Over the years I have gotten into the habit of focusing on such crime dramas as are character-driven and dialog-oriented to the exclusion of sophisticated plots. Given that this movie was effectively a pilot for a TV series later named *Dan August*, i.e., named after its main character, when I recently ran across it on Youtube I was expecting more of the same. At the same time, I remembered that this series didn't last long on TV before cancellation, so I was not expecting an especially effective effort, and would have given it a pass if I had anything deeper in consideration for viewing that night. But being on a kind of nostalgia binge lately (actually, being on a prolonged binge of wanting to be anywhere but the 21st century anymore, anywhere actually familiar, with characters with recognizable and even sympathetic values systems) I wound up watching this for no better reason than to go back to 1968 (the year it was shot) for a couple of hours.
The result, however, was to be surprised. First, in spite of the name, it wound up being a whodunit, a genre I often find tedious as a repository for stereotyped character development. And like whodunits normally are, this movie is plot driven, but here with a wrinkle: in this case, it incorporates the unusual device of quite a lot of its run time being spent on red herrings handled in police procedural mode, i.e., on investigation angles that aren't getting anywhere. This keeps following the plot lively in comparison with a lot of more straightforward whodunits. The plots of the Dan August TV series this movie piloted were more intricate than the usual hour-long police drama typically exhibited, incorporating as much complexity with as many suspect characters and twists and turns among them as the writers could come up with. One added trick also prevalent here was to use in exaggerated form the classic old-fashioned police procedural trope of officers running bluffs on suspects, only here practically instinctively on almost every potential suspect they meet, keeping the audience constantly a little off base as to what the police themselves may really be thinking as the investigation proceeds, something further complicated by having multiple senior officials also disagreeing with each other and the title-role character as a standard device, so that foreseeing the plot resolution can turn into an exercise in deciding which cop is going to turn out to be right after all. All this keeps things especially complicated compared with more usual offerings in either the whodunit or police procedural genres.
On the other hand, this devotion to plot complexity results in almost no meaningful character development at all among the police officer characters, with even the title-role hero being as one-dimensional and cliched a detective character as you can see anywhere. I was and still am frankly surprised that the show was named after the character when so little attention was given to writing him as an actual personality. That's not the way that kind of thing normally works, and the thing that can compensate for that sometimes, having an especially charismatic actor in the lead role, does not occur here either. Even when a young Burt Reynolds took over this part from Chris George after this pilot, there was never enough punch to the title character's screen presence to overcome the uninteresting main character.
There is one other very unusual feature to this drama, and that is how very, very far ahead of its time certain elements of this presentation are, anticipating the cable TV era by a good ten years or more. Rampant, over-the-top sexually excessive behavior by one of the main antagonist characters here is a central theme, and never from any major network TV offering of this vintage can I remember anything so obtrusively in-your-face regarding that kind of subject matter as what we are exposed to here; only until certain 1980s sitcoms do I remember anything so unsubtle. This extends to the language used, where at one point a certain sexually pejorative word is thrown about in liberal doses, a particular word I cannot remember ever seeing used on American commercial major broadcast network TV at any time in my entire life to this day. In fact, it is a word I cannot even repeat *here* for purposes of this review, because the IMDb thought police computer robot evidently found it so impolite that it warned me not to use it when I tried to type it here originally. (Esteemed Sherlock Holmes creator Conan Doyle once got around the same kind of word issue for purposes of the Victorian-era magazines in which he was published by substituting the phrase, "the vilest name that a man could use to a woman".) And finally, there is certain visual material that was so graphic that it was considered cutting edge in only the edgiest theatrical-release movies of the era. It was so unusual to see on broadcast TV that when I saw it here, I found myself jumping up bolt upright in my seat in surprise, actually saying, "whoa!" out loud.
