evil ones, and the femme one is not and therefore salvagable. (The scam is that they're stealing the patients' checks and murdering them).

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The most recent dead woman's false teeth having been located somewhere on the premises, the three ladies are busted. The two butch ones spew filth during their respective interrogations, and the femme one is sorry for all the killings and comfesses completely -- but not before lovely Pepper can convince her that she herself once had a college roommate who'd had the hots for her, and that "I know what a love like yours can do to a person."

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Outside in the hall, a nervous Crowley, unsure of just exactly how far that collegiate relationship may have gone, kisses Pepper on the forehead and offers to drive her home, perhaps intent on validating her womanhood. Fatigued and aware of his agendum, she declines, strolling down the hallway to a longshot freeze frame.

Daring material at the time, handled bravely yet unprogressively.

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The Stalking of Joey Marr/Requiem for Bored Wives/Smack/Cradle Robbers/Shoefly

Target Black/Sidewinder

There are two things I want: a good job -- and to be left alone...

After the skeleton of a blown-up luxury car is pulled from a lake, one owned by local district attorney Edward Littel, Crowley meets with the decedent's widow (played by the executive producer's wife, though it seems a great role for Bette Davis, but oh well..) and her father, Jonas Van Dyke, powerful patriarch of a corrupt California political dynasty. But Crowley neglects to mention that the forensics department found in the vehicle a sole finger print from an African American go-go dancer, the improbably-named Paris Palmer, employed at a local dive.

(The script is by Chester Krumholz, who always seems adept at high-society crime plots).

Pepper goes under as a Reno casino showgirl, revealing her supposed affiliation with the missing Paris, and promptly earns a place on the dance floor by charming the club's owner, Robert Vaughn, and bumping-and-grinding to his satisfaction -- somewhat startling material for TV in January of 1975, the leading lady shakin' it up in a white fringe bikini.

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Vaughn invites her, as a sideline, to participate in "private parties" (in which businessmen and politicians are photographed in flagrante delicto and presumably blackmailed). Pepper declines the offer and enquires as to whether her old pal was engaging in that kind of activity, too. But this doesn't prevent Pep from being wined and dined on the town by her dapper new employer, off-camera.

At this point early in the series, you're never quite sure with whom Pepper is or isn't sleeping. And neither is Crowley.

While Pepper is careful not to sound overly curious about the dead dancer's whereabouts, one of her co-workers is not so cautious, desperately pulling a knife on Vaughn and his business partner, the girl disappearing herself the same evening and found under a bridge the next morning by the police.

Crowley then pays a visit to the Van Dykes' mansion, dropping the hint to the widow that her late husband had been using Paris in some kind of investigation while simultaneously having an affair with her, and that Crowley presently has "an agent" in the club where Paris Palmer worked "and she does all the digging for me."

Inspired by paranoia, the brittle widow drives to meet Vaughn whom she'd blackmailed into having her husband and the girl killed; enraged that they may have blown the job, she shoots Vaughn and drives off in her rented car... Back at the club, the mortally wounded owner returns to find a gorgeous Pepper awaiting him, and she gets him to confess all on audiotape.

Vaughn now having expired, Crowley informs Pepper that "all we have is a voice on tape," the duo unsure that Mrs. Littel will indeed take the fall she deserves... And then they freeze frame on the sidewalk, illuminated by a flickering sunset thru the leaves, Pepper having said something philosophical about the weather.

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No Place to Run

"Oooh, Crowley's not going to like that..."


"The Company" is, technically, just another mobster's infiltration of another mobster's territory type of plot. Yet it contains all the elements which made Season 1 of POLICE WOMAN so distinctive: shot in shimmery, sun-drenched style, the Los Angeles scene is made to feel glittery and glamorous, if not entirely safe.

And all set to an effective score tracked mostly from Richard Shores.

Arguably, it's the series' best Pepper-does-the-town installment...

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Following the gangland killing of a mafia thug during which an imprisoned don's name is uttered, Pepper (along with informant, Linda Summers AKA "The Black Widow") makes an undercover trip to a clandestine, high-class gambling casino and witnesses first-hand the game "taken" by the henchman from this new circle of crooks.

After the man who ran the illegal casino (comic Shelley Berman!) is blown up in his car in front of Pepper and Crowley, the unit tries to flush out the gang responsible by setting themselves up for "protectionism".

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(Regrettably, the S1 DVD print of "The Company" has deleted a wordless long-shot of Pepper and Crowley's car, a panoramic view of the L.A. skyline at sunset in the background, as they're driving to meet their snitch, Linda, on a parking deck, the camera then passing over her as Pep & Bill drive up the ramp... The moment was removed in syndication for purposes time, and as a scene with no dialogue and lasted maybe 15 or 20 seconds, it was a logical choice for cutting... Yet this is such a cinematic perspective shot, it's a disappointment when the scene fails to be reinstated on the DVD -- although all the other previously-cut moments are intact.)

After an intriguingly understated jailhouse conversation with Pepper and Bill,
the imprisoned kingpin, Vito Angelo, who's been falsely blamed for this series of gangland takeovers, sends his assistant out on the streets to learn for the cops that a local, corrupt mafia lawyer has brainstormed the scam, using the kingpin's name for purposes of leverage.

Given the era's true life Church (and other) Committees' public investigations into CIA/mafia conspiracies and assassination schemes, one wonders (given the title) was this script originally meatier than what we wound up with, just a "safe" local mob plot??

Who knows... But it certainly feels bigger than that somehow.

