I have re-watched this movie a couple of times recently, and it does stand the test of time-- at least for those of us who have not lived our whole lives in the internet/cellphone age. It goes much deeper into the workings of a big city police department. For example, in either of the Dragnet series, Friday just says they check R&I about a possible suspect and what is revealed. In this movie, we see them asking a clerk at the appropriate aphabetical station to check the name J.Johnson, with her rhetorical questioning about anything more than that, then working the card files till the right bank comes up, which she says contains more than 2,000 J.Johnsons. Obviously this would be a large computer database today. And we see them looking at the "possibles" from the pervert file, auto registrations (by make, model, or color) registered or ever stopped within the city, the monicker file, and the storage of field interrogation cards. We see 2 composite artists draw different faces of the suspect from witness's descriptions-- as the officers' suspicion, which they eventually find out for sure, that one such witness is lying, who doesn't want her profitable 'lonely hearts club' to become known as a place that had a sex offender and murderer as a member (nor become a party in a civil suit for having put criminal and victim together). Although it's off-camera, this woman also does something (some kind of threat, like revoking his paid membership) to a club member witness the investigators had found who 'made' the composite of the reliable witness, as he claims to have seen him at a 'coffee meeting' or something the club holds regularly.
The story itself does not bear much resemblance to the actual case, other what the suspect was charged with, and one or a few parallels to how the case was solved-- which is typical for Dragnet. But the timeline, the 'red herrings,' and about all personalities involved are all off. But we Dragnet fans don't care, as long as we are given a good story with true police procedures-- which we are. But if you have never seen this before, you may assume at the beginning that it's going to be about an international incident, for Friday is being sought out, while still on vacation, to help with the security of a visiting Russian Deputy Premier. That's not what we expect from Dragnet. I'm glad we are quickly disabused that Joe Friday is going to have to ward off an assassination plot that might jeopardize world peace. Instead, since he has been drafted back from 3 his 3 remaining days of vacation, he is put on the case of 3 missing young women, 2 of which have second jobs as models. The most recent missing woman is the one the pervert met through the lonely hearts' club, and is not a model; but her worried, though still astute, brother is the one who supplies the description that leads to the composite that collars the right suspect-- after a murder victim who is a virtual dead-ringer for him leads to a capital crime solved along the way in just 10 hours. Now that's Dragnet!- with a little drag and a lot of net.
Sure, a few things are kind of 'swept away'-- like, Bill Gannon guarantees the personnel rep that he will be there in the personnel office to sign his retirement forms within 20 minutes, then instead he goes with Friday on a venture to identify, then arrest, 2 suspects in the secondary murder-- which he knows should take hours. Even though this is Gannon's first appearance as Friday's partner (that is, the movie, not its eventual release date), we already trust him enough to not lie that badly to an anxious personnel man, who must secure his police-issued equipment before he can leave for the day, and thus leave him hanging indefinitely. And there is clearly an error in Friday's narration when he says the dead body of the suspect's look-a-like was judged to have been killed some time Saturday morning. It is on Friday that the body is found-- if he had been dead for almost a week, then he couldn't be their suspect, who was seen within the last 2 1/2 days.
The story itself does not bear much resemblance to the actual case, other what the suspect was charged with, and one or a few parallels to how the case was solved-- which is typical for Dragnet. But the timeline, the 'red herrings,' and about all personalities involved are all off. But we Dragnet fans don't care, as long as we are given a good story with true police procedures-- which we are. But if you have never seen this before, you may assume at the beginning that it's going to be about an international incident, for Friday is being sought out, while still on vacation, to help with the security of a visiting Russian Deputy Premier. That's not what we expect from Dragnet. I'm glad we are quickly disabused that Joe Friday is going to have to ward off an assassination plot that might jeopardize world peace. Instead, since he has been drafted back from 3 his 3 remaining days of vacation, he is put on the case of 3 missing young women, 2 of which have second jobs as models. The most recent missing woman is the one the pervert met through the lonely hearts' club, and is not a model; but her worried, though still astute, brother is the one who supplies the description that leads to the composite that collars the right suspect-- after a murder victim who is a virtual dead-ringer for him leads to a capital crime solved along the way in just 10 hours. Now that's Dragnet!- with a little drag and a lot of net.
Sure, a few things are kind of 'swept away'-- like, Bill Gannon guarantees the personnel rep that he will be there in the personnel office to sign his retirement forms within 20 minutes, then instead he goes with Friday on a venture to identify, then arrest, 2 suspects in the secondary murder-- which he knows should take hours. Even though this is Gannon's first appearance as Friday's partner (that is, the movie, not its eventual release date), we already trust him enough to not lie that badly to an anxious personnel man, who must secure his police-issued equipment before he can leave for the day, and thus leave him hanging indefinitely. And there is clearly an error in Friday's narration when he says the dead body of the suspect's look-a-like was judged to have been killed some time Saturday morning. It is on Friday that the body is found-- if he had been dead for almost a week, then he couldn't be their suspect, who was seen within the last 2 1/2 days.