The Rockford Files

[ZelenskyTheValiant (Ivan)]

Never dismiss a list. Not only are lists fun, they give others an idea of where someone stands in regard to their tastes. Those who put their preferences “out there” have my greatest respect.

Besides, lists change and I find those changes interesting, especially when specific reasons are given as to why they’ve changed.

I don’t doubt that many people enjoy making such lists. I don’t find it particularly fun though. It feels like more of a chore to me. I certainly have favorites, but I’d rather discuss those with others, than prioritize number 19 over number 20. To each his own, in both rankings and list making. I just find the words “list” and “fun” used together foreign to my personal experience. That’s all.

Similarly, I know many on the forum who are big collectors of Magnum items, and probably other things that they display. I’m not much of a collector at all. I have a lot of music and film/TV recordings, and a large library of books, but I don’t have any collections displayed in my home, nor does my wife. It’s not something we find particularly fun either, but I know people enjoy it. There have been a few times my wife and I have visited someone’s home and there are lots of collections displayed. Later we often talked about how it felt almost overwhelming with things everywhere.

Well you say you have your favorites. But isn't that sort of a list anyway? It doesn't have to be numbered. Or set in stone. But I'm sure you have 5 or so from each season that you really like. That's a list right there. I wasn't asking you to number or rank episodes. Just to give me your favorite episode from each season, like I did. Or if you don't have 1, then give me 2 or 3 that you really like for that season. I know you really like "Quickie Nirvana" so there you go - probably your favorite from season 4. I think you even said it was your all-time favorite.

[Pahonu]

Never dismiss a list. Not only are lists fun, they give others an idea of where someone stands in regard to their tastes. Those who put their preferences “out there” have my greatest respect.

Besides, lists change and I find those changes interesting, especially when specific reasons are given as to why they’ve changed.

I don’t doubt that many people enjoy making such lists. I don’t find it particularly fun though. It feels like more of a chore to me. I certainly have favorites, but I’d rather discuss those with others, than prioritize number 19 over number 20. To each his own, in both rankings and list making. I just find the words “list” and “fun” used together foreign to my personal experience. That’s all.

Similarly, I know many on the forum who are big collectors of Magnum items, and probably other things that they display. I’m not much of a collector at all. I have a lot of music and film/TV recordings, and a large library of books, but I don’t have any collections displayed in my home, nor does my wife. It’s not something we find particularly fun either, but I know people enjoy it. There have been a few times my wife and I have visited someone’s home and there are lots of collections displayed. Later we often talked about how it felt almost overwhelming with things everywhere.

Well you say you have your favorites. But isn't that sort of a list anyway? It doesn't have to be numbered. Or set in stone. But I'm sure you have 5 or so from each season that you really like. That's a list right there. I wasn't asking you to number or rank episodes. Just to give me your favorite episode from each season, like I did. Or if you don't have 1, then give me 2 or 3 that you really like for that season. I know you really like "Quickie Nirvana" so there you go - probably your favorite from season 4. I think you even said it was your all-time favorite.

My favorites are a type of list, no argument. Quickie Nirvana is probably my favorite simply based on the number of times I’ve watched it. White on White, and Nearly Perfect would also be on that list, along with several others that I couldn’t name without looking at… a list. I’m not keeping the list though! I suppose when I see you guys questioning how one ranked this one over the other, or that one behind the other seasons number whatever episode, I just tune out at that level of ranking. Perhaps it’s best to see my “favorites list” as a very loose bubble diagram of episodes. I have never watched a series in order from start to finish so I don’t know which season many episodes came in other than earlier or later. In fact, when you mentioned you liked the first Rockford season best a while back, I went to IMDB to see which episodes were in season one. I don’t think I even knew that Quickie Nirvana was in season four until that conversation. If you had told me season five, that would have been plausible to me! Perhaps it comes down to me not wanting to spend that kind of time on such precision for something I enjoy but don’t find terribly important.

So you’re saying from now on there are no numbers necessary and I could present you with a sort of brainstorming mess of possibilities? I can totally do that!!!

[ZelenskyTheValiant (Ivan)]

So you’re saying from now on there are no numbers necessary and I could present you with a sort of brainstorming mess of possibilities? I can totally do that!!!

That's pretty much it! No numbers or rankings required.

But I'm still confused how someone with your photographic memory can't remember episode titles or which season the episodes belong to. I mean this is your all-time favorite show, right? Have you seen all the episodes? You should be able to do better than just identify it as an early-season show or a late-season show. I can do that with a show that I'm casually acquainted with. But with my favorite show you can bet I can do MUCH better! Come on, where is that impressive memory of yours? Surely it doesn't just stop with news publications.

[Pahonu]

So you’re saying from now on there are no numbers necessary and I could present you with a sort of brainstorming mess of possibilities? I can totally do that!!!

