Hitchcock and Homicide

First was Sabotage (1936). In this film, Police Sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder) is masquerading as a stock boy in a fruit stand to keep an eye on Carl Verloc (Oskar Homolka), who runs a movie theatre and who is suspected of being a saboteur for the enemy (presumably the Axis powers). At the beginning of the film, London's power is cut for an hour or so, and it's clear that Verloc is responsible, although his wife (Sylvia Sidney) claims he was home the whole time. Verloc plots with other spies to drop a bomb in a populated center, but things go horribly awry and Spencer must pick up the pieces - particularly Mrs. Verloc, with whom he has (of course) fallen in love.

The back end of the double feature was Secret Agent, starring a very young John Gielgud as Richard Ashendon, a British officer whose death is staged so he can go to Switzerland to try to find or kill a German agent. His resources includes a fictional wife, Elsa (Madeleine Carroll, who was also in The 39 Steps), and a professional assassin called The General (Peter Lorre). Problem is, Ashendon and company don't know who the German agent is, and their main contact is killed before they can get to him. As the story progresses, Ashendon and Elsa have second thoughts about killing someone in cold blood, especially if it's the wrong someone, even as they fall for each other for real.

Again, neither of these is a great film. Sabotage is the better of the two, with an effective (if long) suspense sequence in the middle in which an unwitting individual is trying to deliver the bomb to its destination before it explodes. The ending is somewhat chaotic and is wrapped up perhaps a bit too neatly, but the plot at least hangs together decently.

Secret Agent, on the other hand, is played rather broadly for humor (Lorre, in particular, mostly appears to be a fruitcake, a faux-Hispanic sixth Marx Brother, if you can imagine that), and the moments of suspense or terror seem almost surreal - difficult to take seriously. The ending turns out to be fairly ridiculous, based more on fate than on the actions of our heroes, and with a peculiar destiny for The General. The loose ends are tied up through deus ex machina.

It seems fairly clear to me, after four Hitchcock films from the 30s, that Hitchcock was still learning his craft at this point. It would not surprise me if Rebecca turns out to have been his first really great film.

After the movies we had dinner at Taxi's, a burger joint in Palo Alto. It's an okay place - their onion rings are actually quite yummy, and their milkshakes are not bad, although the Peninsula Creamery is considerably better (and nearby). We chatted about the movies and about sports (baseball season - conceptually, if not actually - is getting underway, as the Cubs' pitchers and catchers have reported to Spring Training). A good time was had.

Even better, though, I got home just in time to watch the new Homicide TV-movie. I will be discussing some spoilers in the show (and there are some biggies!), so if you haven't seen it, you might want to skip this section. But I do strongly recommend this movie! It should be fairly watchable for even non-fans.

You may recall that I spent much of 1999 watching the entire Homicide TV series (seven seasons!), which ended last May. It turns out that part of NBC's reason for cancelling the show was to come up with another "womens' series" to put back-to-back with (I think) Providence on Friday nights. Well, that other series promptly went into the toilet, making NBC look rather foolish. Apparently plans for a TV-movie were assembled rather quickly, with the "hook" being that every single major character (and many recurring characters) would occur during the course of the movie.

Well, they deliver on that promise: Al Giardello ("Gee"), the Lieutenant in charge of the homicide unit during the whole series, and promoted to Captain at the end of the last season, is running for mayor of Baltimore, and is critically shot during a speech. In an extremely effective sequence as he's taken to the hospital, most of the cast members are informed of the event: Al's son, Mike, is now a beat cop. Stu Gharty is running the unit in Gee's absence, with Lewis, Falsone, Sheppard, Ballard, and Stivers are still in the unit. Former detectives Bolander and Kellerman hear about it through the media, and Kay Howard is told of it during an arrest. John Munch, now in New York and appearing on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is contacted by telephone, as is Bayliss (on a leave of absence from the department) and his old partner Frank Pembleton, now a teacher at a religious school. They all converge on the department to help investigate, as other old friends (cameraman James Brodie, Detective Megan Russert, Dr. Julianna Cox) arrive to sympathize and keep watch on Gee.

Unsurprisingly, the film is a treat for old fans. Bayliss and Pembleton work together again, and Pembleton - retired from the force - is free to speak his mind to Gharty, whose gutlessness in the face of his superiors causes some problems. (It would have been nice to see Gharty stand up to the higher-ups more plainly; I've always felt he was not well-written.) Munch and Bolander, and Lewis and Sheppard also check out some possibilities, and we see a variety of flashbacks to old episodes which might bear on the case.

Mike Giardello is strained to the breaking point, assaulting reporters who intrude on his family. Gharty sends him out to investigate a possible revenge motive from the Italian district (the Giardellos are Sicilian), and in perhaps the most fall-down-funny sequence of the movie (despite the grimness of its subject matter), we see Mike beating down various suspects for information while Kellerman ambles around eating various food and watching Mike's back. (Kellerman finally pulls Mike away and tells him it's a dead end.)

The movie wraps up one loose end from the TV show: Bayliss admits to Pembleton that he executed a murderer who got off on a technicality, and he's being torn apart by his decision, and wants Frank to turn him in. Frank damns him for putting this decision on him, apparently not having seen the gradual changes that Bayliss went through during the series, the stress the job placed on him. The case of the man Bayliss murdered is written on the board on blue, indicating a solved case from a previous year, though it's left open whether Bayliss turned himself in, or if Frank did it.

The kicker, in the end of the film, is that despite it all, Gee dies of an aneurism. The rock of a man who guided the show through seven seasons is finally gone. In the afterlife (which looks a lot like the homicide unit's rooms) he meets two other late cast members: Beau Felton and Steve Crosetti, whose poker game he joins. The film closes out with a nice montage of moments with Gee, following on the heels of an exchange between Pembleton and Mike Giardello, who never met during the series; this scene had a "passing of the torch" feeling.

There are rumors that there might be a second Homicide series, which would certainly be welcome, though it's hard to see where to go from here. Could Gharty become lieutenant? Seems implausible. And the remaining cast members are among the most bland of the series, and they're all very young, without the balance of Bolander, Pembleton, or even Munch to add a sense of history. (Lewis I guess is now the longest-standing cast member.) I think they'd need to stand back a bit and consider what other avenues they might take in a second series, to approach the subject from a fresh perspective. Perhaps do a series about a different shift of characters?

At any event, if it all ends here, it's a nice coda for the series. A little bittersweet, but what do you expect? The name of the series is Homicide.