About a week ago I was in the Hastings store up in Butte and they had a sale on DVD box sets. I got the impression it was a clearance sale to get rid of stuff that had been sitting on the shelf for awhile, but I stumbled across something that turned out to be a real gem. It was the complete series of an old TV cop show called M Squad. I've been watching episodes and they're kind of fun, largely because they seem to be constructed to serve as the antithesis of another favorite old cop show of mine, Dragnet. A big part of the latter's appeal to me is that Jack Webb (producer/director/star) seemed to view his show as a formalist exercise in dramatic minimalism. I've often thought that the highly structured patterns that mark virtually every episode, as well as the heavily stylized acting on display, make it comparable to the choreographed spectacle of a bullfight (but that's grist for a future post). M Squad is it's opposite on nearly every count: where Webb was stoic in manner and wooden in movement, Lee Marvin (who stars in M Squad as Lt. Frank Ballinger) is laconic and volatile, with a kind of gangly grace when he goes into action. Webb would stand stock still during a scene, whether he was interviewing a witness, leaning on a bad guy, or interacting with colleagues. Marvin is constantly doing little bits of business that have nothing to do with the plot or scene. Here's an example: while interviewing a witness on the street following a fatal car crash, Marvin spots a penny scale on the sidewalk and, without breaking the conversation, steps on, deposits a penny, and gets a fortune. As he continues his interrogation, he casually shows the fortune to the witness, who giggles momentarily along with Marvin, then goes on describing the crash. That's it-- no explanation, no relevance to anything at all, just a really cool actorly moment, that actually rings true. There are a couple similarities to the shows too, just enough to suggest that the whole point might've been something akin to parody. Marvin provides an ongoing voice-over narration, a la Webb, referring to the steps being followed to solve the crime. Also, the city of Chicago plays as big a role in M Squad as Los Angeles does in Dragnet. But while Webb is almost fanatical in boosting the local law enforcement in his town, M Squad seems to relish the quasi-corrupt reputation of Windy City cops, and Marvin isn't above tangling with his colleagues-- something that Webb likely viewed with horror. Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching the rest of these M Squad discs-- I've only watched four episodes out of 117 so far. I'm hoping it will only get better.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Cool Show
About a week ago I was in the Hastings store up in Butte and they had a sale on DVD box sets. I got the impression it was a clearance sale to get rid of stuff that had been sitting on the shelf for awhile, but I stumbled across something that turned out to be a real gem. It was the complete series of an old TV cop show called M Squad. I've been watching episodes and they're kind of fun, largely because they seem to be constructed to serve as the antithesis of another favorite old cop show of mine, Dragnet. A big part of the latter's appeal to me is that Jack Webb (producer/director/star) seemed to view his show as a formalist exercise in dramatic minimalism. I've often thought that the highly structured patterns that mark virtually every episode, as well as the heavily stylized acting on display, make it comparable to the choreographed spectacle of a bullfight (but that's grist for a future post). M Squad is it's opposite on nearly every count: where Webb was stoic in manner and wooden in movement, Lee Marvin (who stars in M Squad as Lt. Frank Ballinger) is laconic and volatile, with a kind of gangly grace when he goes into action. Webb would stand stock still during a scene, whether he was interviewing a witness, leaning on a bad guy, or interacting with colleagues. Marvin is constantly doing little bits of business that have nothing to do with the plot or scene. Here's an example: while interviewing a witness on the street following a fatal car crash, Marvin spots a penny scale on the sidewalk and, without breaking the conversation, steps on, deposits a penny, and gets a fortune. As he continues his interrogation, he casually shows the fortune to the witness, who giggles momentarily along with Marvin, then goes on describing the crash. That's it-- no explanation, no relevance to anything at all, just a really cool actorly moment, that actually rings true. There are a couple similarities to the shows too, just enough to suggest that the whole point might've been something akin to parody. Marvin provides an ongoing voice-over narration, a la Webb, referring to the steps being followed to solve the crime. Also, the city of Chicago plays as big a role in M Squad as Los Angeles does in Dragnet. But while Webb is almost fanatical in boosting the local law enforcement in his town, M Squad seems to relish the quasi-corrupt reputation of Windy City cops, and Marvin isn't above tangling with his colleagues-- something that Webb likely viewed with horror. Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching the rest of these M Squad discs-- I've only watched four episodes out of 117 so far. I'm hoping it will only get better.
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