“Exit Prentiss Carr”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

After four episodes that left me feeling enthusiastic, I’ve finally reached one that leaves me a little cold. “Exit Prentiss Carr” combines several elements of previous episodes: the female client who may be the murderer (“The Countess”), tennis as an upper class signifier (“The Kirkoff Case”, “The Countess”), a locked room mystery (“The Dark and Bloody Ground”), and an easily tricked lunkhead (“The Pilot”, “The Kirkoff Case”). But the episode doesn’t come together as well as its predecessors, mainly because Rockford spends so much time fending off red herrings that the actual villains seem like afterthoughts.

“Exit Prentiss Carr” opens with a tantalizing brain teaser. Rockford was hired to follow an old girlfriend’s husband, the titular Mr. Carr. He finds Carr in an unlocked hotel room, dead of a gunshot wound, gun fifteen feet away under the curtains, with the room in disarray. He goes to the police, but he doesn’t tell them he’s been in the room. He merely asks them to check on Mr. Carr because Mrs. Carr is ostensibly worried. They check. They find Carr in an immaculate room with the gun in his hand and rule the killing a suicide.

Now Rockford has to resolve this conflict. Sadly, Rockford chooses to handle this by accusing the investigating officers of participating in a cover-up. This gets him thrown out of town. He returns to Mrs. Carr, who tells several conflicting stories about where she was in the hours before Prentiss died. She’s also poring over travel brochures and seems awful anxious to spend her husband’s money. Rockford has a good line about how she’s destroying the whole image of widowhood.

Rockford spends much of the episode bouncing between the angry cops and the Widow Carr, but while many of the scenes are entertaining in themselves, they aren’t, in retrospect, all that plot advancing, because none of these people had anything to do with the murder of Prentiss Carr. The actual killer doesn’t arrive until about forty minutes in, and instead of our meeting him as the result of Rockford’s following a long series of carefully laid out clues, the killers first appearance in the story is more of the “point the camera at the guy following Rockford with a look on his face about as subtle as the Goodyear Blimp flying over a Papal Mass with a message flashing along its side in letters fifty-feet high “I AM THE MURDERER” variety. The killer is so obviously sinister that I’m surprised the police aren’t constantly picking him up just because. Lucky for Rockford, he’s also kind of dumb, so there isn’t a whole lot of suspense in their chase through the Bay City streets and their battle in a lumber yard. (Rockford wins by tricking him, but because Swifty the Slayer couldn’t have beaten the tag team of a lobotomized three toed sloth and Paris Hilton at Stratego, the victory is cheapened.) The remainder of the murder motive, blackmail about an insurance scam, is wrapped up with a few lines at police headquarters, as are all of Rockford’s problems.

The episode is notable as the first significant use of Rocky’s fancy pickup truck, so that’s something. On the whole, though, “Exit Prentiss Carr” strikes me as a first-season stumble. It’s an entertaining hour in its way, but its plotting is too lazy, and its reveal of the killer is too much of a cheat. I know "The Rockford Files" can do better than this. It has, and it will again.

The Countess

“The Countess”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

This episode is a reversal of “The Dark and Bloody Ground”. In that episode, one of the characters returns to reclaim his past (and gets murdered for it), in this one, the titular Countess (Susan Strasberg), having found happiness in a fortuitously built life, has invested years in burying her past. Unfortunately, her past returns in the form of a blackmailer, played to oily perfection by Dick Gautier, who knows all about the Contessa’s past mob ties, so she hires Rockford to find some way of getting the blackmailer off her back.

Though this episode is a reversal of “The Dark and Bloody Ground”, it shares with that story a fascination with money and class. In a party scene, Rockford finds a particularly inventive way of driving off an obnoxious upper class snob.

“Where did you meet the countess? Europe?”
“No. Marineland. I run the hot dog concession by the killer whale tank. The Countess loves my footlongs. I’ll let you in on my secret. It’s the wrapping. I wrap the hot dogs in cellophane before I put them in the hot water. Keeps them from getting tough.”

