Tragic timing

The HBO series The Wire is the grandchild of Homicide: Life on the Street, the groundbreaking NBC police procedural series also set in Baltimore which ran for seven seasons in the 1990s.

Homicide is remarkable for its tragic timing, no less for its diverse cast of actors playing people who are police officers. Tragic timing lands just right as caesura, the tragic poignancy of a commonplace pressed to a still point, after which life’s comedy resumes. That Homicide’s actors played people who are police officers rather than simply TV cops jettisoned and even ironized genre stereotypes on both sides of the law and across professional and social levels.

The series is based on the 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by The Wire-creator David Simon. As a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Simon had spent a year attached to the city police homicide unit, Baltimore’s “murder po-lice.” The series’s quirkiest character is the city itself, known locally as “Smalltimore” as it often can feel like a big village where everybody seems connected.

“I may be guilty but I’m not stupid,” says a suspect (cameo Baltimore resident film director John Waters) who waived an extradition hearing in New York to return to Baltimore to face charges.

The small-town connectedness makes for a lazy screen door in the fourth wall between series fiction and city fact. Actual officials such as then-Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke appear and sometimes engage with fictional ones. In one of three separate episodes directed by Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, series regulars Detectives Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) and Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond), filmed by police videographer J.H. Brodie (Max Perlich), corner a confused suspect into an alley filled with a working film crew. Director Barry Levinson (a Homicide co-executive producer, here wearing a “Homicide”-embroidered baseball cap) shouts “Cut!” The fictional Lewis recognizes the actual Levinson as a local high school classmate: for Baltimoreans, one’s high school is a social marker.

Baltimore-born and -bred Levinson was key to the series as a major director and Academy Award-winner. He directed the series pilot “Gone for Goode” featuring a serial black widow, as well as the Season 3 finale, “The Gas Man,” shot from the point of view of two marginal Eastsiders shadowing Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher): Bruno (Victor Helms Jr.), just out of prison, is bent on revenge against Pembleton whose by-the-book detective work had put him there, with his sidekick Danny (Richard Edson) in a disco-happy mist.

Homicide develops its odd-lots characters and partner pairs in their daily routines interacting with colleagues and each other, locals, the media, and their command to turn red names on a large whiteboard—murder victims—into black names—closed cased: “Black is beautiful,” hard-driving shift commander “G”, Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto), exhorts his team, referring to the names in black with a smile. The half-Black, half-Sicilian Giardello is the series’ center; Kotto leads a cast of mostly television and character actors, several of whom may have done their best work making this series.

The show’s creators and writers explore issues beyond conventional boundaries of race, class, and gender with a variety of directors and an unusual mix of actors and guest stars, stories and dialogue showcases ensemble acting. Episodes sometimes center on a single location: the unit interrogation room, the squad room, a stakeout in a private living room, a detective’s rural hometown while on leave, a hostage-taker’s home; and unlike standard police procedurals episodes can be told from the point of view of perpetrators or of murder victims’ families.

The Season 1 episode “Three Men and Adena” works as an intense one-act play. Shot mostly within “The Box,” the unit’s small, yellow-tiled interrogation room, Dets. Pembleton and Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) grill suspect Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn) whom they believe murdered 11-year-old Adena Watson. As the pair browbeat the apparently cowering suspect for a confession, he reads each of them and then tries to turn the psychological tables by probing his interrogators’ insecurities over race, class, and their own inner demons. In Season 3’s “Every Mother’s Son,” the same detectives investigate the purportedly “accidental” execution of a 13-year-old in a bowling alley, questioning a blasé 14-year-old named Ronnie Sayers (Sean Nelson):

Ronnie: “If you’re driving a car and hit somebody you didn’t mean to, it’s an accident.”

Pembleton: “Ronnie, you shot the wrong kid!”

Ronnie: “Car accidents kill innocent people all the time. How’s it any different?”

The boys’ mothers (Rhonda Stubbins White and Gay Thomas Wilson) meet by chance in the unit waiting area as women with pairs of boys the same ages while detectives work the case. This subplot puts ordinary human faces on the toll gun violence takes on communities, here working single mothers struggling to raise families and live their lives. 