That's pretty much it! No numbers or rankings required.

But I'm still confused how someone with your photographic memory can't remember episode titles or which season the episodes belong to. I mean this is your all-time favorite show, right? Have you seen all the episodes? You should be able to do better than just identify it as an early-season show or a late-season show. I can do that with a show that I'm casually acquainted with. But with my favorite show you can bet I can do MUCH better! Come on, where is that impressive memory of yours? Surely it doesn't just stop with news publications.

The memory is very specific to reading things on the page, as I explained earlier. I don’t recall scenes from films like that. I don’t even recall things I read digitally on a screen that way. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s not a photographic memory of everything I see, far from it.

Let’s put it this way. If I read a book you published with all your Hawaii Five-O reviews for every episode of every season, I would likely remember it far better than watching the episodes several times myself. In a somewhat related concept, when architects develop construction documents on AutoCAD or other digital platforms, they always print hard copies to search for the inevitable errors. They are far more obvious on the page than in digital form. It’s strange, but absolutely true.

[Little Garwood]

Composer Mike Post discusses his Rockford Files theme.


youtu.be/snruBzT-bPA

[Pahonu]

Composer Mike Post discusses his Rockford Files theme.


youtu.be/snruBzT-bPA

That was great, thanks!

[Luther's nephew Dobie]

Hi Guys,
Kudos to Garwood for that Mike Post link.
If you like Harry O, this article is for you. If you like books, explore the site, it is outstanding! As Monk would say, you will thank me later:

https://crimereads.com/harry-o-tv-private-eye-series/


Here is a take on Rockford Files.
James Garner's daughter liked it so much she shared it with other people.

In Praise of James Garner by Kim Messick
The Rockford Files have been permanently closed.

James Garner, star of the iconic 1970s private-eye series, died of natural causes at his California home on Saturday, July 19, 2014. He was 86.

Numerous obituaries recounted the details of Garner’s life and work, and they make a great story. Born into a hard-scrabble Oklahoma existence, Garner lost his mother when he was four and was sent to live with relatives at age seven after his father’s small store burned down. His father later remarried but his second wife, in the words of Garner’s brother Jack (also an actor), was “a damn no-good woman” who physically abused her step-children. When he was fourteen, James had a violent altercation with her and left home. Drifting from Oklahoma to Texas to California, he worked a succession of odd jobs before reuniting with his father in Los Angeles, where he briefly attended Hollywood High. While there he became friends with a man named Paul Gregory, who was eight years older but whose background was strangely similar— like Garner, he was a Midwestern kid (Iowa in Gregory’s case) of Cherokee Indian ancestry dispatched to relatives during the Depression. Gregory became an agent and producer, and in 1953 he hired Garner for a small non-speaking role in his stage production of Herman Wouk’s “Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.” From these inauspicious beginnings, Garner fashioned an award-winning career that spanned more than half a century.

That career included star turns in a number of important and successful films— “The Great Escape,” “The Americanization of Emily,” “Victor / Victoria”— and in smaller, more oblique movies (“Support Your Local Sheriff!”) where Garner’s deft comic timing was often on display. But in all likelihood he will mainly be remembered for two ground-breaking television series: Maverick, which aired on ABC from 1957 to 1962 (though Garner himself left the series in 1960 over a contract dispute), and The Rockford Files, an NBC series from 1974 to 1980.

Both shows systematically subverted their respective genres. Debuting at a time when television was awash in Westerns, Maverick’s original protagonists were two brothers, Bret (Garner) and Bart (Jack Kelly), with decidedly unheroic concerns: they were gamblers and grifters more interested in the next hand than in displays of manly rectitude. The Rockford Files visited the same inversions on the private detective series, then nearly as ascendant as the Western had been in 1957. Rockford was no Mannix. He didn’t have a comfy office with a comely secretary; he didn’t have a car phone. (Though he did have an answering machine.) He lived in a crummy trailer marooned in a Malibu parking lot. He ate tacos for breakfast. Like Bret Maverick, he had an instinctive aversion to the heroic. (“There are no heroes” in the private eye business, he once explained to his father. “They die young.”) He owned a gun, of course, but preferred to leave it in its assigned place— his cookie jar. When one incredulous client asked why he wasn’t armed, Rockford’s reply was as swift as it was sincere: “Because I don’t want to shoot anybody.” He was more hustler than paladin, an observation underlined by the fact that many (if not most) of his closest associates were ex-cons— as was Rockford himself.

What anchored all this insouciance— and subversion— was nothing more or less than Garner’s natural irony. Like a blues vocalist who instinctively bends his notes, Garner knew that convention usually hides more meaning than it releases. His line readings, curlicues of inflection, were the verbal equivalent of a wink and a nudge. In one late episode (“The Big Cheese”), two thugs burst into Rockford’s trailer and announce that “the Boss” wants to see him. Rockford is unimpressed. “Really?” he asks. “ ‘The Boss’?” An excellent A.V. Club piece on the series was headlined “In The Rockford Files, James Garner played a private detective who was in on the joke.” It was an apt title.

