Nearly everyone who grew up watching Highway Patrol remembers its opening stentorian narration, "Whenever the laws of any state are broken a duly authorized law enforcement agency swings into action...". Fifty years ago this show was everywhere on the small screen, and it remained a favorite in syndication for many years to come.
It's easy to see why. Academy Award winner Broderick Crawford brings his charisma along as chief Dan Mathews, and he appears in every episode. However the semi-doc style of the series emphasizes the story, not the star, thus the focus is seldom on Crawford himself. As Crawford was overweight, drinking heavily at the time, and, to the perceptive viewer, an east coast big city fish out of water in the then still heavily rural California of the 1950s, this is just as well. On the plus side, Crawford was, for reasons I still can't fathom, a riveting performer even when he was doing very little. With a lesser player, this still would have been an excellent show, but it's Crawford's brusque, ineffable authority that puts it over.
The episodes themselves are, from what I've seen of them lately, uniformly good, and some are better than that. Wisely, the producers chose to shake things up a good deal, thus some shows focus on cold-blooded criminals, others on lost children, some deal with cops in trouble, and there are those that feature amateur or accidental criminals, decent people who have, for various reasons, got in over their heads. Producer Fred Ziv filmed this one on the cheap, as was his custom, and he made a fortune from it. The series channels the style of the semi-documentary films Louis de Rochemont made in the late 40s,--House On 92nd Street, Boomerang!, Street With No Name--while the late Art Gilmore's opening and closing narration at times gives the show the feel of old-time radio. Crawford's closing remarks, as himself, not Dan Mathews, are priceless, the most famous one being "leave your blood at the Red Cross, not on the highway".
It's easy to see why. Academy Award winner Broderick Crawford brings his charisma along as chief Dan Mathews, and he appears in every episode. However the semi-doc style of the series emphasizes the story, not the star, thus the focus is seldom on Crawford himself. As Crawford was overweight, drinking heavily at the time, and, to the perceptive viewer, an east coast big city fish out of water in the then still heavily rural California of the 1950s, this is just as well. On the plus side, Crawford was, for reasons I still can't fathom, a riveting performer even when he was doing very little. With a lesser player, this still would have been an excellent show, but it's Crawford's brusque, ineffable authority that puts it over.
The episodes themselves are, from what I've seen of them lately, uniformly good, and some are better than that. Wisely, the producers chose to shake things up a good deal, thus some shows focus on cold-blooded criminals, others on lost children, some deal with cops in trouble, and there are those that feature amateur or accidental criminals, decent people who have, for various reasons, got in over their heads. Producer Fred Ziv filmed this one on the cheap, as was his custom, and he made a fortune from it. The series channels the style of the semi-documentary films Louis de Rochemont made in the late 40s,--House On 92nd Street, Boomerang!, Street With No Name--while the late Art Gilmore's opening and closing narration at times gives the show the feel of old-time radio. Crawford's closing remarks, as himself, not Dan Mathews, are priceless, the most famous one being "leave your blood at the Red Cross, not on the highway".