This colorized 90 minutes of "Just the facts M'am", can't disguise that it's really an over-long 30 minute episode. Unlike the series, the movie starts off with a bloody bang, but in the process drains the plot of much needed suspense. Instead, we're left with 85 minutes of erratic police interviews, gleeful harassment of a known felon, and one very unnecessary, but carefully choreographed brawl that does add action but also points up the street-fighter inadequacies of the rail-thin Webb and the paunchy Ben Alexander. (Some of the frames appear set up for 3-D, so be prepared to duck.) The film's climax comes across as ironic but unfortunately Webb can't resist rubbing our nose in it.Don't get me wrong-- I was and still am a fan of the series, which occasionally produced some pretty powerful melodramas involving ordinary people and their day-to-day travails. During those Mc Carthyite years, even a glimpse of social realism was hard to come by in series TV, (it might aid commie propaganda). Webb's tersely delivered lines and tight close-ups often worked brilliantly in the half-hour format to bring out otherwise submerged dramatic values. However, stretched over 90 minutes, Webb's exaggerated style becomes pretty tiresome, as does his endless parade of smart-alecky toppers.That same year, 1954, Lucy and Desi spun off from their own wildly successful series to make a movie, The Long, Long Trailer. By most accounts, it is clearly superior to their series. I'm afraid the opposite is true here. Except for nostalgia buffs and curiosity seekers, there's only one reason I can think of to catch up with this 50's artifact. The gorgeous Ann Robinson as the policewoman should be enough to induce even the most hardened cop-hater into joining the force. I should be getting my badge any day now.

I really enjoyed the Dragnet television shows back in the 1950s with Jack Webb and Ben Alexander and later Harry Morgan. They were very entertaining and fast-moving. I say that because this feature-length film was just too boring to add to my collection. I wouldn't watch it again.Oh, it started off with a bang as a man was murdered in a field, but then the rest of it is mostly detail work which gets pretty boring after 40 minutes! Some of the dialog is good: nice '40s-type film noir stuff. What I missed was the humor of the TV show, in which Webb and his partner, Officer Frank Smith, would interview a number of crackpots and those interviews would be funny. Most of the characters in this movie did not invoke laughs. It needed a bit more action, too, for a crime movie.

