Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #12

The LAPD and its chief William Parker...

...spearheaded the campaign against it.

Parker leaked Intelligence

Division files...

...to discredit city housing

authority spokesman.

Frank Wilkinson as a Communist.

Then just before the

municipal elections of 1953,

...Parker helped smear incumbent

mayor Fletcher Bowron,

...a public housing supporter,

...for being soft on Wilkinson.

Bowron lost by 30,000 votes,

...and the new mayor killed

public housing for good.

The LAPD didn't control the

rackets in the fifties,

...it controlled the city.

The police corruption

in L.A. Confidential...

...is quaint by comparison.

What was really wrong with the

police during the Parker years...

...is revealed quite precisely...

...if unintentionally...

...by Dragnet,

...the TV series parodied

in L.A. Confidential.

Parker introduced the paranoid

style into American police work,

...striving to create

a police force...

...that would be feared and hated

by criminals and citizens alike,

...and Sgt. Joe Friday,

...the Organization Superman,

...embodied it perfectly.

"- All right, hands up on the wall.

- Not this time. I've got friends with me."

"- Would you rather do it downtown?

- Ah, get off my back. You know I'm clean."

"Are you? Hands up on the wall."

"All right, take everything

out of your pockets."

"- Where am I gonna put it?

- The ground will hold it."

Joe Friday thinks like a computer.

He walks and talks like a robot.

Actually, I love Dragnet,

...particularly its late

sixties reincarnation...

...when Friday got a new partner

and took on the youth culture.

"- Will you be seeing my father

after you leave? - Sure."

"Ask him to read the Bible."

"The epistle of Paul

to the Ephesians."

"- Maybe he'll understand.

- How's that?"

"Because of what it says

about our generation."

"Tell him to read Chapter six."

"'Fathers, provoke not

your children to wrath."

"The old ways are not their ways."

"Your dusk is their dawn.

The future is theirs."

"Try chapter five, lady."

"The apostle Paul also said this:"

"Yes, what is that?"

"See then that ye walk circumspectly,

not as fools, but as wise."

Its creator and star Jack Webb...

...directed each episode with a rigor

equaled only by Ozu and Bresson,

...the cinema's acknowledged masters

of transcendental simplicity.

Dragnet admirably expressed

the contempt the LAPD had...

...for the law-abiding citizens it was

pledged "to protect and to serve".

It protected us from ourselves,

...and it served us despite our best

efforts to make the job more difficult.

"Quinn, we'd like you to

come down for a show-up."

"Mr. Friday, you'd just as well

know now, I'm not gonna do it."

"- You afraid to testify, Quinn?

- I just don't remember."

"What is it? Your family,

your wife and children?"

"I don't have no family. I'm it,

the whole kit and caboodle..."

"...but I don't want to go downtown and

get all mixed up in something."

"You'll have to go before the grand

jury; they'll subpoena you."

"Mr. Friday..."

"...I'd like to ask you a question:"

"...if you was me, would you do it?"

"Can I wait awhile?"

"Before I'm you."

Friday's heavy-handed

irony never lets up.

None of the witnesses or

suspects he questions...

...penetrate his wall

of condescension.

- " You don't believe anything I've said.

- You make it a little difficult, lady."

"Why? I've told you the truth."

"Sure you did, three different ways."

"As I've been saying, I deal

in ideas, nothing more."

"I might even sell you a few."

"You couldn't sell me

directions to the men's room."

The grotesques and lunatics

he encountered every week...

...must have gone a long way to

establish the city's reputation...

...as the world capital of the weird.

"Ah, the powers of

flowers draw you here."

"- No ma'am. We're police officers.

- Oh, how lovely."

"Are you Miss Deleon?"

"Noradella DeLeone was my

given name, my family name..."

"But I changed it about an hour ago..."

"It's so contrived, so out of it..."

"Just call me Agnes Hickey."

"I'm not like some. I dig the fuzz."

"After all, you're like the

flowers yourselves."

"You have to live, too."

"Yes ma'am. Did you report

your purse stolen by a dog?"

Of course, Dragnet isn't a

documentary portrait of the LAPD,

...and its detectives weren't

really like Joe Friday.

What's scary is that he represented

the department's ideal.

Sometimes I wonder if we are

more obsessed with the police...

...than people in other cities.

Is there any other city where the police

put their motto in quotation marks?

Are they trying to be ironic?

Can there be a movie about Los

Angeles that isn't about its police?

Only if it's a movie

about the film industry,

...and even then, the police

usually get called in...

...although it's often a

suburban police force,

...not the LAPD.

"Mr. Mill, I'm detective

DeLongpre, Pasadena Police."

"No, I... You're putting me in

a terrible position here..."

"I would... I would hate to get

the wrong person arrested."

"Oh please, this is Pasadena. We

do not arrest the wrong person,"

"...that's L.A."

The Dragnet image gave way first...

...to the existential realism

of Joseph Wambaugh,

...LAPD sergeant turned

novelist and screenwriter.

In Wambaugh movies,

...police work makes cops

alcoholic or neurotic.

"We see things sometimes - cops.

Other people don't see..."

"...leaves stains."

"When you're investigating

and collecting clues?"

"We don't collect clues..."

"...we collect garbage and

pray somebody confesses."

They behave badly,

...they lose fights,

...they are humiliated,

...they die.

During the youth gang

hysteria of the eighties,

...the stoically heroic

cop made a comeback,

...and urban movie violence

turned toward the apocalyptic.

A cop killing machine emerged:

James Cameron's Terminator.

"I'll be back."

Cameron enjoyed killing off cops,

...and all of us cop haters got a kick out

of watching the massacres he staged.

At the same time,

...the image of the Los Angeles

policeman was splintering.

Sylvester Stallone essayed two

versions of the dandy cop.

Mel Gibson played a suicidal cop,

...and Richard Gere a homicidal cop.

Andy Garcia and Al Pacino

played cops with arty wives...

...who make them live in

uncoplike designer houses.

"This is my friend Ralph."

"- You didn't tell me you were...

- Sit down."

"Don't you even get angry?"

"I'm angry."

"I'm very angry, Ralph..."

"You know, you can ball my

wife if she wants you to..."

"You can lounge around

here on her sofa..."

"...in her ex-husband's dead-tech, post-

modernistic bullshit house if you want to..."

"But you do not..."

"...get to watch..."

"...my f***ing television set!"

"For God's sake."

After the videotaped and then televised

beating of Rodney King in 1991,

...Los Angeles movie

cops got even weirder.

There was a psycho cop...

"Well. I will be soon, baby,"

...a p*ssy-whipped cop...

"Say it."

- Okay.

- Say it.

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