Little Garwood wrote:Luther's nephew Dobie wrote:
Hi Garwood,
I agree with you, except for one episode. That would be the two part "This Case is Closed" with the great Joseph Cotton. There is a nice episode hidden here amongst the dreck, some good scenes but good lord the needless and endless car chases and plain filler. The director must have been some studio hack with no idea how to edit.
Anyway, I guess if you have "This Case is Closed" on DVD you could fast forward past the lame parts. There is a gem of a scene where Cotton's powerful wealthy man character tries to intimidate Rockford and Rockford gives it right back, explaining that as his own boss he doesn't have to take that sort of guff. It's one of my favorites out of the whole series.
Just watched this last night. I rate it a 6/10. I don't share your dislike of the episode and I maintain that "Love is the Word" is probably the series' low point, relatively speaking.
I enjoyed the Cotten-Garner scenes--Cotten does have a rather interesting accent--and Beery was his usual charmingly good-natured self. His "Greatest Generation"-era mentality makes for a fine counterpoint to Jim's ex-con, post-Watergate cynicism, which is why I must respectfully disagree with our friend marlboro about "Pilot Rocky" being a better fit than our cherished Beery Rocky. The running gag about the ashtray is pretty funny!
The one bit I didn't get was when Rockford was driven out to almost the middle of nowhere and just...dropped off. What was the purpose of that scene, other than to sort of set up the amusing bit with the cabbie and Rocky? Sharon Gless could have been better used; all she does is watch Rockford down a hot-sauce-covered taco (served by future Officer Billings and Garner crony Luis Delgado).
Enjoyed the nighttime car chase through old L.A. and its atrocious streets; they're all cracked and crumbling. It all adds to the unique atmosphere that makes TRF so great to me. Most shows rely on the Universal Lot, whereas TRF actually "takes it to the streets." The fact they actual film at night is another plus, as it is with most Universal shows.
Garwood,
I have discovered that there was several Rockford Files that ran 90 minutes when it originally aired. When it was time to sell the rerun package, Universal's editors added stock footage to flesh them out to 2 hours(with commercials) so they could be cut into two hour long episodes, a "two parter".
"This Case is Closed" was one of them. Instead of a 2 minute chase, expand it to 10 minutes years later by lifting elements of chases from other episodes and then splice. Throw in a scene of Rockford getting a taco, and Bob's Your Uncle.
Universal turned this sort of thing into a art form. McCloud had episodes of 60 minutes, 90 minutes and two hours. So for rerun purposes, they added footage or combined 2 separate episodes, bridging the two together by explanatory/connecting scenes in Chief Clifford's office where they dubbed in new dialog so obviously dubbed by other actors and not matching the original actors mouthings it was shameless. Or adding in a shot of Clifford with his back to the camera, a later added on voice - as Clifford -explaining how the 2 story lines intersected.
The editing is generally terrible, it ruins the mood, continuity and sense of the original stand alone episodes. Which were a lot of fun.
By the way, in the opening montage of McCloud scenes, there is a shot of Dennis Weaver holding on to the runners of a coptor when it lifts off a skyscraper and he is dangling in mid-air 80 stories over NYC. That was him not a double, he missed his cue to let go as the stuntman was slightly tardy running over to take his place and hook on the safety lines, so that was really Weaver hanging on for dear life with no harness.
Even worse than McCloud's editing was what happened to Rod Serling's Night Gallery(shown on the ME network at 4:30 am weeknights). They needed to have enough episodes for a rerun package but the series only ran a few years(3?).
They split the hour episodes in to half hour ones, hard to do with 3 separate 16 minute stores in each hour long episode. So they took a failed series about a shrink, starring Gary Collins, and added scenes from that to the beginning and end of the half hour versions, making no sense whatsoever but such was the studio's contempt for the viewer at home. Supposedly Collin's patient was telling him of his nightmares, which was that episode's Night Gallery offering.
Or they would butcher 2 16 minutes stories down to 11 minutes each, giving you 22 minutes of content and 8 minutes of commercials. It's a total train wreck.