But the ultimate target of Garner’s irony wasn’t the hackneyed vocabulary of hardboiled fiction. It was the narrative conceit at the center of that fiction: its image of the male will, and of the redemptive power of that will when manifested in violence.

The first half of Garner’s career unfurled in a fraught time for American masculinity. As the country pivoted from World War II to the Cold War ‘50s, its beau ideal of manhood seemed securely in place. Captured in the iconic figure of John Wayne, this American Man was half-Davy Crockett and half-G.I. Joe, an amalgam of democratic informality and solitary competence. Self-reliant and laconic, he distrusted words and the feminizing culture they belonged to; his nature rightly expressed itself in wariness and action. The great mission of this figure was to impose order on a potentially chaotic universe. When chaos emanated from the unruly emotional lives of women and children, he did so through a stern but benign exercise of his natural authority. When it involved the predatory behavior of the wicked, he was ready— never eager, but always ready— to invoke the bloody sanctions of lethal force. The implied premises were clear enough: we get order when we respect the prerogatives of a properly male identity; when other identities threaten this order, it can be restored only by acts of saving violence— the right to initiate which is itself one of those very prerogatives.

The security of this ideal was more illusory than real, however. By the late 1950s, it had been unsettled by the corporatism and conformity of post-War, Eisenhower-era America: neither Davy Crockett nor G.I. Joe seemed at ease in a gray flannel suit. The ‘60s assailed it even more directly. Feminists rejected the idea that women were naturally subject to male authority; they agitated for greater female autonomy in every aspect of modern life— economic, social, personal, sexual. The Counter-Culture offered its own critique of male identity, questioning the soulless ambition it detected behind our democratic-capitalist order, wondering whether the self-reliance of the traditional ideal was not in fact a psychotic refusal of human intimacy. And the Vietnam War raised corrosive doubts about the identification of masculinity with violence.

The culture’s response to these challenges was complex. In some quarters there was retrenchment, a vehement doubling-down best represented, perhaps, by Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” pictures and Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” franchise. The message of these movies seemed pretty straightforward: male authority was under attack, civilization was at risk, what was needed wasn’t neurotic self-doubt but heroic self-assertion: not less male violence, but more. (To be fair, Eastwood is a far more complex figure than this snapshot suggests. Early films such as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” begin a criticism of machismo continued by later pictures such as “Unforgiven” and “Gran Torino.”)

It was in this highly contested landscape that Garner offered up his own version of masculinity. No one ever mistook him for a proto-metrosexual; his athlete’s physique and rugged good looks were squarely in line with the Gary Cooper – Rock Hudson – Paul Newman image of male beauty. Nor was he an early version of that other alternative design, the “sensitive guy.” He was something different: a decent guy. Garner’s unrushed, polite manner suggested an openness to the presence and judgments of others, just as his obvious intelligence indicated a mind more interested in understanding the world than subjugating it. His belief that others have rightful claims to press allowed him to see social life as transactional rather than adversarial, and this, in turn, freed him to approach it with a different set of evaluative categories. What usually mattered to his characters— Rockford, for example— wasn’t the gender or class or race or ethnicity of other persons, but whether they were honest and loyal human beings: attributes necessary for social cooperation, and equally available to all of us.

Given these attitudes, it’s no surprise that Garner’s characters were uneasy with violence. Force, as Simone Weil said, is what makes a human being into a thing, and nobody who accepts the humanity of others wants to see them turned into things. To be sure, Rockford was no pacifist. Almost every episode involved fisticuffs and gun play of one kind or another, but such things were never his preferred approach; he would usually go out of his way to avoid physical danger. When one client offered him a job that sounded a bit too scary, Rockford was quick to decline, prompting a puzzled response from his prospective employer. “I don’t understand. I was told you were very reliable.” Rockford’s answer? “Reliable, yes. But chicken.” His investigative methods favored ruses and scams, usually built on fast patter and smooth lines. Words, so despised by the traditional ideal, were Rockford’s stock-in-trade.

