Friday marks the opening of “Noir City: Chicago,” the weeklong festival of film noir presented by Music Box and the Film Noir Foundation. This is the ninth annual edition, which should give you some idea of the festival’s popularity, and with each passing year the programmers, having already screened most of the classic noirs of the 1940s and ’50s, have to strain a little harder to come up with fresh titles. Opening night is a case in point: a double feature of L.A. Confidential (1997), Curtis Hanson’s star-studded Oscar winner about corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department of the early 50s, and Dragnet (1954), Jack Webb’s theatrical spin-off from his wildly popular radio and TV show.
The spin-off feature screening on Friday shows Webb struggling to extend his narrative format to 90 minutes, but the first 30 demonstrate what made the series so compelling. Making his feature directing debut, he opens with a dynamic and highly cinematic sequence in which a local hoodlum, lured into a field by an associate, is ambushed by a third man who takes him down with a shotgun. But after that the movie’s pleasures, in keeping with the show’s radio origins, are chiefly verbal: Friday’s rat-a-tat voice-over narration, compulsively noting the clock time of each errand; the high volume of technical information, as a forensic chemist explains the physical evidence recovered from the scene of the crime; the coiled, world-weary dialogue, ending inevitably in one of Sergeant Friday’s harsh judgments. If nothing else, Webb knew how to deliver a punch line. “Now listen to me, cop, I pay your salary!” cries one suspect. Friday snaps, “Sit down, I’m gonna earn it.”
Onscreen this kind of aggression can be exciting, but in real life Parker’s paramilitary approach, with police cadets subjected to the sort of high-stress training favored by the marines, began to make the LAPD seem like an occupying army. Parker bowed to pressure and integrated all LAPD units in 1962, but the department’s relationship with the city’s black and Latino populations remained sour. That same year the NAACP and Malcolm X both denounced the LAPD after a traffic stop of two Black Muslims culminated in 75 officers conducting a deadly assault on a Nation of Islam mosque. Between 1963 and 1965, LAPD officers killed no fewer than 60 black citizens, 27 of them shot in the back. Parker’s clueless response to the Watts riots of August 1965, combined with his increasingly visible alcoholism, had begun to isolate him politically when he died of a heart attack in 1966, at a dinner in his honor that was being emceed by Jack Webb.
Directed by Jack Webb
