“The Big Ripoff”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

Herb Tarlek, the radioactive suited salesman from WKRP in Cincinnati, once articulated a theory that held that all the world’s conflicts came down to pants: the dungarees vs. the suits. According to Herb, the responsible, upper income suits are constantly losing ground to the younger, more iconoclastic dungarees and must learn to fight back if they’re to keep civilization from collapsing.

This theory doesn’t graft perfectly onto The Rockford Files. Rockford tends toward off the rack slacks instead of jeans, and I think Rockford would have serious doubts about the idea that iconoclastic youth was taking over much of anything. Still, it does come to bear. Rockford spends a lot of his time being hassled, and the source of his harasslement is usually wearing a suit.

In this case, the suit belongs brusque insurance executive Melvyn Moss. Rockford calls Moss after one of his clients stiffs him on a job. Rockford thinks that his client’s boyfriend, Steve Nelson, faked his own death and ripped off Moss’s insurance company for $200,000. Rockford plans to follow Nelson’s girlfriend in hopes of getting a line on Nelson, and he wants Moss’s company to front him some advance money.

What follows is a negotiation that freelancers the world over will recognize. Moss wants Rockford to chase Nelson’s girlfriend on spec, refusing to budge in hopes that Rockford will slip and tell him enough that he can recover the money without paying Rockford at all. They battle back and forth. Rockford drops his demand from $2,000 plus expenses to a measly $500 and Moss, satisfied that he has his pound of Rockford’s flesh, authorizes the investigation.

One of “The Big Ripoff”’s strengths is the number of intriguing supporting characters it packs into its forty-eight minutes. There’s Moss, of course--as effective a suit-and-tied irritant as Rockford has ever met. There’s the Sheriff Neal, whose scene is brief but leaves enough of an impression that he’s easy to buy as a potential antagonist. There’s Carl LeMay, a local gallery owner who throws flak Rockford’s way as a favor to Nelson’s girlfriend, an ex-love. And there’s Steve Nelson, the world’s luckiest man, who after ripping of an insurance company blunders on a disguise that stands to make him more money than the insurance ripoff ever could. All these characters, with their well-built personas and suggestions of subsurface tensions and needs, enrich the world of the story, making it seem less like an exercise in clever plotting and more like the product of the characters’ diverse motives.

Another strength of the episode is Marilyn Polonski, the artists’ model who holds the key to unraveling Steve Nelson’s disguise. Jill Clayburgh, whose performance set off the kind of vibrations that heralded the approach of her stardom, plays her as a fun loving charmer who seems flightier than she really is. Like Rockford, Polonski’s a freelancer who lives simply and has a sensible caution about scary people. She knows that the thugs who beat Rockford up didn’t come from Sheriff Neal, and once she draws a beard on Rockford’s picture of Steve Nelson, she works out that he’s the hot new primitive painter in town who sells through LeMay’s gallery. She thinks he stinks as a painter, but tells us that “half the artists in town think he’s great.”

Rockford eventually finds Nelson, but Nelson captures him, ties him up, and vanishes. He goes back to Melvyn Moss for an additional advance to track Nelson down again, but Moss tells him he’s no longer interested in anything Rockford has to say. Rockford works out that Nelson took Rockford’s advice and made a deal with Moss. As Moss smugly sneers at him, Rockford says the classic line: “Mr. Moss, do you know what you are?” Pause. “Yeah, you do, don’t you.” Herb Tarlek was wrong. The suits win, yet again forever and always.

Rockford doesn’t end up empty handed, though. In a funny last scene, Rockford finds out that Nelson sent him ten of his paintings, which, despite their obvious lousiness, command $2,000 each, covering Rockford’s loss of the finder’s fee. As Rocky says when Rockford tells him the price, “He does have a nice sense of color, don’t he?”

This wraps up all the plots, but it did leave me feeling a little less than satisfied. I wondered why we didn’t get more of a wrap-up of Rockford’s relationship with Polonski. I realize there was a lot of plot for the “Big Ripoff” to close, but Polonski’s character deserved more of a sendoff. Instead, she just vanished, which is the only flaw in otherwise estimable segment.

Notes

--I loved the silent opening of “The Big Ripoff”, which is where you’ll find the Suzanne Somers appearance the DVD promotes. Though Somers eventually became known for Three’s Company, Step by Step, and the Thighmaster, she spent much of the early 1970s making strong impressions in silent roles in pictures like American Graffiti. She lends wit and charm to a clever scene.