Garner’s implied critique of American masculinity wasn’t just a matter of personality. The Rockford Files, in particular, embraced it as a conscious theme. Many episodes explore confrontations between Rockford and men whose personas are more conventionally masculine. The most revealing of these is probably “The Man Who Saw The Alligators,” a 1979 episode written by David Chase, a staff writer for the show who would go on to create The Sopranos. Chase’s script is an almost Jacobean revenge drama, in which “Anthony Boy” Gagglio, a hit man from New Jersey who blames Rockford for the prison sentence he just served, sets out to locate and murder him. Gagglio, played with truly terrifying intensity by George Loros, is single-minded, cold, implacable— the very emblem, in other words, of many traditionally male attributes that Rockford eschews. Trapped in an isolated vacation home, fighting for the lives of two friends as well as his own, Rockford adroitly plays for time and in the end defeats Gagglio, but not before the latter engages in a final conversation with his younger brother. (Who, he knows, has betrayed him.) The conversation reveals the superficially detached and disciplined killer to be, in fact, an incoherent bundle of anxieties and paranoia. Remember when you were a kid, and I told you about the alligators under the bed? he asks his brother. “They’re really there.” Gagglio’s macho is a thinly stretched mask over fear and rage, and we are invited to extend this insight to machismo in general.

The show was explicit in depicting the social possibilities created when inclusion replaces domination. This was particularly obvious in its treatment of women. Rockford seemed perfectly at ease with professional women and with their demands for greater personal (and sexual) freedom. His lawyer was a woman, and a serious love interest— wonderfully played by Kathryn Harrold— was a psychologist. Rockford once upbraided his father for referring to a woman as a “strumpet” because she had lived with a man without benefit of marriage. “Did I hear you right?” he asked. “When did you start bucking for the Cotton Mather award?”

Even more daringly for its time, Rockford refused to treat homosexuals as objects of sport or derision. “The Empty Frame,” an episode from season five, revolved around an obviously gay couple. But their sexual orientation was never the focus of the story; it was offered as just another fact about them, then shrugged off and taken more or less for granted.

Garner’s version of masculinity— rueful, self-deprecating, relaxed— fit seamlessly into this new world of tolerance and inclusion. It would be hard to overstate its appeal to someone like me, a skinny kid growing up in a rough-hewn place (the North Carolina foothills), whose vocabulary was vastly more developed than his biceps. If being a man meant being John Wayne or Charles Bronson, I was clearly destined for something less than manliness. But Garner’s example gave me hope. It signaled a way of being masculine without becoming a macho jerk, of shaping a self that didn’t confuse integrity with hostility.

In the A.V.Club piece mentioned earlier, the writer perceptively notes that Rockford, while it featured many noir elements, seldom embraced noir wholeheartedly. I don’t think this was simply a matter of the series’ insistent humor, nor of Rockford’s living at the beach and not, like Philip Marlowe, in Los Angeles proper. I think it derived ultimately from the same decency that informed Garner’s masculinity— from a genial determination to judge human life a great good thing. In the credits that precede each Rockford episode, there’s a shot of Garner with his face lifted into the sun and a satisfied, almost rapturous smile. A golden glow covers the frame. When we accept ourselves and others for what we are, it suggests, we release grace and goodness — and light.

So bon voyage, Jimbo. If there is another side, I hope to see you there. And I’ll bring the tacos.

[Pahonu]

Hi Guys,
Kudos to Garwood for that Mike Post link.
If you like Harry O, this article is for you. If you like books, explore the site, it is outstanding! As Monk would say, you will thank me later:

https://crimereads.com/harry-o-tv-private-eye-series/


Here is a take on Rockford Files. I think it has too much of the professorial about it, like academics discussing something till the flavor is gone. And I certainly don't agree with
the author on a few points and his outlook on some things. But it is insightful to a degree.
James Garner's daughter liked it so much she shared it with other people, so what do I know.

In Praise of James Garner by Kim Messick
The Rockford Files have been permanently closed.

James Garner, star of the iconic 1970s private-eye series, died of natural causes at his California home on Saturday, July 19, 2014. He was 86.

Numerous obituaries recounted the details of Garner’s life and work, and they make a great story. Born into a hard-scrabble Oklahoma existence, Garner lost his mother when he was four and was sent to live with relatives at age seven after his father’s small store burned down. His father later remarried but his second wife, in the words of Garner’s brother Jack (also an actor), was “a damn no-good woman” who physically abused her step-children. When he was fourteen, James had a violent altercation with her and left home. Drifting from Oklahoma to Texas to California, he worked a succession of odd jobs before reuniting with his father in Los Angeles, where he briefly attended Hollywood High. While there he became friends with a man named Paul Gregory, who was eight years older but whose background was strangely similar— like Garner, he was a Midwestern kid (Iowa in Gregory’s case) of Cherokee Indian ancestry dispatched to relatives during the Depression. Gregory became an agent and producer, and in 1953 he hired Garner for a small non-speaking role in his stage production of Herman Wouk’s “Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.” From these inauspicious beginnings, Garner fashioned an award-winning career that spanned more than half a century.

