Tue 12 Apr 2011
A TV Review by Michael Shonk: DECOY 1957-58 (Beverly Garland).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[11] Comments
DECOY. Syndicated TV. First aired October 14,1957; 39 30min episodes aired at various times around the country. Cast: Casey Jones: Beverly Garland. Executive producer: Everett Rosenthal; technical advisor: Margaret Leonard, Detective 1st Grade (Ret.).
Decoy is best remembered as the first American TV series to feature, as its main character, a policewoman.
The series’ episodes were “based upon true and actual cases.” Decoy was dedicated to the Bureau of Policewomen of the city of New York. The stories had little humor and were thick with melodrama. Decoy was much like Dragnet, but with a more feminine point of view. As Joe Friday did, Casey Jones narrated the episodes.
Decoy featured crime stories dealing with the social issues of the times. Often the villains were portrayed as victims themselves. It was common for at least one bad guy to find redemption in the end.
In “High Swing,” Casey goes undercover replacing a murdered ‘Come On’ girl, a woman who picks up guys in a bar and leads them to a place to be mugged. The killers were a nice old couple trapped by a tragic past that left the wife hooked on morphine.
Casey did not have a regular partner, instead she was assigned to a different department every week. She might be in uniform, undercover, or the officer in charge. She worked on any type of crime and in any area of the city. Her fellow male officers accepted a policewoman as routine and treated her with respect.
While little is revealed of Casey’s life beyond being a policewoman, we do see the effects each case has on her. At the end of every episode, Casey would break the fourth wall and talk to the audience, often sharing how the case had affected her.
The series was filmed, some of it outdoors in the New York area. The productions values were on par with network television of that time. Most of the episodes remain entertaining, yet dated, crime melodrama.
The writing was weakened by the melodrama. It is hard today not to laugh at lines such as in “The Sound Of Tears”: “There were no kisses in the park that night (pause) unless you want to count the kiss of death.”
The direction was adequate for its time except for the episode “Across the World.” Casey goes undercover to find a killer, but she is found out, beaten badly, and ends up in the hospital (and out of most of the episode!). Director Teddy Sims apparently had only one camera and limited time. Characters were reacting to things the camera did not show, characters off camera had conversations with others on camera, and it had the worse chase scene ever filmed.
A talented underrated actress, Beverly Garland was the best part of Decoy. Watching her share the screen with a guest cast that included such talent as Peter Falk, Martin Balsam, and Suzanne Pleshette remains the best reason to watch Decoy.
SOURCES: Internet Archives offers episodes to watch for free. Classic TV Archives has a good episode guide. And the series is available on DVD.
April 12th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Beverly Garland appeared in nearly every TV series you can think of, and I’m exaggerating only a little. Besides DECOY, she had extended roles in MY THREE SONS and THE SCARECROW AND MRS. KING.
I might have seen DECOY once or twice during its original series run, but if I did, I know I never have since, and I’m glad to be reminded of it. Besides the historical significance and the stories themselves, I’m like you, Michael; I enjoy watching older TV series like this one to pick other faces in the cast, back before they became famous.
This, by the way, is one of a small handful of reviews I retrieved from my upstairs computer this weekend when my leg was doing much better than it has the last couple of days. I’d have forwarded more to this, my wife’s computer, where I am now, if only I’d known that the trip upstairs was going to be the only one for a while.
April 12th, 2011 at 4:58 pm
Michael starts his review by mentioning that DECOY is remembered as the first American TV series to feature as its main character, a policewoman, which is absolutely true. Unfortunately, many histories still state that POLICEWOMAN(1974) is the first, which is incorrect.
I recently saw this mistake repeated yet again during a PBS series on genre TV. When they covered the crime show, there was the usual mistake saying that POLICEWOMAN was the first. Frankly, I’ve always liked Beverly Garland and I like watching DECOY more than I ever liked POLICEWOMAN.
April 12th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Walker:
That PBS series was one of the reasons I did this review. Some might argue that POLICEWOMAN was the first “network” TV series to feature a policewoman as the main character. But that is also not true.
The following dates are from both imdb and tv.com.
January 22,1974 the TV-Movie pilot for the series GET CHRISTIE LOVE aired.
March 26,1974, an episode of POLICE STORY called “The Gamble” aired. It starred Angie Dickerson as undercover cop Lisa Beaumont. The episode would become a spin-off for the series POLICE WOMAN.
ABC aired the first episode of GET CHRISTIE LOVE (series about an undercover policewoman) September 11, 1974.
Two days later (9/13) POLICE WOMAN began with undercover policewoman Pepper Anderson.
Steve:
Beverly Garland also played Laura Holt’s mother on REMINGTON STEELE. Poor Laura Holt, first Daddy walks out when she is 16 and then Mom leaves her for Mrs. King.
April 12th, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Steve, do you want any new reviews sent to another email address or wait until you tell us you have conquered Mt. Stairs?
April 12th, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Michael
I’ll be touch, through my wife’s account. I thought I’d be in action long before now. Looks like some workarounds might indeed be in order.
— Steve
April 13th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Beverly Garland is one of the all-time TV greats.
In addition to the roles enumerated above, she also put in time as Lois Lane’s mom on LOIS AND CLARK, and before that spent a season playing sitcom wife to Bing Crosby on his 1964 series.
That last was the first time my family had seen her do comedy. We were waiting for her to pull a gun on Frank McHugh …
April 13th, 2011 at 5:02 pm
For those of us too young to fully understand that last remark of Mike’s, I went to Wikipedia, from which I excerpt the following:
“From 1964 to 1965, he [Frank McHugh] played the role of Willie Walters, a live-in handyman on ABC’s sitcom, The Bing Crosby Show.”
Mike is also right about Beverly Garland’s place in TV history. Even without the huge amount of name recognition that a lot of other actresses have had, she was one of the greats.
April 14th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Now I really know I’m getting old.
How many of us are old enough to remember Warner Bros’s Irish Mafia, of which Frank McHugh was a member in good standing?
And the kick we got in learning (from James Cagney’s memoir) that they weren’t all that Irish?
Ralph Bellamy – Scotch.
Victor McLaglen – Anglo-Scotch (his father was an Anglican priest!)
Lynne Overman – German.
Dennis Morgan – “A big, good-looking Swede … his real name was Stanley Morner.” From the Cagney book.)
I think they made Russian-Jewish George Tobias an honorary member.
No wonder we all love old movies.
April 14th, 2011 at 10:15 pm
By sheer coincidence — you know how those things work — Frank McHugh is in a movie I started watching tonight, HEAT LIGHTNING (1934), one of those good old-fashioned Warner Brothers movies, this one starring Preston Foster, Aline MacMahon, Ann Dvorak and Glenda Farrell, taking place in a small gas station/restaurant/tourist camp in the middle of the Mohave desert. Good stuff!
April 17th, 2011 at 10:50 pm
J. Kingston Pierce over at the brilliant and always interesting The Rap Sheet blog was kind enough to mention this review. In the comments, Adam Graham mentioned the lack of a link to Internet Archives where you can watch some of the episodes of DECOY for free.
Here is a link:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3Amovies%20AND%20collection%3Aclassic_tv%20AND%20subject%3A%22Decoy%22
March 20th, 2023 at 5:39 pm
With regard to the ACROSS THE WORLD episode, I believe Garland fell ill during the filming. The series schedule was so tight they couldn’t wait for her to recover, so they ended up “writing her out” of the episode.
I know I’m 12 years late with this information. 🙂