Were the 'fifties really this awful? The mind boggles.Moviegoers in 1954 got excited when they heard that one of their favorite TV shows, Dragnet, had been made into a feature film. (I remember because I was one of them.) One now stares in wonder at this icon of the strange and far-off 'fifties, an era that was Eisenhower-sunny on the surface and dark and menacing just beneath it.Dragnet the movie (eventually there was a second, on TV), now largely forgotten, was nothing more than an extended television episode made in color, while home sets were still black and white. Judging from the picture's low-rent set-ups, it must have been one of Warner Brothers' most cheaply made films for that year. A couple of scenes take place in empty fields, and---with the single exception when filming was done at the African wing of the Los Angeles County Museum---the indoor sets were not much more imposing. Many of the actors were frequently unemployed second-string players whose work did not make a deep impression.In the intervening time since it was made the film has largely gone unseen and although it made it to video, it is little viewed in this form. (I found a dusty copy at a Half-Price book store, selling for a desperate-to-get-this-turkey-off-the-shelf $3.99!) Predictably, it has dated badly. That 'fifties audiences accepted the actors' rigidly stylized, robotic impersonations of police officers as representing the way they actually spoke in real life says something about Americans' willingness to uncritically accept virtually anything they saw in movies, and especially on TV. (Remember actors posing as doctors extolling the pleasures of smoking during cigarette commercials?) Dragnet's cops' signature manner of speaking---a flat, semi-technical, bureaucratic argot, spoken in low, monotonal voices---Webb's cops rarely if ever snarled---was one of the most memorable things about the show. Now this is seen for what it always was: unintentional self-satire. (On the other hand, to Webb's great credit, virtually all modern-day cop shows stemmed from Dragnet, untold imitations of which have been launched on television over the past five decades)For more evidence of the film's antiquated point of view, watch the scene at the jazz club where Friday and Smith, seeking information about a criminal they're pursuing, converse with a musician who's one of their informants. There's a humorous moment when Smith gets a `real hip' handshake from the trumpet player that is nothing more than a quick swipe and a handful of air, then stares at his hand as if to figure out what had just transpired. This is followed by a three-way conversation during which the script clumsily has the musician work his way through an A to Z litany of now-moldy, 'fifties hipster clichés (`How's that chick?' `Really flipped, huh?' `Oh man, that's a drag,' `He was really nowhere,' `I've been diggin' it in the papers,' `He was jumpin' pretty steady with that Troy mob,' `Dig ya.') by way of what the screenwriter apparently must have regarded as establishing a well-rounded character.Not only was the film disappointing in how little attempt was made to `open it up' for the big screen, but in some ways its narrowly focused two-for-a-nickel script was decidedly less interesting than what was shown on the television show. For example, it missed interesting possibilities for character development, especially as this pertained to Webb's Joe Friday and Ben Alexander's Frank Smith. (Some time after the film's debut, Webb finally recognized that television viewers yearned to know more about Joe Friday in his off-duty hours and so gave them glimpses of this law enforcement automaton's meager social life, including intriguing little dabs of romance.)The film version also completely wastes the participation of Ben Alexander, the warmest and most appealing of all Joe Friday's sidekicks, leaving him with nothing to do except dutifully tag along with his superior officer and occasionally asking suspects or witnesses the odd question or two. The inspired daffy non sequiturs that his character, Frank Smith, regularly voiced in conversations with Joe Friday on the television show, which viewers loved and looked forward to, were almost entirely absent from the film. The one exception, which occurs during a brief back-and-forth with Webb about their individual food preferences, is so brief and isolated that it comes off as a self-conscious sop to audiences whom the screenwriter knew would be looking for it and falls flat.Webb also was the film's director, and he went about most of these duties with a notable lack of imagination. The result is a picture that is dreary and monotonous from start to finish. He elicited almost uniformly wooden-and even occasionally embarrassing-performances from the cast (leaving one to wonder how much of his own money was invested in the film or what his deal was with Warner's, and whether he might even have deliberately restricted himself to printing the first take, no matter much a second or even a third might have been desirable). The scene where as Joe Friday he interrogates the crippled woman whose small-time crook of a husband has just been killed is mawkish, and the actors playing police officers are directed to be so deadly serious that scenes like this were subsequently lampooned to great effect in the Dan Aykroyd satire made in 1987. At one point a very competent actor, Richard Boone, is reduced to miming a series of grotesque scowls while instructing his subordinates. It's a wonder Webb didn't direct him to gnaw on a table leg.Dragnet was a film that was mired deeply in its time and seems to evidence a disturbing subtext that relates to the American mindset as it was during the bland, conformist, and frightened Eisenhower/McCarthyite ‘fifties. The Cold War was at its height in 1954 and fears by Americans of falling victim to communist manipulations and even outright mind-control were rampant. It may be no coincidence that Dragnet and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared within two years of each other. The cops in Dragnet are not merely grim, intense, obsessed defenders of the law, they often border on being zombie-like. One of Dragnet's most explicit messages---brought home to audiences several times---was how, if only we didn't have so many laws and that darn Constitution, we could put a heck of a lot more criminals behind bars where they belong. I've replayed this film at least half a dozen times and each time I watched it, the scarier it seemed. It's interesting to contemplate what super-patriot Joe Friday, if given the power and left to his own devices, would have done to lawbreakers. Luckily for the bad guys in the film---and possibly for all the rest of us---he wasn't given access to nuclear weapons.

This film is so true to the atmosphere of the 1950's that you could show it in a history class, but it's a lot of fun. Jack Webb is fantastically straight as Joe Friday; he never had a better role. He speaks every word with a cement-like conviction; he's always got a snappy answer for every sarcastic criminal. Everyone in the movie is great, but the standouts are Virginia Gregg as the murdered man's alcoholic and handicapped wife, Stacy Harris as Max Troy, insincere head of the crime syndicate, and Richard Boone as the police captain, who says to his men with angry authority "all right, bumper to bumper tail; get up with em in the morning and put em to bed at night".