At the party, Rockford meets the countess’s husband, Mike Ryder (Art Lund) a likable fellow who, the countess later explains, never got past the eighth grade but struck it rich and loves the idea of having married a countess. He tells Rockford that most of the people at his party are “social climbing creeps” who are there to fill up the place. It’s apparent that Rockford feels a kinship with Ryder, based on shared social origins and an impatience for the idle rich, and it makes it easier for Rockford to sympathize with the Countess’s desire to preserve her image in Ryder’s eyes.

Unfortunately for Rockford, his confrontation with Dick Gautier’s Brago goes poorly. In the middle of their fight on the beach, a sniper shoots Brago from the bluff. Rockford runs past two witnesses to pursue the man, and ends up being pulled over and arrested as a suspect. This leads Rockford to the man who’ll serve as his principal police antagonist for the next couple of seasons, Lt. Alex Diehl (Tom Atkins). Diehl tries to toss Rockford in the Tombs, but Beth Davenport arrives to bail him out by daring Diehl to book Rockford for first degree murder, a charge he doesn’t have enough evidence to make.

Rockford gets out, finds out the videotape he made of Brago is missing, and suspects the Countess of having stolen the tape and Brago shot. At this point, he confronts the Countess at her tennis lesson, watch for James Cromwell as her tennis instructor, and lets her know that unless she convinces him that she’s innocent, he’s going to sell her out to the police. The Countess doesn’t do a very good job, until Rockford tells her that he has a copy of the tape he’d made of her meeting Brago and will show that to the cops unless she pays him. She offers to pay, and Rockford realizes that she couldn’t have made off with the tape. At that moment, he explains just how much she can expect from him:

“You’ll keep your promise. You won’t tell the police.”
“Well, let me put it this way, Debbie: I’m never too sure just how much character I’ve got. In a pinch, I start groping for alternatives. I’ll probably sell you out before I take a rap for murder. If you can help me, you’d better get your coffee can and start bailing, because if I go down, you go down.”
“Chivalry is really dead isn’t it?”
“I know.”

This reminds us that Jim Rockford isn’t the standard issue dime novel gumshoe. He gets rattled, and he doesn’t promise more than he thinks he can realistically deliver. He sometimes likes his clients, but he won’t martyr himself for them.

Shortly after this, the mob kidnaps him, and during the kidnapping he finds out that the mob didn’t kill Brago. They are, in fact, angry about his having been killed. (Brago had relatives in high places.) Before the mob can execute Rockford, the police bust in. They’d be planning to arrest Rockford, but the mob just barely beat them to it.

Rockford escapes from the police and returns to the Countess’s house. He’s just realized who the killer is, only to discover that the killer is in the house with him. It’s Mike Ryder, which functions as a nifty plot reversal because the entire episode operated on the assumption his innocence of the matter at hand. It turns out that Ryder knew Brago was the blackmailer, knew about the Countess’s past, and killed to preserve her reputation. Now he feels a need to kill Rockford. Rockford tries to talk his way out of the situation, but Ryder forces him into the driver’s seat of a car. Ryder takes the passenger seat, and soon they’re off toward the execution site. Rockford continues to beg in the car, but Ryder is unmoved. At that point, Rockford runs a bluff, accelerating to a high speed on a twisty back-hills road. Ryder tries to pull the keys out, but Rockford reminds him that this car has a safety feature that prevents this and nods at the obvious irony. Soon Rockford loses control, the car plunges into a ravine, and though Rockford manages to escape the car, Ryder isn’t so lucky. At the hospital, the police tell Rockford that Ryder won’t last the night.

The last lines of the episode wrap up the themes of falsehood and artifice that flow through the story. The countess has cleared Rockford with the police, and in doing so implicated her dying husband. She calls herself a plastic countess, and hates that Ryder, the only real person she’s known, sacrificed himself for that. Rockford replies: “We’re all scared to death. I guess that’s the price we pay for living in a world where all the price tags end in 99 cents and they sell mortuary plots on billboards next to the freeway. What you do is to keep laughing. They’re going to kiss your hand, honey, because you’re a countess. Stop worrying about it. Just keep laughing.”