Among the series’s many guest stars are Robin Williams as a family man whose wife is shot in front of him and their two children in a stick-up near the then-new Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Steve Buscemi is a white supremacist and murder suspect who purports to read Greek, shown up by the Black detective interrogating him who actually does. Lily Tomlin eludes a police escort to settle a longtime score. Melvin Van Peebles is a funeral director who “socializes” with his subjects. Elijah Wood is a smarmy adolescent sociopath. Joan Chen is an ambitious crime reporter. James Earl Jones and Jeffrey Wright are father and son in a prominent local family whose Haitian refugee “domestic” is murdered. A vindictive shove catches Vincent D’Onofrio between subway car and platform. Alfre Woodard spars with Det. Pembleton over her clinical care of the terminally ill. Charles Durning is a retired cop brought back to help close a 60-year-old case.

Season 5 includes “Heart of a Saturday Night,” an understated auteur episode by film director Whit Stillman with the feel of a short film. In addition to the usual series cast, Stillman regular Chris Eigeman (Metropolitan, 1990; Barcelona, 1994), along with Rosanna Arquette, Polly Holliday and Tom Quinn play the husband, wife, and parents of three murder victims, brought together with Chief Medical Examiner Julianna Cox (Michelle Forbes) in a survivor support group. The action shifts between the support group, the three murders, and detectives working these cases.

“Of all the movie theaters in all the towns in all the world, he had to walk into mine,” a Baltimore theater manager (Wallace Shawn) told police detectives investigating a murder.

In “A Case of Do or Die” (Season 7) Wallace Shawn manages a movie theater showing Casablanca (1942) in which an obnoxious film-going regular who blurts out classic movie lines with running commentaries does not survive a screening. The episode written by Homicide regular Anya Epstein focuses more centrally on a pair of stories about women who leave men. Epstein is the granddaughter and grandniece of the team who wrote the Casablanca screenplay; the episode title was taken from the lyrics of Casablanca’s classic theme “As Time Goes By”, the song Sam (Dooley Wilson) immortalized in playing again.

In addition to Kotto, Braugher (whose actual wife Ami Brabson plays his non-police officer wife Mary in the series), Johnson (who directed six episodes and also acted, directed, and wrote in The Wire), Secor, Diamond, and Forbes, long-term unit regulars include stand-up comic Richard Belzer as Det. John Munch, Melissa Leo as Det. Kay Howard and Isabella Hoffman as Det. Megan Russert. In the early seasons, Ned Beatty, Adam Baldwin, and Jon Polito featured as detectives; Toni Lewis, Peter Gerety, Jon Seda, Callie Thorne and Michael Michele join the unit in later seasons, with Giancarlo Esposito as FBI Special Agent Mike Giardello, G’s son. Željko Ivanek is Assistant State’s Attorney Ed Danvers.

In the sense that Homicide’s cast played people who were law enforcement officers, the series may have humanized its older NBC sibling Law & Order and cop shows that followed. Characters from the two NBC series crossed over several times to work cases involving Manhattan and Baltimore law enforcement agencies. Belzer’s Munch transferred to the NYPD in the Law & Order franchise after Homicide was canceled in 1999 (and reprised the role on another nine shows). His serial, rambling commentaries were memorably brought up short once by an adolescent: 

“It’s like you have to use all these weird words, and it’s like you’re listening to the words like they were a cartoon coming out of your mouth, and you’re watching them, thinking: ‘I’m cool. I’m cool,’” Fidel McGibney (Ryan Todd) told the uncharacteristically speechless Munch in the Season 3 episode “All Through the House.”  

Homicide won critical acclaim throughout its run but chronically low Nielsen ratings made it a constant target for cancellation and “massaging” by NBC. This did not go unremarked by the show’s writers. In an episode late in the series’s final season, a detective compares the apparent “invisibility” of a so-called Nielsen family to a suspect who may be a mobster relocated with his family to Baltimore in a federal witness protection program.

However, the genuine actors’ studio of regulars and guest stars and the diversity of directorial, shooting, and writing styles made a statement and remain a phenomenon: Each episode is a thing in itself, memorable, and seldom gives the viewer the same thing twice. Although Homicide’s telephones sit on desks and police officers type reports on typewriters, first-time viewers nearly three decades later may be surprised to find its race, class, gender, and criminal justice issues easily in step with today’s.

