‘Twas the Fight Before Christmas...
On
Christmas Eve, an assassin stalks McCloud, a spurned mistress attempts suicide,
a sidewalk Santa turns mugger, junkies raid a hospital pharmacy, Chris’s newspaper
organizes a party for orphans at Westside Hospital with Chief Clifford as
Santa, and the junkies take hostages.
A
further development of “This Must Be the Alamo” and “Return to the Alamo”
(comparison to Shakespeare’s early, middle and late periods is not amiss, nor
to television style in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties—and beyond). Chief
Clifford, incredibly, leaves Sgt. Broadhust in charge again, on the theory that
lightning doesn’t strike thrice. Feints of this order lead to the surprising deflection:
headquarters is not the target but Westside Hospital, whither all the various
strands tend by roundabout measures.
An
assassin with a grudge (he keeps a scrapbook of McCloud’s press clippings, with
such headlines as “LORD BRIDGES ARRESTED” and “MARSHAL KILLS CABBIE”, and has a
considerable arsenal) brings a suitcase to headquarters and asks for the
marshal, who’s off duty (but on call all night). Finally, the fellow betakes
himself to a rooftop.
Sgt.
Broadhust steps out for thirty minutes (“We’ll be here,” says Det. Grover) to
buy his wife a last-minute gift at Saks. While he’s away, Chief Clifford is
stopped by a traffic cop and arrested in his Santa suit with no identification
on suspicion of being “the sidewalk Santa mugger” (a sidewalk Santa who robs
his patrons). He’s placed in a lineup and selected by a victim, but McCloud
arrives in the nick of time.
William
Sylvester and Linda Gray enact the suicide from The Apartment, with
McCloud pulling the girl from an eighth-floor ledge he sees while looking out
Chris’s window. Meanwhile, Peggy (Ann Dusenberry) is in withdrawal, so her
friends (Dean Stockwell and Robert Weaver) take her to Westside Hospital’s
pharmacy for morphine at gunpoint. There is a shootout, and the junkies hole up
in the fourth-floor ward where Chris and Chief Clifford are regaling orphans.
The
real Santa Claus mugger is stabbed by a victim with a hat pin, and makes his
way to Westside Hospital, where he’s briefly mistaken for Chief Clifford.
Captain Hellman is a gung-ho go-getter, but McCloud has a better way. Fifty
feet of rope down from the roof and through the window into the ward, presto!
First, however, he must deal with the assassin on the roof, who wants to “cut
the big man down to size,” because he diminishes those who lead “one-room
lives.” In a matter of seconds, this poor fellow, who only identifies himself
as “Jim from the Southwest,” falls into tears and is subdued by Sgt.
Broadhurst.
Weaver’s
direction is uncommonly good, seizing upon a natural rhythm in the first half,
while pivoting on Terry Carter’s resemblance to Vince Edwards for a droll
evocation of Ben Casey, and glorying in a long slow pan-and-tilt over
Christmas trappings and dropped boots in Chris’s apartment, to the sound of
Diana Muldaur at her most insinuating urging McCloud to “relax,” until both are
seen relaxing on the sofa. “Good will toward men... and toward women,” says
Sgt. Broadhurst as he explains to Chief Clifford why the duty roster is
scantier than customary.
|
William Sylvester Jason Howard |
Story by Allan R. Folsom, David H. Balkan,
Michael Sloan Directed by Dennis Weaver |
43316, 12.6.76
The other cases cited in the assassin’s scrapbook are from
the same season, “London Bridges” and “The Great Taxicab Stampede”.
(Headlines in the assassin’s scrapbook.)
LORD BRIDGES ARRESTED
MARSHAL KILLS CABBIE
(Chief Clifford is at Westside Hospital, if anyone wants
him.)
SGT. BROADHURST: Just tell them to report to Santa.
(A sidewalk Santa pulls a gun on the clientele.)
LADY: Are you mugging me?
SANTA: It’s been
a bleak year at the toyshop!
(He tries it again.)
SANTA: Come on,
I can’t stand here all night, I knock off at twelve!
(The victim strikes back with a hat pin.)
SANTA: She stabbed me. She stabbed me!
(After a bit of derring-do.)
SGT. BROADHURST: McCloud you... did it.