In any event, warned that the police were about to bust him, the crooked lawyer moves to dispose of his incriminating records--- but not before the CCU can stop him. Tossing his box of important paperwork into the wind, the gusts from the nearby docks scatter the records in a thousand different directions, leaving Pepper and Bill to scramble to recover them, resulting in one of the best episode-ending freeze-frames for a TV series.... ever!

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There's plenty left to lose: it's the series best episode!

"Nothing Left to Lose" displays a kind of character and narrative maturity POLICE WOMAN had approached by the end of Season 1, and would quickly lose with the unfortunate changes in the show the following season... At this point, it's clear that the producers are still intent on doing something "good" with POLICE WOMAN, and it remains easy to remember that this is a spin-off of the then-groundbreaking (if deathly repetitive) POLICE STORY anthology.

Following a painful-looking massage courtesy of LaRue Collins (Patty Duke-Still-Astin) where various crimes are presumably being discussed, the episode opens to the old Kris Kristofferson song echoing from down a corridor, as undercover-hooker Pepper is prowling the local bus station trolling for johns for no stated reason--- but it's Pepper, so you assume it's her lunch hour.

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Pep tries to wave her away, but the two wind up at the soda counter as LaRue anxiously passes some criminal gossip to a halo-encircled Angie Dickinson never photographed more beautifully. Pepper surprises LaRue by remembering that LaRue has a little boy, and LaRue communicates her vulnerability by nervously mis-associating Joe Namath with baseball terminology. As a result of this meeting, a fur heist is stopped by the squad, and the call goes out that LaRue Collins is the culprit.

While exiting a local Pan Parlor, an ominous limo sweeps by, taking several shots at Collins, establishing the premise for the episode. LaRue's friend, Alma, about which a lesbian relationship is suggested, immediately becomes alarmed.

Desperate and realizing she's been fingered (by the mob, not Alma... at least, not on camera) LaRue goes to the police department to get her payoff from Pepper, who's out on a dental appointment. Proving how doomed she really is, Crowley is there to escort her into his office; having no knowledge of Pepper's alliance to this snitch (Pepper always called her 'Apple Annie'), Crowley calls LaRue a liar and sends her packing. She asserts, "You just killed a girl". And indeed he has.

Trying to obtain bus fare any way she can so the episode can neatly end in the same location in which it started, LaRue goes to visit aging madam, Mrs. Fontaine, who owes her a finder's fee. In an apartment decorated as if it was intended for Alexis Carrington, Patricia Barry gives perhaps the Best Brittle Bitter Bitch performance I think I've ever seen such that Joan Crawford would run screaming for cover. She's totally convincing. LaRue is sent away.

Pepper, her teeth all shiny, returns to the precinct in time to have Crowley deny responsibility as per usual. Pepper intuits without even leaving the office that LaRue is being hunted by killers because an obscure shooting on the edge of town (this is only Los Angeles, after all) and Collins' improbable appearance at the station both occur only 15 minutes apart. Crowley reluctantly agrees to participate.

The cops pick up Alma who then searches thru mug-books, and tries to identify the random names of the show's crew they toss at her until she recognizes Donald Hoss, LaRue's old boyfriend who was paralyzed when shot during a bust in which LaRue was the informant.

This provides nice irony as LaRue approaches Donny (Duke's then-real life hubby, Gomez Addams) in his room for cash. He isn't sympathetic openly, wishing her dead to her face. But, as maybe the most tragic person in the entire episode, he has enough character to later mislead the brutes who come looking for her, getting a face full of brass knuckle for his trouble.

Poor Donny. Can't win for losin'... sorta like the title song says.

Meanwhile, LaRue calls her country-fried mother who's been raising LaRue's young son back in Arkansas virtually since the day he was born. LaRue asks for money to come home on, but it seems she's pulled this trick before and never appeared; Mama hangs up, but you can't really blame her.

The activity is made all the more effective from the use of Richard Shores' foreboding score and Gerald Finneman's moody camera-work.

From a phone booth, LaRue calls Pepper at the police station in a tense and effective exchange; Pepper, assuring her she has the money, gets LaRue's location and heads out to find her.

Nervous upon catching every limousine in her peripheral vision, LaRue doesn't do the sensible thing and hide in the culvert underpass until Pepper arrives; she runs thru it and up onto the other side of the intersection to catch a bus to go see Mrs. Fontaine once again.

This time, LaRue has a big rock and threatens to "bash your skull" unless she's paid. Mrs. Fontaine agrees to the terms but not until LaRue calls her self "lower than the dirt that rock sat in!!" Collins takes her new wad and runs, but you know what Mrs. Fontaine is going to do next.

LaRue gets to the bus station, buys a one-way ticket home to Arkansas -- a little toy truck for her son, and dashes for the nearest Greyhound, only to encounter a gun-toting thug at the doorway and another to her rear, the hoods presumably tipped-off by Mrs. Fontaine. Both fire and take-off, leaving Patty Duke to collapse in a nice, music-free slow-mo, before hitting the tile at the proper speed.

Pepper shows up at the terminal just in time to delay the EMT's from carting her off to prompt medical treatment so Angie can get in her requisite, "You're gonna be okay, you know that", which, of course, is the Kiss of Death. Crowley appears seconds later without explanation other than he hates to be left out of anything, let alone a freeze-frame. And freezes it does as LaRue dies.


The series had ripened so nicely by the end of Season One... and this should have been where POLICE WOMAN remained, this level of focus and quality.

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