Homicide: Life on the Street 1993-1999 U.S. (122 50-minute episodes) Baltimore Pictures/NBC Studios. Created by Paul Attanasio; written by Tom Fontana, James Yoshimura, Anya Epstein, David Simon, and many others, based on Simon’s 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; executive producers Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, and others. 

Chatter, questions, & sex: I Am Curious (Yellow)

Notorious in the 1960s for its sex scenes, censors in the US and elsewhere may have had more problems with the left-wing politics of I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue).

From the place that gave the world Greta Thunberg, this once famously-banned pair of 1960s Swedish films as though foreshadow the identity passions of today in the sense that 1960s US civil rights activism fed today’s Black Lives Matter movement. It is an ambitious project that tells a similar narrative in two films that complement each other like the yellow and blue in Sweden’s flag, addressing issues of no less import today than they were sixty years ago despite the vast social, political, economic, and historical changes that have taken place.

Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) and Lena (Lena Nyman) cross the line into character in I Am Curious films.

I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue) were shot in a “meta” style: A small film collective makes a movie about a small film collective making a movie about the sociopolitical and sexual adventures of the “curious” Lena (Lena Nyman), a young woman footloose in Stockholm. But the sex for which the films initially had been banned around the world is barely pornographic. Contemporary censors and viewers likely were offended by the notion that an ordinary young woman would explore her own sexuality and sexual freedom to challenge her country’s social status quo. But the protagonist Lena is less porn queen Linda Lovelace than John Waters’s Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray (1988).

Lena (Lena Nyman) and Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) engage in post-coital political dialogue in Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious-Blue (1968).

The documentary-style rendering of a young woman openly discussing sex, orgasms and other sexual bodily functions and having “free sex” in the ordinary run of things in circa 1966 Stockholm is a far cry from the underground “blue movies” of the time or the sex film industry to which the two I Am Curious films helped open the door in the 1970s. The films portray an assertive, politically left-leaning, sexually curious but naive heterosexual woman in her early twenties discussing politics and having sex with contemporaries, pursuing her own curiosity and desires with partners roughly as clueless in their own ways as she is in hers. The personal relationships come first.

In the I Am Curious films, filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman and his star Lena Nyman construct a critique of contemporary Swedish society.

The film opens with young filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman, playing himself, in a relationship with his star Lena, a drama student playing herself, contemplating how to tell a story about contemporary Swedish society. Inspired by the US civil rights movement, the character Lena challenges Swedish society by trying to apply Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of non-violent resistance/non-cooperation to achieve social, economic, gender, and sexual equality. The drama student Lena also half-teases Sjöman to film a sex scene between herself and a student she spots at a poetry reading—“just a quickie”.

“We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files/We’d like to help you learn to help yourself”: The file room of Nymans Institut in Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious films.

The character Lena establishes “Nymans Institut” in her bedroom at her father Rune’s (Peter Lindgren) apartment where she lives: “I had to start my own business because [others] don’t do anything: Newspapers work too fast and can’t be trusted. Science works far too slow and gets no results. You have to do it yourself.” She collects data aided by informal assistants with whom she also pickets institutions (the church and the US, Soviet, and Chinese embassies). She and her collaborators sing “We Shall Overcome” many times in both films. She pens picket signs that read: MEDDELANDE TILL MÄNSKLIGHETEN; RIV PRIVILEGIE—SAMHÄLLENA RUNT OM I VÄRLDEN [LENA] (Message to humanity—down with the privileged classes all around the world) and MEDDELANDE TILL DE FÄRGADE FOLKEN: FÖRBERED ER! DE VITA SVIKTAR! [LENA] (Message to non-white people—be prepared! White people are failing!) There were very few non-white people in Sweden at this time.

Lena and her helpers also vilify the then-Spanish dictator/autocrat Francisco Franco, picket the Spanish embassy, and Lena challenges Swedes at the airport returning from vacations in Spain for tacitly supporting Franco’s regime: A woman traveler retorts that Sweden’s “dictatorship” makes a bottle of whiskey cost 50 crowns, as one might imagine a US follower of Fox News grouse today). Lena keeps a picture of Franco on her wall and a running tally on her bedroom wall of the number of days since her father purportedly “fled” the 1930s Spanish Civil War after serving just three weeks in the anti-Franco International Brigade. (The film was banned in Spain until 2005.)

