Background: In May, 1966, after nine successful seasons, Raymond Burr’s iconic run as the lead in Perry Mason came to an end. Nine months later, NBC would release a pilot film for Ironside, about a former San Francisco police detective who continues to fight crime after being confined to a wheelchair. Ironside would become a regular series for the 1967-68 TV season, and then run for eight seasons, meaning Burr had a run of 17 of 18 seasons as the lead of a mystery program.
I’d never watched a full episode of Ironside in my life, but prompted by a comment in regard to a recent Kojak audiodrama review, I decided to check out the TV movie (affiliate link) on Prime where it is currently available to subscribers for free.
The Plot:
San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside (Burr) takes his first vacation in 20 years on a farm outside of the city, where he’s felled by a sniper’s bullet. He’s rushed to the hospital when he’s found in the morning, and his demise is anticipated by both the media and his colleagues on the San Francisco PD. He survives, but is left paralyzed for the rest of his life, and retires from the police force. However, Ironside offers his services as an unpaid consultant and sets about investigating who tried to murder him.
The Good:
Raymond Burr got an Emmy nomination for his performance and he deserves it. As a fan of Dragnet, I see a lot of his Dragnet radio character Ed Backstrand in Ironside, a relentlessly driven, smart, tough, no-nonsense cop. Ironside could easily become cartoonish, particularly judging by some of what’s said about him when it’s thought he would die. “You know what he once told me? The only reason a cop should take a day off is for a death. His own!”
Yet Burr makes Ironside believable – a crusty, tough, smart cop who is unapologetically himself and is dedicated to his life’s work. He has no illusions about the nature of the job. He cares for the people around him, even if they don’t always appreciate how he shows it.
The series is also a fascinating time capsule of a time when accommodations for people with disabilities were far less common. Ironside takes charge of making his own arrangements to try and give himself as much a sense of mobility and independence as possible.
The mystery is well-crafted, playing to Ironside’s strengths, with enough surprises to make it a satisfying standalone experience.
The feature length of the pilot allows it to work effectively as a first episode, while at the same time introducing the main character and his supporting cast. I think the film does a mostly admirable job of giving us a feel for who Ironside is. The scenes where his life hangs in the balance are generally effective at helping us understand the man and his place in the world.
The Bad:
The film is strong, with only a few minor hiccups. There is one scene with multiple rapid cuts right in a row that I found unpleasant and disorienting, and it didn’t help that this occurrs at a key moment in the film.
While the telefilm mostly works, there are a few awkward moments as the series defines its lead and supporting cast. The best you can say for the supporting cast is that they’re present, but very one-dimensional. Reasons for that include the facts that 1) Burr’s performance would sell the series and 2) the supporting cast could easily be swapped out for the main run. This happened many times, but not on Ironside, as Detective Sergeant Ed Brown (Don Galloway), Officer Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson), and Ironside’s driver Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) all made the jump to being series regulars. And this isn’t a great introduction to them.
Sergeant Brown suffers the worst in a scene that highlights Ironside’s deductive brilliance. A bag found at the scene of Ironside’s shooting is labeled, “Some miscellaneous nuts.” Brown cheerily volunteers that he’d labeled that himself, before Ironside goes off to explain the very common sense reasons why you shouldn’t vaguely label crime scene evidence, and that the correct term is, “Five Acorns.”
While the moment illustrates Ironside’s genius, it makes Brown look incompetent, and it makes you wonder why Ironside would have him as an assistant. It has me expecting that as I watch the series, I’ll find Brown to be “the stupid one.” It also undercuts Ironside as a leader/teacher, because Brown serves under Ironside. How did Brown not know better than that?
Some might consider the identity of Ironside’s would be-assassin to be a negative as well. Early in the film, we learn that Ironside made a lot of highly dangerous enemies. So you’d expect some major criminal syndicate or a hardened criminal archenemy to be behind the killing. Halfway through the film, it becomes apparent that that’s not the case at all. I don’t consider this a negative as it just shows how the program is grounded in reality. In the real world, sometimes it’s not the obvious supercriminal that inflicts the most harm. Sometimes, it’s a random person with a weird motive. That’s life and that’s the nature of the job.
Noteworthy:
One of the surprising scenes has Ironside giving a speech that parallels one of Joe Friday’s most well-known speeches on Dragnet. In the episode “The Interrogation,” Friday delivers the famous “What is a Cop?” speech about the trials and tribulations of being a policeman to a young, discouraged policeman. In this episode, when Ironside is thought to be about to die, a news reporter finds a not-for-public-consumption speech that Ironside had given to a graduating police academy class. The TV movie aired only a few weeks after the Dragnet episode, and both were likely in production at the same time. So it’s likely a case of both productions’ writers picking up similar public sentiments about police.
Ironside’s speech is far shorter than Joe Friday’s, and far darker. Friday warns of many struggles that come with being a policeman but paints a picture of thousands of men who know “being a policeman is an endless, glamourless, thankless job that’s gotta be done.” Ironside has a similar message but ups the ante by emphasizing the likelihood of death. “And one day, you’ll stop a bullet, and they’ll decide you weren’t a brute, or a crook, or incompetent. Just a cop. A man trying to do an impossible job. And down at the station house, the squad will take up a collection for your widow, if you’ve been silly enough to get married. And that’ll be that.”
This is neither good nor bad, but definitely illustrative of who Ironside is as man and what viewers can expect from the series.
All in all, Ironside does everything it should: introducing the lead character, establishing the premise of a potential Ironside TV series, and introducing his supporting characters, and presenting a good mystery story. It doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does well enough to make the TV movie a worthwhile viewing experience for fans of Raymond Burr, classic police procedurals, and detective programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Rating: 4 out of 5
