This couple of cops are mythic, Detective Lieutenant Mike Stone and his partner Inspector Steve Keller are not walking but rolling the streets of San Francisco chasing not petticoats or petty criminals but real hard core criminals who are ready to kill anyone, including their husbands or friends, though essentially weaker people, for a handful of dollars, for sums that today sound small but in those days sounded great like a few hundred thousand dollars or half a million dollars. It seems with these criminals the risk they take is more important than the profit they make. Yet they make that profit, or at least try to, they run their risks and they get caught by the "villainous" cops who are only there to get their heads, or at least their mugs, on their walls over their fireplaces, if they have a fireplace, because what's more these cops are poor and badly paid. Why on earth do they track boys and girls who make more money in one month than they do in a couple of decades? Because these cops are perverts and that is obvious from the very start. You have to be a pervert to arrest a criminal and find pleasure, pride and even fame in doing that. But these cops are bringing to the profession another dimension, a human and even humane dimension. They are moved into action by the suffering of the people, by the social dimension of their cases, by the emotional and even sentimental sides of their situations. There is always a lot of love lost somewhere that is found again, or a lot of love that could have been lost and is retained. There is also a lesson about Pearl Harbor and about all kinds of jingoism or sectarianism or segregation or racism, or whatever that makes life and humanity dirty looking and mean sounding. Those two cops seem to be trying to create harmony, to be scoring some music and tuning all the voices of the big social choir to the one single pitch that could please human ears and from time to time divine ears, but not too much nor too many. The 50 odd minute episodes are not too long but are short enough to be packed and dense and that is an advantage, a good asset. The structure in four acts and one epilog is also rather nice though of course the format is becoming a limitation little by little. Some more complex cases cannot be solved in four little acts and one short epilog and fifty minutes is rather short on TV. But that was the format on TV in these late 60s and early 70s when color TV became popular. My first color TV in 1969 with Bonanza, Mission Impossible, Love American Style and so many other programs. That sure was another time and television was not an isolating tool yet but rather a machine around which people gathered and enjoyed some time together every night. A tremendous leap forward toward a culture for all and a social reflection for everybody and with everybody. So these programs had to be popular and police drama had to be close to people, close with a city like San Francisco that has always had a reputation to be friendly and easy going, with simple people who are severely hurt and maimed by crime and with some other people who suffer tremendously because of the consequences of the actions of criminals. That reveals though another type of courage, the courage to suffer in order to bring about justice and simple people who are the victims of such crimes are often willing to help justice rather than to get a vengeance. And Bonanza was the same and Mission Impossible was the same and Clint Eastwood and his spaghetti westerns were the same. It is not so much the cops themselves that bring peace to the community but the victims of crime that do and when one becomes a stray cat of justice and wants to be a vigilante or a pistolero or a gunslinger, then the whole universe reacts and brings that lost sheep back into the corral. OK Corral of course and more than Dead or Alive we want the criminals alive for the court and the judge and the jury. This series is still quite viewable and decent, and even emotional and at times slightly poignant. Quite different from the police dramas of today that are even shorter and definitely a lot gorier.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID