Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
08.00 McMillan And Wife
10.00 Police Squad
McMillan And Wife. Episode 10. "Blues for Sally M"
After two particularly strong episode in a row, the series takes a downward turn with a very weird and predictable yarn.
When the tale begins we discover that Sally has had a musical piece named after her by a famous composer/pianist. Sally is mystified by this, because she has never met the man. As far as she can recall...
That, by itself, would be kooky way of getting the McMillan's involved in a case-of-the-week but the writers (Alfred Brenner and Oliver Hailey) take it a step further by telling us that Sally reads once a week to the pianist's sworn enemy: a near-blind newspaper critic who hates everything that the musician creates.
Huh?!
I mean, seriously, this is one strange tale. And it gets odder when Sally visits the mysterious critic - to read to him - and he is filmed from a distance, always wearing a wig and false beard.
Between all this oddness, there's the usual mixture of banter, chases and comedy. Sally and Mac have some amusing romantic scenes, Mac's cop sidekick gets a couple of funny scenes and there's a bit of action here and there.
But, as episodes of this series to, this is a weaker than normal outing and ending is easy to predict from about twenty minutes in, which makes the remainder of the movie a bit of a time waster. Shame.
Police Squad. Episode 1. "A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise)" Bank
The humour in Police Squad works on two levels. Certain gags are funny to anyone, and certain gags are aimed at those of us who have watched a lot of 70s cop shows.
1. When a character called Ralph Twice is shot during a bank robbery it leads to a wonderful dialogue scene having much confusion about "Who shot twice?" and so on. A scene that pretty much anyone paying attention will find hilarious. It's wonderfully written and superbly performed by Leslie Nielsen, Alan North and Kathryn Leigh Scott.
2. When our hero takes to the streets and gets vital case information from a shoeshine boy named Johnny (William Duell) it's a scene that will be found funny by anyone who's familiar with characters like Huggy Bear and the tropes and idioms of television detective fiction.
And some of the gags are timeless, so much so that they are more relevant today. In this episode when Drebin stops off at the lab there's a scene that's as much a parody of every modern CSI episode as it is of anything else. Olsen (Ed Williams) shoots bullets into video tapes and details the results as if the mean something significant. That's how the CSI shows work. The audience is in the dark, and the characters tell us what is significant to them and we believe it. Willing suspension of disbelief. The genius of Police Squad is that it holds a mirror up to that.
As opening episodes go, this is a strong one. The gags are relentless and Leslie Nielsen instantly establishes himself as having star power and an ability to rise above the sea of jokes. Witness his "I did live with a guy once" soliloquy to see his talent at work.
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McMillan And Wife, Police Squad
