User Reviews

This is a terrific show that starts with an intriguing premise: a woman (Joan Van Ark) shows up at Rockford's trailer with an usual assignment. She wants him to find someone: her.

This is one of those shows where no one ever quite seems to know what's going on. People are lying and being very mysterious about their backgrounds and motives. Finding the truth takes Rockford to Denver and gets him involved with another organized crime figure.

Good performances all around. Garner is solid as usual as Rockford (displaying a lot of toughness in this episode), Van Ark is good as the mysterious client and surprisingly, at least to me, Paul Michael Glaser (of "Starsky and Hutch") is VERY effective and believable as the villain.

It's never good to deceive Jim Rockford. But that's what Joan Van Ark does (and will do in later episodes) at the beginning, middle and end of this episode.

She plays a harried woman who calls on Jim and asks for his services to find a missing person. That missing person is her, or she, or whichever pronoun works in this sentence. As we later find out, this damsel in distress is not who she says she is and is using a private eye in order to see if her small time mobster boyfriend would be able to find her.

James Garner is great in this one - he knows he's being used, but he goes along with it, because he believes that his client is in danger. The common sense / morality struggle in Jim Rockford makes him such an engaging character, on the one hand, he wants to drop this case because it will more than likely get him killed. On the other hand, if he drops it, his client will more than likely take a bullet. There is also a great scene with Rocky that sets up the father / son relationship for the rest of the series.

This one travels a bit too, as he heads to Denver to investigate the mobster (I'm guessing not the first choice for a person interested in organized crime). He runs into some static with the police (shocker) and a lawyer who isn't Beth (again, I'm floored), but ends up getting timely and effective cooperation in the end. So much so, that I wonder why he didn't relocate his business to the Rocky Mountains. I mean, with his name, that would be a perfect fit! Anyway, solid episode, as most of them are. A question I have on the show is how much did Jim have to watch his back for all these mobsters he busted? From the geeky (Paul Michael Glaser) to the goofy (Abe Vigoda) to the awesome (Robert Loggia), he beat them all. Wouldn't you think either they or their goons would be sent to whack this guy who lives in the easiest to find house / office in California? I guess Denver mobsters are easier to put away than those David Chase later created in New Jersey.

If I had been Jim Rockford I'd have dropped Joan Van Ark as a client here no matter how attractive she was. The usually very smart Jim Rockford is thinking with another part of the anatomy other than the brain.

This has to be the most expensive game of hide and seek that was ever played. Van Ark hires James Garner to find herself. What she doesn't tell him is that she's the girlfriend of Denver mobster Paul Michael Glaser and that she's lifted $50,000.00 from. No wonder she can afford to pay him and Garner who forever has a cash flow problem can't forget that and her.

But Van Ark may have witnessed the hot tempered Glaser kill someone. Here is where the story goes off kilter. This is where you bring in Beth Davenport to negotiate with the DA's office in Denver. Rockford tries it on his own and has lots of problems. These folks only respect another member of the bar.

Nice to see Joan Van Ark before she was Val Ewing and Paul Michael Glaser before he was David Starsky. But this is one Rockford Files episode that doesn't really measure up.