That career included star turns in a number of important and successful films— “The Great Escape,” “The Americanization of Emily,” “Victor / Victoria”— and in smaller, more oblique movies (“Support Your Local Sheriff!”) where Garner’s deft comic timing was often on display. But in all likelihood he will mainly be remembered for two ground-breaking television series: Maverick, which aired on ABC from 1957 to 1962 (though Garner himself left the series in 1960 over a contract dispute), and The Rockford Files, an NBC series from 1974 to 1980.

Both shows systematically subverted their respective genres. Debuting at a time when television was awash in Westerns, Maverick’s original protagonists were two brothers, Bret (Garner) and Bart (Jack Kelly), with decidedly unheroic concerns: they were gamblers and grifters more interested in the next hand than in displays of manly rectitude. The Rockford Files visited the same inversions on the private detective series, then nearly as ascendant as the Western had been in 1957. Rockford was no Mannix. He didn’t have a comfy office with a comely secretary; he didn’t have a car phone. (Though he did have an answering machine.) He lived in a crummy trailer marooned in a Malibu parking lot. He ate tacos for breakfast. Like Bret Maverick, he had an instinctive aversion to the heroic. (“There are no heroes” in the private eye business, he once explained to his father. “They die young.”) He owned a gun, of course, but preferred to leave it in its assigned place— his cookie jar. When one incredulous client asked why he wasn’t armed, Rockford’s reply was as swift as it was sincere: “Because I don’t want to shoot anybody.” He was more hustler than paladin, an observation underlined by the fact that many (if not most) of his closest associates were ex-cons— as was Rockford himself.

What anchored all this insouciance— and subversion— was nothing more or less than Garner’s natural irony. Like a blues vocalist who instinctively bends his notes, Garner knew that convention usually hides more meaning than it releases. His line readings, curlicues of inflection, were the verbal equivalent of a wink and a nudge. In one late episode (“The Big Cheese”), two thugs burst into Rockford’s trailer and announce that “the Boss” wants to see him. Rockford is unimpressed. “Really?” he asks. “ ‘The Boss’?” An excellent A.V. Club piece on the series was headlined “In The Rockford Files, James Garner played a private detective who was in on the joke.” It was an apt title.

But the ultimate target of Garner’s irony wasn’t the hackneyed vocabulary of hardboiled fiction. It was the narrative conceit at the center of that fiction: its image of the male will, and of the redemptive power of that will when manifested in violence.

The first half of Garner’s career unfurled in a fraught time for American masculinity. As the country pivoted from World War II to the Cold War ‘50s, its beau ideal of manhood seemed securely in place. Captured in the iconic figure of John Wayne, this American Man was half-Davy Crockett and half-G.I. Joe, an amalgam of democratic informality and solitary competence. Self-reliant and laconic, he distrusted words and the feminizing culture they belonged to; his nature rightly expressed itself in wariness and action. The great mission of this figure was to impose order on a potentially chaotic universe. When chaos emanated from the unruly emotional lives of women and children, he did so through a stern but benign exercise of his natural authority. When it involved the predatory behavior of the wicked, he was ready— never eager, but always ready— to invoke the bloody sanctions of lethal force. The implied premises were clear enough: we get order when we respect the prerogatives of a properly male identity; when other identities threaten this order, it can be restored only by acts of saving violence— the right to initiate which is itself one of those very prerogatives.

The security of this ideal was more illusory than real, however. By the late 1950s, it had been unsettled by the corporatism and conformity of post-War, Eisenhower-era America: neither Davy Crockett nor G.I. Joe seemed at ease in a gray flannel suit. The ‘60s assailed it even more directly. Feminists rejected the idea that women were naturally subject to male authority; they agitated for greater female autonomy in every aspect of modern life— economic, social, personal, sexual. The Counter-Culture offered its own critique of male identity, questioning the soulless ambition it detected behind our democratic-capitalist order, wondering whether the self-reliance of the traditional ideal was not in fact a psychotic refusal of human intimacy. And the Vietnam War raised corrosive doubts about the identification of masculinity with violence.

The culture’s response to these challenges was complex. In some quarters there was retrenchment, a vehement doubling-down best represented, perhaps, by Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” pictures and Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” franchise. The message of these movies seemed pretty straightforward: male authority was under attack, civilization was at risk, what was needed wasn’t neurotic self-doubt but heroic self-assertion: not less male violence, but more. (To be fair, Eastwood is a far more complex figure than this snapshot suggests. Early films such as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” begin a criticism of machismo continued by later pictures such as “Unforgiven” and “Gran Torino.”)