Lena throws herself into the mainstream of Swedish life with a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder slung from her shoulder, posing questions on current topics to incidental men and women at work and on the street. She asks national service inductees if they would consider conscientious objector status. She campaigns for prison reform, biking 150 miles to the then-new maximum security Kumla prison in western Sweden. She opposes the högern (the political right), particularly högerstedenterna—conservative students. She and Sjöman interview figures such as Dr. King, the Swedish socialist politician Olof Palme, the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Sweden’s King Gustaf VI Adolf (played by actor Holger Löwenadler).

Film recording supervisor Raymond Lundberg and his assistant do "yoga" with Lena on retreat in I Am Curious-Blue (1968).

Sjöman films himself making statements that Dr. King appears to answer directly (from an interview on the US civil rights movement filmed earlier in Sweden). Lena tells Sjöman: “I like [King]. He talks about better things than Palme,” referring to the then-Swedish transport minister, a rising star in the country’s Social Democratic Party who opposed the US war in Vietnam. Sjöman films himself filming an actual interview with Palme in the minister’s backyard with his then five-year-old son Mårten “Råttan” [Mouse] and his wife Lisbeth at an upper window. The films were made before King was assassinated. (Palme, later Sweden’s prime minister, was assassinated in February 1986. Palme’s unsolved murder is modern Sweden’s greatest mystery.)

Filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman interviews Swedish politician Olof Palme with his five-year-old son Mårten in I Am Curious-Yellow (1967).

Sjöman and his crew also film Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at a university poetry reading. Yevtushenko was a “rock star” of the Brezhnev regime, a charismatic, youthful-looking, officially-sanctioned “dissident” poet popular in the West. Yevtushenko’s comments at the reading are later spliced-in to rebuke Lena’s naive political views. Her interview with the king of Sweden (Löwenadler) is a fantasy that includes her lover Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) as the king’s grandson, in which she reassures His Majesty in his living quarters: “It isn’t you, personally, the socialists want to get rid of...”

Lena (Lena Nyman) and King Gustav VI Adolf (Holger Löwenadler) at home in the palace in I Am Curious-Yellow (1967).

And Lena experiences lively varieties of sex, in character and as a person. She surprises her film partner Börje (who lives unmarried with the mother of his baby daughter, which Lena later discovers) when she says that she has had sex with 23 men. “The first 19 were no fun” she said, because she “did it to satisfy them, so that they would have an orgasm...” The director Sjöman tells himself that “a love scene without consequences would be pointless.” He tells his actor Börje at the beginning of Blue that Börje will have a love scene with Lena: “A love scene with consequences.” “What kind of consequences?” “I don’t know. I’ll think of something.” Sjöman works this out while filming Lena and Börje, telling himself: “[Ingmar] Bergman always used to say it’s bad to fall for your star. You get blind to her affectations. It never happened to him, though.” Or so Sjöman supposed.

Lena (Lena Nyman) and Magnus (Magnus Nilsson) watch the film crew prepare in Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious-Yellow (1967).

In a moment of passion, Lena confesses to her ideal: “Listen, Martin! I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough. But that’s the way it is. Börje is a big shit, and I’m going to kill him when I get my hands on him! You said it yourself: ‘If you can’t adhere to nonviolence, you shouldn’t participate.” You need people who are strong. I won’t ever speak for your ideas again.”

But Lena’s adventures free-range a large expanse of social, political, economic, and sexual topics and give a broad picture of the universal influence of the 1960s US civil rights movement which may apply to an even greater extent in the form it takes today.

Jag är fri!!! Reformera världen!

Jag är nyfiken-En film i gult/gul [I Am Curious (Yellow)] 1967 Sweden (121 minutes) and Jag är nyfiken-En film i blått/blå [I Am Curious (Blue)] 1968 Sweden (104 minutes) Sandrews/Criterion. Written and directed by Vilgot Sjöman; cinematography by Peter Wester; edited by Wic Kjellin; music by Bengt Ernryd; produced by Göran Lindgren.

A Peculiar British Fruit

The Sandbaggers is a first-rate vintage British spy series that gives a layered inside view into where, how, and by whom decisions were taken to commit clandestine operators abroad in the later Cold War. A much later French parallel to the show might be Éric Rochant’s excellent The Bureau.

