“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.