It was in this highly contested landscape that Garner offered up his own version of masculinity. No one ever mistook him for a proto-metrosexual; his athlete’s physique and rugged good looks were squarely in line with the Gary Cooper – Rock Hudson – Paul Newman image of male beauty. Nor was he an early version of that other alternative design, the “sensitive guy.” He was something different: a decent guy. Garner’s unrushed, polite manner suggested an openness to the presence and judgments of others, just as his obvious intelligence indicated a mind more interested in understanding the world than subjugating it. His belief that others have rightful claims to press allowed him to see social life as transactional rather than adversarial, and this, in turn, freed him to approach it with a different set of evaluative categories. What usually mattered to his characters— Rockford, for example— wasn’t the gender or class or race or ethnicity of other persons, but whether they were honest and loyal human beings: attributes necessary for social cooperation, and equally available to all of us.

Given these attitudes, it’s no surprise that Garner’s characters were uneasy with violence. Force, as Simone Weil said, is what makes a human being into a thing, and nobody who accepts the humanity of others wants to see them turned into things. To be sure, Rockford was no pacifist. Almost every episode involved fisticuffs and gun play of one kind or another, but such things were never his preferred approach; he would usually go out of his way to avoid physical danger. When one client offered him a job that sounded a bit too scary, Rockford was quick to decline, prompting a puzzled response from his prospective employer. “I don’t understand. I was told you were very reliable.” Rockford’s answer? “Reliable, yes. But chicken.” His investigative methods favored ruses and scams, usually built on fast patter and smooth lines. Words, so despised by the traditional ideal, were Rockford’s stock-in-trade.

Garner’s implied critique of American masculinity wasn’t just a matter of personality. The Rockford Files, in particular, embraced it as a conscious theme. Many episodes explore confrontations between Rockford and men whose personas are more conventionally masculine. The most revealing of these is probably “The Man Who Saw The Alligators,” a 1979 episode written by David Chase, a staff writer for the show who would go on to create The Sopranos. Chase’s script is an almost Jacobean revenge drama, in which “Anthony Boy” Gagglio, a hit man from New Jersey who blames Rockford for the prison sentence he just served, sets out to locate and murder him. Gagglio, played with truly terrifying intensity by George Loros, is single-minded, cold, implacable— the very emblem, in other words, of many traditionally male attributes that Rockford eschews. Trapped in an isolated vacation home, fighting for the lives of two friends as well as his own, Rockford adroitly plays for time and in the end defeats Gagglio, but not before the latter engages in a final conversation with his younger brother. (Who, he knows, has betrayed him.) The conversation reveals the superficially detached and disciplined killer to be, in fact, an incoherent bundle of anxieties and paranoia. Remember when you were a kid, and I told you about the alligators under the bed? he asks his brother. “They’re really there.” Gagglio’s macho is a thinly stretched mask over fear and rage, and we are invited to extend this insight to machismo in general.

The show was explicit in depicting the social possibilities created when inclusion replaces domination. This was particularly obvious in its treatment of women. Rockford seemed perfectly at ease with professional women and with their demands for greater personal (and sexual) freedom. His lawyer was a woman, and a serious love interest— wonderfully played by Kathryn Harrold— was a psychologist. Rockford once upbraided his father for referring to a woman as a “strumpet” because she had lived with a man without benefit of marriage. “Did I hear you right?” he asked. “When did you start bucking for the Cotton Mather award?”

Even more daringly for its time, Rockford refused to treat homosexuals as objects of sport or derision. “The Empty Frame,” an episode from season five, revolved around an obviously gay couple. But their sexual orientation was never the focus of the story; it was offered as just another fact about them, then shrugged off and taken more or less for granted.

Garner’s version of masculinity— rueful, self-deprecating, relaxed— fit seamlessly into this new world of tolerance and inclusion. It would be hard to overstate its appeal to someone like me, a skinny kid growing up in a rough-hewn place (the North Carolina foothills), whose vocabulary was vastly more developed than his biceps. If being a man meant being John Wayne or Charles Bronson, I was clearly destined for something less than manliness. But Garner’s example gave me hope. It signaled a way of being masculine without becoming a macho jerk, of shaping a self that didn’t confuse integrity with hostility.

In the A.V.Club piece mentioned earlier, the writer perceptively notes that Rockford, while it featured many noir elements, seldom embraced noir wholeheartedly. I don’t think this was simply a matter of the series’ insistent humor, nor of Rockford’s living at the beach and not, like Philip Marlowe, in Los Angeles proper. I think it derived ultimately from the same decency that informed Garner’s masculinity— from a genial determination to judge human life a great good thing. In the credits that precede each Rockford episode, there’s a shot of Garner with his face lifted into the sun and a satisfied, almost rapturous smile. A golden glow covers the frame. When we accept ourselves and others for what we are, it suggests, we release grace and goodness — and light.

So bon voyage, Jimbo. If there is another side, I hope to see you there. And I’ll bring the tacos.

