“This Case is Closed” parts 1 & 2

“This Case is Closed” parts 1 & 2

Click here for the answer phone gag.

“This Case is Closed” leads with a fantastic hook. Rockford gets off a plane. Tired from his cross country flight, he calls his client and tells him that he ran into something weird back in New Jersey. He doesn’t elaborate but promises to explain all when they meet in the morning. On his way home, he spies someone following him in a gray Chevy. Rockford pulls a few maneuvers and loses his shadow. He then gets home and finds two guys trashing his trailer. These boys beat Rockford up, stick some heavy duty shades on him, and kidnap him to a fancy home up in the hills. The owner of the house tells him that if he doesn’t reveal his client’s identity, Rockford will be breathing dirt instead of air.

Obviously, this is a tense moment, but it’s also revealing. Rockford’s given up his clients’ names to other people who’ve threatened him, but here he tightens up. Maybe it’s the fellow’s limp, or his melodramatic approach, but Rockford doesn’t seem take this captor as seriously. Rockford offers instead to call his client and ask if he’d mind having his name revealed, but his host, unsatisfied, tersely tells him that he’s a dead man. Rockford seems surprised, and before he can do much more than say please, his captors abandon him in a beautifully furnished, and very locked, room. Rockford’s left with a lot of questions, all of which boil down to much the same thing, why have I been one step behind everyone since this case started, and how the hell did I end up here?

“This Case is Closed” keeps these questions in front of us for the length of the episode, introducing a variety of criminal and law enforcement players to a game that everyone seems to understand except Rockford. It all centers on Mark Chalmers, a playboy nightclub owner who’s engaged to marry the daughter of a bitter old rich coot who’s hired Rockford to dig up ugly things in Mark’s past. Rockford disdains the assignment, but his client drops the nastiness just long enough to keep our hero in his service. What Rockford finds out is that a lot of people are interested in Mark Chalmers--criminals, cops, feds--but no one wants to explain why. What’s apparent is that everyone thinks that Rockford knows more about Chalmers than he really does, and this sets him up all manner of trouble with the aforementioned mobsters, a stonewalling FBI agent, a meanspirited cop from New Jersey, and Chalmers’s beloved (who wants to hire Rockford to find out why Chalmers left him, not knowing that her father is Rockford’s client.)

In the special features of the DVD, James Garner speaks of complaining to the writers about the way the episodes just follow his character around. While I sympathize with his desire to take the occasional shooting day off, given his bad knees and bad back, following Rockford around is what makes this episode work. By sticking to Rockford’s point of view, we’re invited to think along with him as he tries to sort out all of these players and try to infer from their actions what the game is. We know what Rockford knows. When the mobsters take Rockford from their hills home, presumably to shoot him, and the feds turn up to rescue Rockford from their clutches, we wonder, as Rockford does, how they managed to figure out he was there, and why they were watching this mafioso’s activities. Were the feds the guys in the grey Chevy that followed Rockford from the airport? It’s fun sitting on Rockford’s shoulder in this one and trying to reason alongside him.

The supporting players in “This Case is Closed” are uniformly excellent. Heading the list is Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, The Third Man), playing bitter old rich coot Waner Jameson. His scenes with Garner are a pleasure to watch, with Cotten expertly playing a man who dislikes Rockford but dislikes needing him even more. (I love the way his voice seesaws through the line “I shoot a mean game of dirty pool.” It’s simultaneously threatening and so old Hollywood. I think that vocal style has been lost to time.) Sharon Gless (Cagney and Lacey) plays Jameson’s daughter with a sunny disposition that makes it hard to imagine her growing up in her Warner Jameson’s house, and James McEachin finds the right combination of impatience and officiousness as FBI Agent Shore.

Notes:

--One complaint I have with the DVD version of this episode is the overlong recap of part one at the beginning of part two. I do realize that seven days used to separate episodes and that there were no VCRs or other video recording devices in homes in the 1970s (except for a few prototypes used in test markets). But two things: the episode recaps in future “Rockford Files” two parters were considerably shorter, when the VCR situation wasn’t much better than it was when the series began, and even if there was an issue for viewers in the 1970s, why should today’s DVD watchers have to sit through a recap of an episode that they’ve probably just seen?

--Watch for the hotheaded New Jersey Cop from this episode (Eddie Fontaine). He’ll appear later on this season in the role of a hotheaded criminal. I’m sure he played a lot of hotheads on TV, which makes me think that I’d love to see him in the role of Osric in Hamlet.