Thus, while a modern audience in 2023 won't find anything especially shocking in this piece by current so-called standards, if you decide to try this out realize that it is way beyond the norm of 55 years ago. It is only because of this unusual trait that I gave this as high a rating as seven stars, in other words, something worth seeing if only for that feature alone, because otherwise the cliched protagonist treatment I think ought to drag it down to a six. The truth is simply that regardless of the carefully intricately plotted narrative, and the appearance of as an appealing an actress as Janet Leigh in a new twist on her established bathtub scene fame (if you are an Alfred Hitchcock fan, as soon as you see that bathtub you know what is going to happen, more or less), the heroes are just plain dull.
The result, however, was to be surprised. First, in spite of the name, it wound up being a whodunit, a genre I often find tedious as a repository for stereotyped character development. And like whodunits normally are, this movie is plot driven, but here with a wrinkle: in this case, it incorporates the unusual device of quite a lot of its run time being spent on red herrings handled in police procedural mode, i.e., on investigation angles that aren't getting anywhere. This keeps following the plot lively in comparison with a lot of more straightforward whodunits. The plots of the Dan August TV series this movie piloted were more intricate than the usual hour-long police drama typically exhibited, incorporating as much complexity with as many suspect characters and twists and turns among them as the writers could come up with. One added trick also prevalent here was to use in exaggerated form the classic old-fashioned police procedural trope of officers running bluffs on suspects, only here practically instinctively on almost every potential suspect they meet, keeping the audience constantly a little off base as to what the police themselves may really be thinking as the investigation proceeds, something further complicated by having multiple senior officials also disagreeing with each other and the title-role character as a standard device, so that foreseeing the plot resolution can turn into an exercise in deciding which cop is going to turn out to be right after all. All this keeps things especially complicated compared with more usual offerings in either the whodunit or police procedural genres.
On the other hand, this devotion to plot complexity results in almost no meaningful character development at all among the police officer characters, with even the title-role hero being as one-dimensional and cliched a detective character as you can see anywhere. I was and still am frankly surprised that the show was named after the character when so little attention was given to writing him as an actual personality. That's not the way that kind of thing normally works, and the thing that can compensate for that sometimes, having an especially charismatic actor in the lead role, does not occur here either. Even when a young Burt Reynolds took over this part from Chris George after this pilot, there was never enough punch to the title character's screen presence to overcome the uninteresting main character.
There is one other very unusual feature to this drama, and that is how very, very far ahead of its time certain elements of this presentation are, anticipating the cable TV era by a good ten years or more. Rampant, over-the-top sexually excessive behavior by one of the main antagonist characters here is a central theme, and never from any major network TV offering of this vintage can I remember anything so obtrusively in-your-face regarding that kind of subject matter as what we are exposed to here; only until certain 1980s sitcoms do I remember anything so unsubtle. This extends to the language used, where at one point a certain sexually pejorative word is thrown about in liberal doses, a particular word I cannot remember ever seeing used on American commercial major broadcast network TV at any time in my entire life to this day. In fact, it is a word I cannot even repeat *here* for purposes of this review, because the IMDb thought police computer robot evidently found it so impolite that it warned me not to use it when I tried to type it here originally. (Esteemed Sherlock Holmes creator Conan Doyle once got around the same kind of word issue for purposes of the Victorian-era magazines in which he was published by substituting the phrase, "the vilest name that a man could use to a woman".) And finally, there is certain visual material that was so graphic that it was considered cutting edge in only the edgiest theatrical-release movies of the era. It was so unusual to see on broadcast TV that when I saw it here, I found myself jumping up bolt upright in my seat in surprise, actually saying, "whoa!" out loud.
Thus, while a modern audience in 2023 won't find anything especially shocking in this piece by current so-called standards, if you decide to try this out realize that it is way beyond the norm of 55 years ago. It is only because of this unusual trait that I gave this as high a rating as seven stars, in other words, something worth seeing if only for that feature alone, because otherwise the cliched protagonist treatment I think ought to drag it down to a six. The truth is simply that regardless of the carefully intricately plotted narrative, and the appearance of as an appealing an actress as Janet Leigh in a new twist on her established bathtub scene fame (if you are an Alfred Hitchcock fan, as soon as you see that bathtub you know what is going to happen, more or less), the heroes are just plain dull.