Nothing short of eloquent Dobie. Thank you for sharing! James Garner was not only the star of my favorite TV show but a person I respect for his integrity and more importantly, his willingness to act in accordance with his beliefs of inclusiveness. He attended the March on Washington in 1963 with Sidney Poitier and others. He met his wife at a rally for Adlai Stevenson, and never lost his focus of progressive ideals. I count myself fortunate to have met him, if ever so briefly, in the mid 90’s while he was filming the Rockford Files TV movies. He never lost sight of the average man though he achieved so much and could easily have done so.

I am also a huge fan of David Janssen and particularly his portrayal of Harry-O. It’s perhaps my second favorite series after The Rockford Files. Sadly he died far too young, when I was just 9 or 10 and I didn’t discover his work until I was older. Thank you for the link to his greatest role. Sorry to Fugitive fans.

[Little Garwood]

I am also a huge fan of David Janssen and particularly his portrayal of Harry-O. It’s perhaps my second favorite series after The Rockford Files. Sadly he died far too young, when I was just 9 or 10 and I didn’t discover his work until I was older. Thank you for the link to his greatest role. Sorry to Fugitive fans.

David Janssen was a TV legend, but is someone who is rarely, if ever, remembered nowadays. Even his post-Harry O career largely consists of forgettable TV movies. The viewing culture had already changed during Janssen’s lifetime; he deserved better.

I’ve only seen a handful of Harry O episodes, but I’ve watched enough to know that the series is right up my proverbial alley. Janssen having gone forgotten makes the series all the more interesting—and poignant—to me. I have a fascination with that brief 1970s window in which the series exists. I rapidly lose interest in pop culture post-1975. Shows like The Rockford Files held on a bit longer into the malaise-ridden late ‘70s, but it would have been interesting to see what Harry O would have done had it been permitted ro continue—it’s a shame it didn’t.

[Little Garwood]

Shows like The Rockford Files held on a bit longer into the malaise-ridden late ‘70s, but it would have been interesting to see what Harry O would have done had it been permitted ro continue—it’s a shame it didn’t.

Rockford began as an on-target commentary of mid-‘70s cultural foibles, yet ended as the lone voice of reason in a country heading (sadly and foolishly) towards 1980s oblivion! Had the suits at Universal not yanked the plug on TRF, the series might have served as one of the few, if only, tv shows to satirize the 1980s as effectively as it did the ‘70s…just as Kolchak: The Night Stalker did; David Chase being the common denominator on those two shows.

[Little Garwood]

“…And so, an unsettling day for Tim Richie. Pop legend, one time gyrating lead vocalist for the now-defunct super group, The Suspects. Now an enduring solo rock powerhouse. A man who’s been called everything from the primo white blues vocalist in the world to ‘the original bad boy.’ Today, no smashing of amplifiers, no mascara and rouge. Today, only a man pondering the fifteen million dollar price tag of love.”

~Only Rock and Roll Will Never Die (Part I)

The Tim Richie character is involved in a “palimony” suit like the one actor Lee Marvin endured with his longterm live-in girlfriend a few years before this episode of TRF aired.
——————————-

I also get a kick out of this exchange between pop music journalist Whitney Cox (Marcia Strassman) and Our Man Jim:

Whitney Cox: “You see, it’s my thesis that the macho man-of-action-cowboy-as-sex-symbol is not only over but history. When you take Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, even John Travolta, they’ve all proven that. It’s my feeling that Tim Richie is the most sensual man of his time; the sexual bellwether and prototype of everything you’re going to see as we leave the ‘70s behind us.”

Jim Rockford: “Yeah, really, yeah, yeah. My dad and I were gabbing about that just the other night. [Looks behind him] You ready to go, Eddie?”

[Little Garwood]

My Season Three Episode ratings…figured I’d better do it before this thread drops off the first page:

The Fourth Man 9/10
The Oracle Wore a Cashmere Suit 9/10
The Family Hour 8/10
Feeding Frenzy 7/10

Drought at Indianhead River 8/10
Coulter City Wildcat 7/10
So Help Me God 8/10
Rattlers’ Class of ‘63 8/10

Return to the 38th Parallel 6/10
Piece Work 7/10
The Trouble with Warren 6/10
There’s One in Every Port 6/10

Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, But Waterbury Will Bury You 8/10
The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers: Part 1 8/10
The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers: Part 2 8/10
The Becker Connection 6/10

Just Another Polish Wedding 10/10
New Life, Old Dragons 6/10
To Protect and Serve: Part 1 7/10
To Protect and Serve: Part 2 7/10

Crack Back 6/10
Dirty Money, Black Light 10/10

[ZelenskyTheValiant (Ivan)]

My Season Three Episode ratings…figured I’d better do it before this thread drops off the first page:

The Fourth Man 9/10
The Oracle Wore a Cashmere Suit 9/10
The Family Hour 8/10
Feeding Frenzy 7/10

Drought at Indianhead River 8/10
Coulter City Wildcat 7/10
So Help Me God 8/10
Rattlers’ Class of ‘63 8/10

