User Reviews

DRAGNET "The Big Show" 1953

This is the 25th episode of the 283 episode run of the original Police Detective series, DRAGNET. This series ran from 1951 to 59.

Sgt Joe Friday (Jack Webb) and Detective Frank Smith (Ben Alexander) are working the day watch out of Juvenile Division. They get a call to the bus station about an abandoned baby. The Detectives find a woman, Virginia Gregg, at the station with a 7 week old baby. She tells the cops that a young woman off the same bus she had been on, asked her to look after the child for a minute. That had been several hours earlier.

The child is taken into care and Gregg is asked for details about the woman who left the child. After interviewing several others, including the bus driver who had been driving the bus Gregg was on, they realize that there is no other woman. The child had been travelling with Gregg.

It is off to the Police Station for some more questions. Gregg soon admits the child is hers. She then tells the Detectives that she could not take care of the child because her husband was returning from Army duty overseas. The problem here is that he has been gone two years. The child would get in the way when the husband returned in several days. She had decided that the child would get a home as an abandoned baby, and she would get her husband.

The story might sound silly to today's viewers, but at the time it was semi scandalous. Anyways, all is settled for the best for all involved. Miss Gregg is quite good here and runs up and down a whole range of emotions. It is a better episode that I make it sound.

Like most of the early episodes, the story is taken from one of the DRAGNET radio programs.

Review - The Big Show Aired 1-22-53 Season 2 Episode 11 This episode showcases a married woman bearing a child through a wanton relationship while her military husband is overseas, leaving the child to the police, making up a story of someone abandoning the infant with her. Friday, Smith investigate her story after details prove she is not telling them all the facts, or least not truthfully.

Contradictory information supplied by the hospital on the mother's age, hair color, height coupled with the bus driver telling a completely different sequence of events regarding the lady coming from Tucson, baby in her arms, the only baby on the bus, and sitting next to a woman not matching the description of the purported mother.

A tearful confession in a hotel room to an already suspicious Friday, Smith was well acted by the consummate and versatile Virginia Gregg playing the middle-aged real mother. Back in the early fifties or today, the story is believable for the police to be involved, but I am not happy to see this actress.

Dragnet's stories cover all sorts of plots, the rating for acting is above average, but the overall episode is acceptable, in fact mediocre, mundane, like some police work can be. All the angles have to be checked, and suspects, there is only one, have to be authenticated; it is just a relief the majority of the episodes do not deal with an ending hard to accept. Virginia was almost thirty-seven when she made this; it worked, but there is something lingering saying wished it did not work.