(this blog was begun the night of September 20, 2019)
Tonight's movie was called "Warning Shot" (1967), a crime thriller about a police detective (David Janssen) who kills a man during a stakeout. As the movie opens, Janssen and his partner (Keenan Wynn) are keeping watch on an apartment building in the area of West Los Angeles. A serial killer is on the loose, and they think he may live there. As Janssen is hiding in the bushes near the front door, a man approaches from inside the complex. Also in the entryway is a large, fuzzy dog, who will add confusion to what is about to take place. After the man stops to pet the dog, he resumes his exit from the building, but something about his body language alerts David Janssen that he may be their man, the psycho killer they have been looking for.
As the guy exits the building, Janssen makes a snap decision to arrest him. He jumps from his hiding place to announce himself as a police officer, and the man runs back inside the courtyard of the apartment complex. Janssen gives chase, and within seconds he has shot and killed the man, who falls dead into the pool.
We the audience see that, prior to being shot, the man had pulled a gun from his coat pocket and was raising it to shoot at David Janssen at the moment he was blown away. But in the aftermath of the shooting, when the evidence team has arrived, no gun can be found. This is astounding to Janssen (and to us), because he knows what he saw, and he can even describe the model of gun, a .38 caliber pistol.
Because this was an officer involved shooting, Janssen must face a procedural review from the higher-ups at the department, and because no gun was found, on or near the suspect, he is relieved of duty and temporarily suspended. The hard charging D.A., who has a personal reason for hating bad cops, presses charges against Janssen immediately, because it turns out that the dead man was not the serial killer the police were looking for, but instead was a local doctor who was loved and respected in the community.
Sounds like a pretty good start to the plot, eh?
And it was a good start. Before I began watching, I had figured "Warning Shot" to be a TV movie that had 15 minutes of footage added to gain a theatrical release, made perhaps in 1974-75, during the golden era of the teleplay. I checked it out from the Libe a few days ago and I couldn't remember how I'd come to put a hold on it, or what search term I'd used in finding it. I knew it wasn't a David Janssen search. But at any rate, the dvd had arrived at Northridge Libe with a host of other films for which I did know the search origin, and because I didn't recall how I came to order "Warning Shot", or what it was about, I just figured from looking at the cast and the dvd box that it had been a TV movie that was later given a theatrical release, maybe in regional areas or as a "second run" feature. Adding to this conclusion were the many cameo appearances of stars like Joan Collins, Walter Pidgeon, Eleanor Parker and George Sanders, each of whom receive high billing but appear only briefly. This reminded me of the format of a late-70s show like "The Love Boat" or "Fantasy Island", which usually had featured guest stars from the movies of yesteryear in every episode.
To make a short story long, as I just did above, I didn't remember how I came to order "Warning Shot" from the library database, so when I got it, I just thought that it was a TV movie from the mid-1970s, which it was not. It was an actual theatrical release from 1967.
And it got off to a good start, as noted above before I went on my tangent.
(now it is Saturday afternoon September 21, 2019) .....and oh my goodness, here we are again with the return of the abominable two-day blog! "Oh Good Lord, Ad, don't start up with those again". I will try not to, but I can't make any promises. For now, let's remain optimistic and hope this will be the only one. Now let's get back to the movie.
The plot is very suspenseful for about the first 45 minutes, or approximately half the film. David Janssen is going to be prosecuted for shooting the "unarmed" man, and has only himself to rely on to uncover the truth. No one believes him that the man had a gun, so he undertakes his own investigation to try and locate it. His first step is to conduct interviews of other residents in the building to try and get a fuller picture of who the man was - besides just a beloved doctor - and what his interests may have been. This section of the movie is very involving and it looks like we have a top drawer mystery on our hands.
However, things bog down a bit in the second half, with cameo appearances from the about named actors that go on too long and in some cases are stylised or cliched to suit the guest star in question. For instance, Eleanor Parker plays the seductive, alcoholic wife of the late doctor (who knows what he was really like), and she was a good actress, but the scene comes across as specifically a cameo, like "here comes Eleanor Parker as the drunk wife". Do you get what I mean? You do if you know your 1970s television shows. One exception to the stylised cameos is the performance of George Grizzard as a happy-go-lucky airline pilot who lives in the apartment building. You really wonder what is up with his character, and he will keep you guessing as the rest of the plot unfolds. He also has some of the best lines in the movie, including some laugh-out-loud one liners near the end.
Overall, "Warning Shot" is worth a watch. I'm gonna be generous and give it Two Regular Thumbs Up, but had I finished this review last night as intended, I'd have only doled out one and one half thumbs. But yeah, the first half is very good, and even in the second half you get George Grizzard and a young Stephanie Powers to get you through some of the mundanity. I think they were trying to make a movie star out of David Janssen with this one, as he was hot off "The Fugitive", a hit show at the time. Maybe his persona didn't translate to the big screen in the long run, but he is very good here in an understated role.
So there you have it. Give "Warning Shot" a look, even if you can't remember why you ordered it. ////
That's all for now. I'll be back tonight at the Usual Time, and I'll be striving to keep the blogs arriving on deadline. Have an awesome day!
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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