The Sandbaggers are a fictional Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) “special section” of several highly-trained ex-military men and women deployed abroad on sensitive missions. Each episode centers on a main incident in which the biggest fights take place first in administrative back channels of Whitehall among government ministries and their agencies. The Soviet KGB, Philbyphobia, and the UK’s “Special Relationship” with its US “Cousins” are natural ingredients.

Sandbagger chief Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) exercises the "Special [UK-US] Relationship" with CIA case officer Jeff Ross (Bob Sherman) in the “The Sandbaggers” (1978-80).

Roy Marsden stars as Neil Burnside, a former Sandbagger and director of operations under SIS C[ontrol] (Richard Vernon, whom the Beatles memorably teased in A Hard Day’s Night). C is a career diplomat without a professional intelligence background; his deputy is Matthew Peele (Jerome Willis). Burnside’s former father-in-law Sir Geoffrey Wellingham (Alan MacNaughtan) is permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office (the civil service agency head under a politically-appointed foreign minister). Burnside’s Sandbagger One is Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen), a former sergeant in the Parachute Regiment, a working-class James Bond wannabe; one notable early Sandbagger Two is Laura Dickens (Diane Keen), a Bond-averse linguist and skilled operator. Burnside's long-suffering office secretary Diane Lawler (Elizabeth Bennett) may be of all the best informed. And Central Intelligence Agency case officer Jeff Ross (Bob Sherman) and Burnside help each other keep things real.

Ravens wings and writing desks: How are British senior civil servants like oranges?

In contrast to the sweet, easy-to-peel fruit, the British mandarin* is a hard-shelled senior civil servant cultivated in the public schools and Oxbridge for ministry hothouses at Whitehall. This makes for a cozy climate, though these mandarins are anything but potted plants: More senior officials lurk in this series’s shadows than femmes ou hommes fatals or kay-gay-beasties. Although bowlerized Whitehall men in pinstripes portrayed in this series since have been augmented by persons of other colors, sexes, styles of apparel, and national origins, John Le Carré among others encourage the belief that their roles, personalities, and language remain much the same. 

 

Sandbagger operations typically involve overseas incidents or official indiscretions which seldom make headlines, deftly disarmed by discreet discovery and handling. The operations are fictional though were topical at the time and MI6 evidently did not have a Sandbagger section. But the series drives home the authentic point that the chief considerations in ministerial squabbling over use of highly capable but demonstrably expendable government employees center on the ruling political party’s best interests, budgetary considerations, and the country’s economic advantage, e.g., flogging British weapons systems abroad. The operational challenges of a particular mission and mortal danger to the secret operators are afterthoughts at best.

Although the work of Sandbaggers such as Laura Dickens (Diane Keen) involves down time at the office, in the field it can demand life-or-death decisions at civil service rates.

C: “Small consolation to the prime minister if he’s faced with an international incident.”

Burnside: “So that’s it?”

C: “Yes, Neil, that’s always it.”

Current US viewers may find episode 12, “It Can’t Happen Here,” of interest. The recent assassination of a liberal US senator chairing a committee on race prompts in-house discussion on suspected FBI involvement in the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. Two Sandbaggers are seconded briefly to the US Secret Service as security for the senator’s successor. In the aftermath, British intelligence officials must consider options for handling a British cabinet minister believed to be a KGB agent but politically untouchable.

MP accessed the series on DVD via a public library. Do not be put off by the “Dr. Who” interiors: British television at the time videotaped interiors and shot on location with 16mm handheld cameras. This series is well-made and well-acted; the dialogue moves quickly and is inlaid with details such that the episodes keep well and are worth seeing more than one time.

The Sandbaggers 1978-1980 U.K. (twenty 50-minute episodes) Yorkshire Television/BFS Entertainment. Created by Ian Mackintosh; produced by Michael Ferguson and David Cunliffe.

“The Sandbaggers”: High intrigue and derring-do in the pre-digital world.

*Mandarin comes from Sanskrit via colonial Portuguese for “counselor”. It refers to both Chinese imperial officials (guān) and the language of officialdom (官話, guānhuà) in the Beijing region, the longtime Chinese imperial center. The British apparently claimed the Portuguese word for their own imperial officials late in the 16th century.