Irving
the Explainer
The Rockford Files
Coburn opens with
a bit of dazzle, the camera spins slowly in on a yellow rose with a microphone
hidden inside it, all the while a woman’s voice
is speaking off-camera.
The story is
about a missing Watteau (Pilgrimage to Avignon, 1789) owned by Marie
Antoinette and Hermann Goering, purloined by a courier, and thought to be held
by the director of The Bloody Sky and Hell on Wilshire Boulevard.
There is a murder
that changes hands more than once, a daughter, a lover, an art dealer (the
eponymous Irving), the Abwehr, the Sūreté, and El Cid Productions, formerly on Ivar
Street, now in a Studio City apartment.