“Is that what you do?” the Countess replies.

“You bet.”

I sometimes think that scene is a little overwritten, and that there’s something incongruous about telling someone who’s husband is dying to “keep laughing”, but it also seems like sound advice. Rockford knows, from experience, that everyone, in every situation, sometimes has to be a phony. The only way to manage that without going crazy is to keep laughing. On a few occasions, in future seasons, Rockford has an opportunity to express this same sentiment. I think he does it better then, but scene still functions here, tying up a very satisfying episode.

Next Week: “Exit Prentiss Carr”

The Dark and Bloody Ground

“The Dark And Bloody Ground”

Click here for the answering machine message.

Up to now, Rockford’s dealings with the upper classes have kept him at some distance from them. The bluebloods are either the targets of his investigations or clients that Rockford mistrusts. But this time around the big money is not only on the antagonists’ side. Meet Beth Davenport, high powered lawyer and heir to a family fortune. She’s Rockford’s friend, nudzh, and lawyer. (A dialog exchange also implies a past romance.) With Beth’s arrival, class relations on The Rockford Files take some fascinating new turns.

Somewhat like Jim Rockford, Beth Davenport collects indigent clients and lost causes. Of course, with her money, she can afford such indulgences. Jim can’t, and the friction between them on the subject of finance is almost as important to the story as the main plot, which concerns an indigent woman charged with the murder of her hippie-poet husband. Beth wants Rockford to donate his services because she’s donating hers. Rockford refuses. Beth promises to pay Rockford if he can prove her client innocent. Rockford agrees to listen to her story. Beth turns that into a promise of aid. Rockford puts expenses on the bill; Beth argues until he takes them off.

What strikes me in watching this episode is that there isn’t the sexual tension between Rockford and Beth familiar to viewers of Moonlighting or Northern Exposure. The two characters banter, and it’s often funny, but it’s the banter of two people who are far too comfortable with each other to get that frission going. Also, not only does the viewer get a sense that Beth’s and Rockford’s lifestyles differ too much to allow a successful coupling, but it seems like Beth and Rockford also sense that. After Beth runs down one of the people Rockford’s investigating as “new money”, Rockford asks if Beth’s ashamed to be seen with him because he doesn’t even have “old money”.

Of course, Rockford isn’t the only example of social mobility here. His client’s hippie-poet husband turns out to have been a bit of climber himself. He wrote the titular book a long time ago, faked his death so that he could abandon his wife, then returned to collect his money from his ex when his Dark and Bloody Ground became fodder for a big budget Hollywood spectacular. The ex decided not to share and so we learn once again how damaging social climbing can be to a person’s health. The episode implies he’d have been a lot better off staying in Arizona “listening to the desert” and living, more or less, like Jim Rockford. But, greed, like fear, eats the soul.

Rockford works all this out by, once again, employing a ruse to mix with high society, and using a touch of deft logic to trick them into saying more than they intend. Soon, the malefactors are caught, an innocent woman is freed, and Rockford...doesn’t get paid, even for the expense of a toothbrush.

Notes:

--The car vs. truck chase in this episode plays an awful lot like Duel, except that Rockford’s a better driver than David Mann, and that the director of “The Dark and Bloody Ground” chose to show the truck driver’s face. The chase is well done, with a good ending, and it’s integral to the plot, but it disappointed me that it gestured so strongly toward an iconic movie car chase. Thankfully, Rockford never finds cause to pursue an L train in his Firebird.

--I love the bit where Rockford, having received Beth’s self serving advice, heads to a pay phone to call another attorney for a second legal opinion.

--I liked the way that Rocky’s analysis of the truck chase muddied the issue of whether the truck driver meant to kill Rockford or just scare him. Rocky was assuming the driver was a professional, while Rockford allowed for the possibility that the driver was an amateur. Rockford was right, but Rocky’s authority on trucking made me think about the incident more than I otherwise would have.

