Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Oh, what a delight to begin TV Month with the first ever movie based on a TV show! Yes, that's right! This was based on the popular show "Dragnet" and it's too bad seeing as how I have never seen the original show. I think it might have set some record for prime time show with the most series revivals. I got to poobala's crossover website enough to know that. Anyway, this movie was well, good.I'm surprised that the first would be in color and the color is quite nice. I admit it does run into the problem of seeming just like a long episode of a show. I will however, forgive that a bit seeing as how this was the first ever movie based on a TV show. The plot probably could have been bigger, but this is still well acted. It's great how consistently serious this movie is. While not a classic, I'm glad to have come across it. ***

Contains Spoilers With the success of his television series, Jack Webb extended the working territory of Sgt. Joe Friday into widescreen color cinema with the first Dragnet motion picture, scripted by Richard Breen from an actual LAPD case file - complete with realistically detailed rap sheets on the perpetrators involved.Miller Starkey, White Male American, aged 44 - in LAPD lingo WMA 44, with an LA prison number of 106484; bookmaker, gambler, procurer, with no known legitimate occupation, and debt collector for Vegas bookies. Upon hearing George Fenneman's announcement of the truth of the story with name alteration to protect the innocent, we witness the actual commission of the crime in a field near Loma Vista, Third, Wentworth, and Rachel Avenues, as Starkey is gunned down in cold blood by hit-man Chester Davitt and West Coast mafia second-in-command Max Edward Troy (Stacy Harris). This dramatic device was comparatively unused in film at the time, predating by nearly two decades the formula made standard by one of Joe Friday's fellow LAPD detective lieutenants, a man named Columbo.Starkey's record is such that suspects in his killing are fairly easy to identify. The department rounds up Starkey's mob associates, and Friday and Frank Smith have the task of interrogating Max Troy, who despite four hours of often bitter questioning, refuses to admit to anything.Joe and Frank are given 36 hours to find evidence against Troy and his pals or they will have to walk. Despite a heated argument with Deputy DA Adolph "Alex" Alexander (Vic Perrin), the suspects have to be let go when the 36 hours elapses. Friday and Smith, though, continue the investigation, assigning Policewoman Grace Downey (Ann Robinson) to infiltrate a swanky nightclub at which Troy and his pals hang out (and which is covertly co-owned by Troy), and eventually finding Starkey's "work book," a diary of names and addresses of gambling debtors.From their sources the two officers learn that Starkey was badly beaten up and also that gambling debtors visited by Starkey were revisited by other enforcers who never got paid. From Grace Downey they also learn that Troy borrowed the nightclub bartender's car and that there is a package in the glove box that must be disposed of.Eventually Chester Davitt, Troy, and two others are arrested and taken before the grand jury, but the grand jury votes not to indict, which angers LAPD Intelligence chief James E. Hamilton (Richard Boone) enough that Friday and Smith are assigned a bumper-to-bumper tail - which humiliates Troy and leads to a brawl with several toughs.Grace Downey then comes up with a major clue, and wiretap recordings of the nightclub lead Chester Davitt's wife, who has furiously refused to cooperate with police, to suddenly change her mind and finger Troy and her husband, all of which gives the DA's office ample evidence to send Troy and company to the gas chamber. But Max Troy pulls one final fast one on the police ensuring he will never be arrested.

