User Reviews

Larry (Gene Roth) and his accomplice are bad news. They steal cars and then sell them. Larry spots a sucker: a woman he romances named Theo (Ruth Clifford), takes $10 grand from her, and plans to run off with her car (a light green four-door Sedan). An auto painter who painted that Sedan black thought they were suspicious and fetched a patrolman after them. This patrolman is soon found dead (at first missing, with the police trying to find him), and this becomes a murder investigation. Theo is in the hot seat (sort of) as Chief Dan Mathews (Broderick Crawford) links the license plate of the painted Sedan to her. Theo realizes, thanks to Mathews' investigation, that she has been played a fool, but she could very well help the police catch Larry and put him (and the accomplice) in jail where they belong. Anyone familiar with Highway Patrol understands that this is all business: an austere, sincere enactment of the day-to-day activities and cases of the police on the road, specifically on the highways and into the streets of counties where all sorts of crimes take place, depicted in a manner that doesn't dick around with a lot of flash. You get the details, told in a straight-forward manner, with both sides, the police and criminals, elaborated as the investigations in crimes are developed. Because there's only twenty-two minutes for each case, the show had to cut out the fat, so there aren't long dialogue scenes; most of the time, dialogue--pertinent to the investigation and importance of the cases featured--isn't wasted and doesn't dilly-dally. In Dead Patrolman, I got a kick out of Crawford's scene with the auto painter, as he reacts a bit annoyed, as if he just wants to be done with the witness. My favorite scene, though, has Clifford responding to the fact that her character has realized how much of a patsy she was when falling for Larry's deceit…it's all in her face, the blood draining and the disbelief right there (it was masterful). What I found fascinating about this episode was that there isn't a lot of time spent on the unfortunate death of the cop; this show was more about catching the criminals responsible for his murder...police die every day, and the show documents the response to that not by highlighting the trauma such death has to their families (well, at least not in this episode) but how the highway patrol catch those behind it. Crawford has that closing line: leave blood at the Red Cross, not on the highway.

A patrolman's car is found abandoned with the keys still in the car and the radio out of order. An auto paint shop owner tells Matthews that he had seen the officer and had reported to him that he was suspicious about a car he had just painted. The officer then drove off after the driver of the newly painted car. The highway patrol traces the car's license number, finds the car and near it the body of the murdered officer. The car's owner is found to be a middle aged bookstore owner named Thea Nielsen. Come to find out, Thea has been scammed of ten thousand dollars by two men, one of whom pretended he wanted to marry her. When she realizes the truth she laments that "I've been such a terrible fool." I agree with the reviewer who said that Ruth Clifford's performance as Thea was the highlight of the episode, she was excellent in the role. Clifford appears to have had a pretty solid career in silent movies and given her talent, one wonders why her sound movie and television career wasn't more substantial. Gene Roth also did a good job playing, as he usually did, a bad guy.

We open with pictures of a patrol car sitting by the roadside and nobody around. Art Gilmore's narration tells about the importance of these vehicles in allowing the Highway Patrol to achieve "high-speed mobility in order to combat organized crime. A patrolman would no more abandon his car than his gun." I'll come back to that later.

The story deals with someone observing the empty car and then phoning the Highway Patrol about same. Dan and Co. See evidence of another car having been near the police car and they make impressions of the tire tracks. Later, they are aided by a car painter named Frank Handley (played by Hank Patterson, best known as Mr. Ziffel on Green Acres) who tells about being asked to paint a car quickly for no reason. He is a bit talkative and being a man of action, Dan seems annoyed with having to waste time listening to him palaver. But his work slip does provide a license number which is traced to a Theo Nielson, owner of a used book store.

Theo is an older woman who tells Dan she loaned it to a female friend to take a trip and that the friend is a couple of hundred miles away, but expected to soon return. But Dan's men have now found her vehicle, without plates, parked on a lonely section of the roadside in the mountains (the only kind that existed in Highway Patrol-world southern California) not too far from where they have now found the body of the missing patrolman.

Dan returns to the shop to bring in Theo for questioning. Unbeknownst to him, he has been spotted by Larry Gardner, the fiance of Theo, who is the person to whom she actually lent the vehicle. He is a longtime car thief and more, and it is his brother who panicked earlier and killed the cop. Via phone, Larry has promised Theo to return her car from a used-car lot where his brother sold the vehicle.

Theo finally realizes she has been duped and tells Dan about a meeting scheduled for the used-car lot after she closes her store that night at 6. Figuring to not trust Gardner, Dan plants an undercover man outside the store. Just after he happens to go inside to let her know he's there, Gardner comes into the store and Theo panics and calls to the cop. Gardner takes off with his brother, leading to the omnipresent police blockade along a lonely highway where Mathews and his partner have the fugitives boxed in.

This time they capture them without a struggle. The pair's car just pulls up and stops when Mathews blocks him and they surrender. You'd think men wanted for murder might put up more of an attempt to drive through the one-car blockade.

Remember the opening line I reported about officers never abandoning their cars? The closing scene here shows the prisoners being loaded into the back seat of Dan's car, with the other officer sliding in next to them, and Dan getting into the driver's seat and immediately driving off...leaving behind the other officer's patrol car, all by itself on the lonely highway. I know they can send a pair of officers to retrieve it, but the scene jumped out at me remembering those words from the opening scene.

I'm not sure they really established what happened to cause the man to want to kill the policeman. Focus here was on the lady who was fooled by the nice man she thought loved her and how she came around to understanding he wasn't what she thought.

A typical decent episode, but nothing special here-a seven.