Note: This article originally appeared in Crimespree Magazine in 2010.
I recently spent the winter weeks revisiting The Rockford Files.
It’s a little tough, now, to grasp what a radical,
quirky show Rockford represented in
the early 1970s.
James Garner was known to me: I’d recently seen him in Support Your Local Sheriff (an ABC
“Movie of the Week” or the like). My mother had told me about Maverick — had nearly named me “Bret”
after Garner’s character before opting for “Craig” Stevens of Peter Gunn fame.
Friday night, October 11, 1974: twisting channels
(pre-remote days, don’t you know), I saw, “James Garner in…”
The first episode I caught was one called “Tall Woman in
Red Wagon,” scripted by Stephen J. Cannell from a story by Roy Huggins.
Befitting the series title — but not typical of the
show’s overall format — this episode was framed in flashback.
It opens with Jim Rockford digging up a grave — you
wouldn’t catch Mannix, McGarrett or Cannon doing that.
In the course of the episode, we get Rockford’s déclassé
digs — a house trailer with a million-dollar Malibu view. We meet his hectoring
but loveable old man and we see that sweet tan Firebird (license #853-OKG).
We’re introduced to the slick mini-printing press Jim
uses for cranking out on-the-spot business cards. We see a frustrated Rockford
back his Pontiac into a suspected tail — at speed.
Something else Barnaby Jones would never have the stones to do.
Case solved?
Requisite T.V.-P.I. closure?
Yes and no. From the get-go, Rockford didn’t toe the
party line.
As the series evolved, we got a floating pool of
recurring characters that gave weight and novelistic scope to Jim’s world.
The writing, featuring some early, brilliant work by
David Chase, was sly, knowing and rarely risk averse.
The tone of the show deftly merged comedy and drama, suspense
and parody and even some unexpected, powerfully mounted social commentary
(season three’s “So Help Me God”) in a way precious few series have come close
to matching.
Even the clunker episodes are never less than amiably
watchable, and a couple of truly radical episodes are, in their strangeness,
charmingly jaw-dropping.
Of the latter ilk, I personally favor “Irving the
Explainer,” scripted by David Chase.
It’s a wild concoction of art treasures stolen by the Nazis, a sinister
German chiropractor, agents of the Sûreté, a vintage and sleazy 1940s-era
Hollywood murder and two men who share the name Irving.
The result is a dizzyingly convoluted thicket of
suspects, motives and crimes, so complex Rockford resorts to hiring a UCLA
logic student to flow-chart the case.
About once a season, in a wink at Maverick, Garner would unleash the persona of cowboy-hat wearing
tycoon Jimmy Joe Meeker (think Brett Maverick with a car). These episodes,
perhaps attempting to cash-in on the early 1970s’ success of The Sting (which in turn plundered the
classic Maverick episode “Shady Deal
at Sunny Acres”), turned on big-store con games:
Jim sold natural gas rights back to crooked real estate
agents and mounted a phony King Tut exhibit among other bunko schemes run in
the name of (cockeyed) justice.
By the time The
Rockford Files reached its fifth and final full-season, the show was
arguably at the top of its game.
Of course it had to end sometime.
Rockford’s end was more bittersweet than most.
A frankly uneven sixth season was suspended abruptly
when its star’s health collapsed.
Garner — an intensely loyal man — had exacted a heavy
toll on an already beaten-up body by increasingly doing many of his own stunts,
partly it was reported, to spare his longtime and ailing stunt double.
When Garner’s illness lingered, NBC cancelled the
series, and, in time, studio suits and Garner found themselves in litigation
over accounting practices. (Legal entanglements with studios is a kind of
running motif in Garner’s career: He also wound up in legal battles decades
earlier regarding matters related to Maverick.)
The series went into heavy syndication…remained a fond
memory.
In the 1990s, quite unexpectedly, the first of what
would prove to be eight Rockford Files
reunion movies debuted. The first four of these are now available on DVD.
Although a couple of the films feel slightly padded to
fill their running time, for the most, the movies work extremely well. The
chemistry is still there among the key players (although Noah Beery, Jr.’s “Joseph
‘Rocky’ Rockford” is sorely missed).
Returning writers Cannell, Chase and Juanita Bartlett
used the movies to pick up dangling threads from the series and round out some
story arcs lingering from the old days, bringing back, among others, Rita
Moreno’s Rita Kapkovic and Rockford’s memorable ex-flame Megan Dougherty,
played by Kathryn Harrold.
In the purest sense, the movies are a gift to longtime
Rockford fans left frustrated by the series’ sad and jagged end.
While the movie cycle also didn’t end definitively — the
last movie sat on the shelf for nearly two years before finally being aired —
it was, on balance, a strong note to end on. It felt, for the most part, some
capstone had been fit.
Years passed.
Everything, it seems, gets (or receives talk of) a
remake.
Eventually, someone had the audacity to suggest a Rockford relaunch.
Lord knows, from Doctor
Who to the latest Star Trek film,
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by many a reboot.
But the idea of a wholly new Rockford goes down hard and thick.
If somebody want to mount some homage and slap a
different name on the title character, well, go for it, I suppose.
But the personas of Jim Garner and Jim Rockford are too
inextricably bound for any passing of the baton. (Granted, the same might have
been said of Maverick’s leap to film,
but Garner was very much a player in that one, and, from a character
standpoint, could easily have been playing the Bret Maverick we recalled from
the original).
Some things just shouldn’t be done (take shot-for-shot
remakes of Psycho, for instance).
At this writing, it looks like NBC is plunging ahead
with this mad scheme; I’m crossing my fingers the situation reverses and saner
heads prevail.
Why spoil a wonderful memory?
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