Were the 'fifties really this awful? The mind boggles.Moviegoers in 1954 got excited when they heard that one of their favorite TV shows, Dragnet, had been made into a feature film. (I remember because I was one of them.) One now stares in wonder at this icon of the strange and far-off 'fifties, an era that was Eisenhower-sunny on the surface and dark and menacing just beneath it.Dragnet the movie (eventually there was a second, on TV), now largely forgotten, was nothing more than an extended television episode made in color, while home sets were still black and white. Judging from the picture's low-rent set-ups, it must have been one of Warner Brothers' most cheaply made films for that year. A couple of scenes take place in empty fields, and---with the single exception when filming was done at the African wing of the Los Angeles County Museum---the indoor sets were not much more imposing. Many of the actors were frequently unemployed second-string players whose work did not make a deep impression.In the intervening time since it was made the film has largely gone unseen and although it made it to video, it is little viewed in this form. (I found a dusty copy at a Half-Price book store, selling for a desperate-to-get-this-turkey-off-the-shelf $3.99!) Predictably, it has dated badly. That 'fifties audiences accepted the actors' rigidly stylized, robotic impersonations of police officers as representing the way they actually spoke in real life says something about Americans' willingness to uncritically accept virtually anything they saw in movies, and especially on TV. (Remember actors posing as doctors extolling the pleasures of smoking during cigarette commercials?) Dragnet's cops' signature manner of speaking---a flat, semi-technical, bureaucratic argot, spoken in low, monotonal voices---Webb's cops rarely if ever snarled---was one of the most memorable things about the show. Now this is seen for what it always was: unintentional self-satire. (On the other hand, to Webb's great credit, virtually all modern-day cop shows stemmed from Dragnet, untold imitations of which have been launched on television over the past five decades)For more evidence of the film's antiquated point of view, watch the scene at the jazz club where Friday and Smith, seeking information about a criminal they're pursuing, converse with a musician who's one of their informants. There's a humorous moment when Smith gets a `real hip' handshake from the trumpet player that is nothing more than a quick swipe and a handful of air, then stares at his hand as if to figure out what had just transpired. This is followed by a three-way conversation during which the script clumsily has the musician work his way through an A to Z litany of now-moldy, 'fifties hipster clichés (`How's that chick?' `Really flipped, huh?' `Oh man, that's a drag,' `He was really nowhere,' `I've been diggin' it in the papers,' `He was jumpin' pretty steady with that Troy mob,' `Dig ya.') by way of what the screenwriter apparently must have regarded as establishing a well-rounded character.Not only was the film disappointing in how little attempt was made to `open it up' for the big screen, but in some ways its narrowly focused two-for-a-nickel script was decidedly less interesting than what was shown on the television show. For example, it missed interesting possibilities for character development, especially as this pertained to Webb's Joe Friday and Ben Alexander's Frank Smith. (Some time after the film's debut, Webb finally recognized that television viewers yearned to know more about Joe Friday in his off-duty hours and so gave them glimpses of this law enforcement automaton's meager social life, including intriguing little dabs of romance.)The film version also completely wastes the participation of Ben Alexander, the warmest and most appealing of all Joe Friday's sidekicks, leaving him with nothing to do except dutifully tag along with his superior officer and occasionally asking suspects or witnesses the odd question or two. The inspired daffy non sequiturs that his character, Frank Smith, regularly voiced in conversations with Joe Friday on the television show, which viewers loved and looked forward to, were almost entirely absent from the film. The one exception, which occurs during a brief back-and-forth with Webb about their individual food preferences, is so brief and isolated that it comes off as a self-conscious sop to audiences whom the screenwriter knew would be looking for it and falls flat.Webb also was the film's director, and he went about most of these duties with a notable lack of imagination. The result is a picture that is dreary and monotonous from start to finish. He elicited almost uniformly wooden-and even occasionally embarrassing-performances from the cast (leaving one to wonder how much of his own money was invested in the film or what his deal was with Warner's, and whether he might even have deliberately restricted himself to printing the first take, no matter much a second or even a third might have been desirable). The scene where as Joe Friday he interrogates the crippled woman whose small-time crook of a husband has just been killed is mawkish, and the actors playing police officers are directed to be so deadly serious that scenes like this were subsequently lampooned to great effect in the Dan Aykroyd satire made in 1987. At one point a very competent actor, Richard Boone, is reduced to miming a series of grotesque scowls while instructing his subordinates. It's a wonder Webb didn't direct him to gnaw on a table leg.Dragnet was a film that was mired deeply in its time and seems to evidence a disturbing subtext that relates to the American mindset as it was during the bland, conformist, and frightened Eisenhower/McCarthyite ‘fifties. The Cold War was at its height in 1954 and fears by Americans of falling victim to communist manipulations and even outright mind-control were rampant. It may be no coincidence that Dragnet and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared within two years of each other. The cops in Dragnet are not merely grim, intense, obsessed defenders of the law, they often border on being zombie-like. One of Dragnet's most explicit messages---brought home to audiences several times---was how, if only we didn't have so many laws and that darn Constitution, we could put a heck of a lot more criminals behind bars where they belong. I've replayed this film at least half a dozen times and each time I watched it, the scarier it seemed. It's interesting to contemplate what super-patriot Joe Friday, if given the power and left to his own devices, would have done to lawbreakers. Luckily for the bad guys in the film---and possibly for all the rest of us---he wasn't given access to nuclear weapons.

I agree with the other comments that it is somewhat disappointing that we already know the identity of the killer at the beginning, but it is obvious that the killing was shown so that we know Friday and Smith aren't harassing an innocent man throughout the movie. And harass they do. Because we know the killer, we can laugh they way Friday and Smith do when they frisk him four times a day and tailgate his car. The main problem with the movie is that the story just isn't as interesting as most of the stories of the television episodes were, and, as someone wrote, Friday is a different, tougher man, not as likeable as before. Another unfortunate thing is that in making the movie in color to attract audiences who had only seen "Dragnet" in black-and-white, the movie loses the stark film noir feel that many of the television episodes had. In addition, the movie was made when the television series started to bring more silly comedy into it, and, as a result, the movie contains far too much of it. The early episodes had a lot of dark humor, but not silly humor like this movie does, such as the scene with the big-busted singer, and the scene in which the bystanders watch Friday and Smith frisk Max Troy. Even Friday's one-liners aren't as darkly funny or clever as they are in the early television episodes. That said, the movie is still very interesting and rather entertaining if you give it a chance. Webb directs with a nice pace and the big production gives it a grand atmosphere that the television show can't capture. Had a "Dragnet" movie been done in black-and-white, with a more accessible story, and during the 1951-52 season when the only comedy was dark comedy, the movie would have been a bonafide classic.