Return to the 38th Parallel 6/10
Piece Work 7/10
The Trouble with Warren 6/10
There’s One in Every Port 6/10

Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, But Waterbury Will Bury You 8/10
The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers: Part 1 8/10
The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers: Part 2 8/10
The Becker Connection 6/10

Just Another Polish Wedding 10/10
New Life, Old Dragons 6/10
To Protect and Serve: Part 1 7/10
To Protect and Serve: Part 2 7/10

Crack Back 6/10
Dirty Money, Black Light 10/10

Out of the first batch of 4 I think "The Family Hour" (with Burt Young and Kim Richards) is the strongest. "The Fourth Man" is pretty strong too so I agree with that one. But I think "Oracle" is rated too high. It's not on the same level as the other 2 I mentioned. Although Robert Webber is always good.

I also never understood the great love for "Polish Wedding". You have it as pretty much the best episode of season 3. Is it the pairing of Hayes and Gossett? Is it the Nazi bar scene? Though I honestly don't remember much about that scene because I haven't seen this episode in so long. Guess it's time for a revisit.

Also surprised how low "To Protect and Serve" is. That one typically gets a lot of love and I think Joyce Van Patten delivers an Emmy-worthy performance! She really makes that two-parter. The other stuff in the episode (kidnapping, etc.) I care less about. Yes, even "Tony Boy" Gagglio.

My personal 10/10 for the season would be "The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers". My #1 ROCKFORD episode!

[Little Garwood]

Out of the first batch of 4 I think "The Family Hour" (with Burt Young and Kim Richards) is the strongest. "The Fourth Man" is pretty strong too so I agree with that one. But I think "Oracle" is rated too high. It's not on the same level as the other 2 I mentioned. Although Robert Webber is always good.

I think people rate steak “too high” and asparagus “too low.” There are MPI episodes others here rate “too high” (or “too low”) but it’s just a matter of everyone’s personal taste.

Speaking only for myself, “Oracle” rates that high partly because I enjoy the Garner-Webber interactions. I also have liked Webber in just about everything in which I’ve watched him (ever see Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia? Webber is hilarious and brutal in that).

I also never understood the great love for "Polish Wedding". You have it as pretty much the best episode of season 3. Is it the pairing of Hayes and Gossett? Is it the Nazi bar scene? Though I honestly don't remember much about that scene because I haven't seen this episode in so long. Guess it's time for a revisit.

I am rarely confused as to “why” someone likes or dislikes something. For example, I can see why someone enjoys, say, The Grateful Dead rock band, but they do absolutely nothing for me.

I suppose one either likes or dislikes the “flash and smash” pairing of Louis Gossett, Jr. and Isaac Hayes; I like it. And yes, the comedic banter between the duo and the Nazi bar scene are definitely highlights. I also appreciate the fact that the episode fits comfortably within the “Rockfordverse”, unlike some other “back-door pilots” (Two Birds of a *cough cough* Feather).

Also surprised how low "To Protect and Serve" is. That one typically gets a lot of love and I think Joyce Van Patten delivers an Emmy-worthy performance! She really makes that two-parter. The other stuff in the episode (kidnapping, etc.) I care less about. Yes, even "Tony Boy" Gagglio.

I agree with you on the episode’s quality and JVP’s performance. I just don’t particularly enjoy watching that one. Maybe it’s being a two parter hurts it in my view, though S6’s Only Rock and Roll Will Never Die is a two parter, but it’s a lot lighter in tone than “To Protect and Serve.”

Speaking of Joyce Van Patten, I was surprised to learn she was married to Dennis “Richie Brockelman” Dugan for 13 years!

My personal 10/10 for the season would be "The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers". My #1 ROCKFORD episode!

My Mrs. adores that episode! She loves Strother Martin’s character.

My favorite S3 episode is “Dirty Money, Black Light.”

[Luther's nephew Dobie]

Little Garwood wrote:
I suppose one either likes or dislikes the “flash and smash” pairing of Louis Gossett, Jr. and Isaac Hayes; I like it. And yes, the comedic banter between the duo and the Nazi bar scene are definitely highlights. I also appreciate the fact that the episode fits comfortably within the “Rockfordverse”, unlike some other “back-door pilots” (Two Birds of a *cough cough* Feather).

LG,
"Flash and smash pairing", that sums them up perfectly, a most stylish bit of phrasing.
I always liked Hayes simmering resentment of Gossett's con man hustle, getting over on people instead of putting it on the line and facing the consequences.
Too bad Rockford Files didn't have them on 2 or 3 times a season.
On a certain level isn't Gossett's character a tad more slimy take on Jim at his most manipulative?
I think, as Ivan said, it's time to revisit this episode.
I want to see if we are meant to see similarities between Garner/Gossett's roles.