This episode is drowning in extras, and has a court scene.
Virginia Gregg is dynamite in this episode.
"This is the city-- Los Angeles, California. It's a big city and a lot of money can be made here. The great majority spend their time working hard to support themselves and their families. There's a small minority who spend their time thinking up ways to separate these people from their hard-earned pay. It's my job to try and stop them. I carry a badge."
Zoom out, pan per usual.
This construction site is used as arrival footage when they bust the guy selling NALE cards in a different frauds episode.
I GOT TO GET TO CRENSHAW, MAN
Oooh! China Markers!!
Fun!!
WE AGREE CHINA MARKERS ARE FUN
Classified Ad Section
!!WANTED!!
Sales Personnel
$800 Mo. Guarantee - Experience Unnecessary
Fabulous Discount Service
Double earnings in a month
Double them again in two
UNLIMITED POTENTIAL
Earn over $100,000 Proof Available
Phone: Mrs. Horton Bonnie Bates - 933-7399
HOLD THE PHONE
Exiting Parker Center at night:
The set of the Brookfield Hotel is total backlot and meant to be a hotel on West Fifth - aka - Skid Row!
This is Virginia Gregg's fake, dead husband who does seem familiar.
Maybe he tended bar or was a bookie in another episode? We'll find him.
This is one of our recycled Dragnetters/John Waters-in-training.
There is some glee in Virginia Gregg holding up a giant check:
Consumers Trust & Savings Bank.
She has some neat, neat costumes in this episode. Vincent Dee did a good job.
She's doing sales/scamming in an 'evangelical' style.
Evangelical has the root 'the good news', as in 'spreading the good word'. One is typically charismatic.
But instead of "saving souls", Virginia is selling appliances in a Ponzi scheme.
There's another feather flower in the opposite alcove? You're killing me, er kidding me:
My grandmother had a terrifying feather flower from when she redecorated 45 or so years ago.
It was hidden behind the big console television and it scared the bejesus out of me.
It existed in our family home for over 20 years before we took the horrifying creation to a yard sale marked fifty cents. It was the first thing sold. I was flabbergasted.
It was green, orange, and nightmare-inducing.
Compare this hotel set to the modern (for the time!) Hotel Elsinore.
This stuff doesn't even make sense!
Contrast this clock with the modern one from the time we stuffed Peggy Webber into the trunk of a car.
That feather flower is going to leap forward and attack that guy!
Dollar Wise.
A lithograph, a sconce, a juke box.
A jumble of chairs, a plant slowly giving up.
The style of painting all of your woodwork and all of your trim the same color is coming back into fashion. Here it's just meant to make the place look old and out of style:
Dang! That clock is huge!
Oh! Virginia Gregg in a purple gown. So nice.
Aaaaaand - now we're in court.
Hi, Vinton Hayworth:
Tape player is placed on a book for visual interest:
Those earrings are ka-razy!
Our Jury:
Another dude that looks like a muppet.
(I love Big Mean Carl, actually. My favorite bit was when he swallowed the porcupine.)
Joe totally namechecks the police cartography department:
I WAS IN WORLD PREMIERE DRAGNET
I DON'T KNOW IF I LOVE LUCY OR NOT
I LOOK JOHN WATERS CREEPY
I'M IN TONS OF EPISODES
I'M A LAWYER IN REAL LIFE, YOU GUYS
Big, weird fuzzy green swing dress. Maybe it's a feather flower costume.
Dude's about to bust out a slide rule.
THIS IS A SLIDE RULE, YOU GUYS
I'M NOT IMPRESSED
Mrs. Horton Bonnie Bates
Fined $500 and sentenced to six months probation.
(That's all?!)
S2e12
Aired 30 November 1967
Starred
Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday
Harry Morgan as Officer Bill Gannon
Virginia Gregg as Bonnie Bates
______ as the late Horton Bates
Byron Morrow as Palmer Forrest
Bert Fields, Esq. as Hal Davies
Robert Cornthwaite as Dr. Edgar Sundstrom
Art Gilmore as Captain Lambert
Byron Keith as Nick Gowers
Vinton Hayworth as The Judge
Chet Stratton as Everett Tottle
Sam Edwards as Mr. Black
Alma Platt as Little Old Lady
Sidney Clute as Salesman
Art Direction - Russell Kimball
Set Decor - John McCarthy and John Sturtevant
Costumes - Vincent Dee
Written by Norman Lessing
See you next week when we figure out what the heck is going on with those NALE cards that are going around...
I like the way the tambourine was used in the line up sequence at the end. Nice touch.
ReplyDeleteGeez - that clock IS big.
Interesting to watch this stuff 50 years later. My roommate got sucked up into a pyramid scheme a couple weeks ago.. $120 to sign up, they sell insurance but it is multi level marketing, at the intro it was a bunch of people in a room, they were handing out checks showing how much these people were making, just like this episode.
ReplyDelete(Delete prior comment, please edit this out). The guy above the "seems familiar" picture and sitting in the front row is no less than Sam Edwards, my dad. When his family was doing radio in the late 1930s and early 1940s on KGO in San Francisco, Webb auditioned for a part on The Edwards Family but was ultimately rejected as being too stiff or not right. He remembered that years later, jokingly, and constantly used Sam on Dragnet episodes and his other series. This appearance featured a lot of Sam, and I remember him liking it, but also being frustrated with Webb's propensity to try to get 30 minutes of dialog into 24 minutes. Just the facts. More on Sam at http://ragpiano.com/sam_bio.shtml
ReplyDeleteThe "China markers are fun" bit made me laugh out loud. Thanks for this hilarious blog! I'll be reading more :)
ReplyDeleteI discovered this blog last night during my screening of "The Missing Realtor" and subsequent search for how I too could procure the SINGLE GREATEST HAIRPIECE IN THE HISTORY OF PROSTHETICS. This is a terrific homage to the truly classic television! I am eager to triangulate the episodes themselves, the IMdb trivia and goofs sections, and this blog. I can already tell that my productivity will fall off a cliff for the next several weeks as I focus on area of study.
ReplyDeleteI have endured a couple of excellent pyramid scheme sales pitches, so called network marketing. One was slickly delivered by someone that was driving a Jag (not a Cad) and the other was very folksy, no less compelling. I had friends that were really, really in to the first system (which was a quasi-Amway outfit) and they spent five or six nights a week attending presentations - just brutal - and they were making zero money - just spending time, gas, and their own cash on mediocre products.