Two things struck me as I watched the first 7 episodes of the old (1957-1960) cop show M Squad, starring a comparatively young Lee Marvin. First, like many old shows, this one provided a heart-warming parade of familiar faces, mostly future TV stars. This first disc alone offers up not only a couple of veteran b-movie actors (Morris Ankrum, who played military officers in seemingly every ’50s sci-fi movie), but people like DeForest Kelley and Mike Connors (Mannix) in one show, to the folks who play Col. Klink of Hogan’s Heroes, Aunt Harriet of Batman and Mrs. Ziffel of Green Acres in another.
The other thing I quickly figured out was that this was the particular show the Zucker brothers modeled their beloved but short-lived spoof Police Squad on. I didn’t know their show was mainly taken from one other one, but it makes sense, since their initial success Airplane took of its particulars from the old movie Zero Hour.
Here, Marvin’s serial opening voiceover intro, “I’m Frank Ballinger, Detective Lt. of M Squad, a special division of the Chicago police department”, served as the model for the similar voiceover intro of Police Squad‘s Frank Drebbin. The first couple of episodes of M Squad were leaned on particularly heavy, lending Police Squad such elements as its lab technician. Even some of the sets seen in that show seemed based on ones we see here early on. And although these early shows don’t feature it, we hear a jazzy piece of music over the DVD menu, which I’m assuming became the program’s theme later on in its run. This piece clearly inspired Police Squad‘s own jaunty jazz score.
M Squad proves a sort of mix of Dragnet, with its laconic, “just an average cop” voiceovers, and The Untouchables, with its Chicago setting and gobs of violence. Dragnet largely eschewed the latter—Joe Friday rarely drew his gun—but M Squad draws much more from films noirs and pulp detective stories. Shooting and murder play a much bigger part here. As for the “special division” thing, M Squad is sort of a squad of roving problem solvers, who go from one precinct to another whenever an onerous case comes up. This allows for a great deal of flexibility in what sorts of crimes Ballinger investigates, from homicide to bunco to vice and so on.
Marvin is unsurprisingly the main draw, and this probably represented his first attempt to move into good buy guy territory instead of the heavies he played in his early films and TV work. He plays Ballinger with a rolling looseness, playing off his natural grace. He gets opportunities to display his more typical touch guy qualities, but Ballinger basically seems as light-hearted a guy as you could expect given his job.
The Chicago setting is mostly established by dialogue references to local streets with occasional exterior shots of Ballinger walking past parts of the city’s distinctive architecture. Chances are, though, that these were all garnered on one trip to the city, as the show is otherwise often confined to the sorts of pretty obvious sets familiar from other TV programs of this period. So I’d expect the show was mainly shot in Los Angeles.
The DVD set has a pretty expensive list price ($120!), yet Amazon is selling it for a rather more reasonable $48, and some of their dealers have it for $40. The presentation is pretty weak, at least on the first disc. Some of the episodes look OK, but others are pretty bad, like the sorts of video tape copies we old-timers once got from places like Sinister Cinema because that was the only way to get old stuff. Presumably the shows were recorded via kinescopes, a process that basically involved putting a camera on a TV monitor as the show was being broadcast. On the other hand, while the presentation isn’t that great (although maybe it gets better?), for a reasonable price you get 15 DVDs covering three years of 117 (!) episodes, and a theme CD. And, of course, you can always get it through Netflix or maybe your local library.
Since like most early cop shows there is absolutely no sense of continuity here, I’ll probably skip ahead in the series when I next rent a disc to see the show after it’s more firmly established. It would be great if we got great presentations here, but still, it was nice to catch up on a show I’d often heard about but never gotten the chance to see.