“The Kirkoff Case”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

Credit James Woods with helping the first season of the Rockford Files open on a high. Woods plays Larry Kirkoff, scion of a wealthy family and, according to just about everyone in Los Angeles, his parents’ murderer. Woods had a small role in The Way We Were and bit parts in Kojak and a few other shows, but it may be in this episode that Woods first gets to show just how many edges he can add to a part. Woods only gets a few minutes of screen time, but in those few minutes he takes the character from icy, to nervously distracted, to strangely sympathetic (or at least trustworthy) all without seeming as if he’s expending energy acting. This performance announces the talent that would later drive Videodrome, Salvador, and Promise.

Woods’s Kirkoff role reminds me of something Orson Welles once said about the Harry Lime role in The Third Man. When asked if it bothered him that he didn’t appear until the middle of the picture, Welles replied that it was all right because, for the entire first act of the film, all the other characters were talking about him. Everyone in”The Kirkoff Case” is talking about Larry Kirkoff, and a good many people seem to need his guilt, which is why Rockford gets into trouble trying to prove Kirkoff’s theory that someone else, possibly his mother’s ex-lover, committed the murder. As it turns out, there are two ex-lovers, one for each parent. Each of them has a penchant for mickey-finns, but in spite of that, neither one looks good as a murder suspect. Of more serious concern to Rockford is another interested party, a mobster who abducts Rockford, has his goons beat the tar out of him, and explains that certain nefarious deeds might be exposed if the cops decide Larry Kirkoff didn’t kill his parents. So even when Woods isn’t on screen, he’s on screen.

This episode introduces a few more facets of Rockford’s character that separate him from older-school shamuses. Rockford folds easily when pressured. He refuses to reveal Kirkoff’s name to a suspect, but when the suspect aims a pistol at him, he spills it in a half-second. Kirkoff’s growling doberman intimidates Rockford out of demanding his $10,000 bonus, and when Rockford takes a pounding from a mobster’s goons, he’s perfectly comfortable pleading for an end to the violence. He also fails a lot. The pair of Kirkoff adulterers drug him, steal his pants, and force him to talk. Waiters never bring him the mustard for his hamburger. The mobsters easily lure him into a kidnapping, and when Rockford pulls out a patented move for dealing with a recalcitrant thug, the thug blocks it and puts his fist through Rockford’s jaw. Kirkoff never pays him for taking all this abuse. He misjudges Larry Kirkoff. Indeed, Rockford fails so often that when, in the end, he describes himself as “tangle-footed” and “obtuse” we buy it. Yet while we’d roll our eyes at another character who does this, with Rockford it feels right. He can be outwitted, outgunned, and outfought. I think we sympathize in part because Garner’s impossible to dislike, but it’s also because Rockford’s adversaries are competent and dangerous. They know how to hit people, kidnap them, and, as Rockford knows too well, murder them. They’re scary, and we know that Rockford’s scared of them simply because he’s a sensible man with normal reflexes. Only an idiot would stand up to a guy who commands a platoon of thugs and says, in a whispery voice, “The kid committed murder. You know what I mean, Rockford? Murder.” (The search for the idiot who’ll stand up to such people will eventually lead us to Lance White, but he’s a few seasons down the road.)

But we eventually come back to Larry Kirkoff, and a twist at the end that I didn’t see coming--and I thought I knew all the tricks. Kirkoff, as it worked out, was guilty of murdering his father, but it wasn’t for greed. It was for revenge. His father had hired a killer to murder his mother. That one was for greed. Larry Kirkoff hired Rockford to prove his father killed his mother so that he could feel good about confessing to shooting his father. The odd thing is, looking back at Woods’s performance, I could see it. There were moments when he let Kirkoff’s conscience peek out from the icy exterior. Just watch him. They’re there.

All in all, a brilliant start to the first season.

Next Week: The Dark and Bloody Ground

Notes:

This is the first appearance of Noah Beery as Joseph Rockford (Rocky). It’s good to have him where he belongs.

This is also the first use of the answering machine gag, though they must have done it in a hurry because Rockford’s voice sounds as if it were done in a studio instead of processed so that it sounded like a voice on an answering machine speaker.