The Las Vegas Strangler

DVD, Starsky & Hutch S2 (The Las Vegas Strangler)

You can tell they're trying to start Season 2 with a bang. I say trying, as it looks like a lot of stock footage to me, but the 'glamourous' neon signs and dancing girl shows do help give the impression that this isn't just 'Starsky & Hutch,' but 'Starsky & Hutch' done BIG. It even starts in the same manner as the pilot did in Season 1: we see some of the guest cast credits, plus the episode title is onscreen, something that had only happened once before, I think, on 'Captain Dobey, You're Dead!' Added to the high life depicted, it makes this seem more like a TV film than a series, so maybe they should have made this two-parter (the first in the series' run), into a feature-length single episode, in keeping with its feel as a new pilot. I suppose it's always important to start a season in a spectacular way and get the money up on the screen, something they tried again (less successfully), at the start of Season 3, with another location setting and two-part story (by Season 4 they didn't bother, with a much more basic single episode opening, perhaps realising that by that time they weren't likely to get new viewers hooked).

The humble TV production values can't entirely be disguised - we see plenty of studio sets of apartments or recognisable locations (the white-fronted clothing shop run by Huggy's friend, Duke, looks suspiciously like many a white shopfront we've seen before), but they do give us some nice scenery, such as the drive across the desert road or the use of an actual casino for when they're 'undercover' as high rollers (even though they stick out like a sore thumb), which means they must have cordoned off part of the place, and they had lots of extras! But they were really trying for something different, away from the usual police buddy drama, or uncompromising view of a city mired in dirt and corruption. This was by far on the 'fun' end of the gauge, not dealing with any of the negatives of gambling, purely a holiday for the characters, and the actors too - I expect this was a relatively easy sell to get back into the series by going off to film in different places, playing up the playful antics, while still having a threat hovering in the background to leaven the levity. This is probably how you could describe Season 2 as a whole, where they were happy to bring more of the carefree jollity into frame, with less focus on hardboiled gutter crime, while not forgetting action and getting to know the characters more.

This first episode introduces us to an old schoolfriend of Hutch's, a guy that's pretty crazy in the way he talks ten to the dozen, dashes off all over the place, lives at all-night parties, and brushes over his eccentricities as if it's normal behaviour! When we first see him (the camera canted onto one side to show Hutch's point of view as he tries to work out if the guy lying on a prison mattress is his old buddy, thus setting up the character as someone that has to be looked at in a different way, both for his suspicion as a suspect, and as an old friend), is about the only time he's still, apart from when he burns out on a dance floor and S&H have to carry him home. The rest of the time he's full of energy and just having fun, though his ability to do that without seeming to have a job or carrying out his career to be a doctor lends credence to the suspicions surrounding him. Despite the larger than life performance I'd actually forgotten all about Jack Mitchell and his role in the story!

Though this is quite a different kind of reintroduction to the series, the familiar conventions are there in part: Captain Dobey makes it into one scene (where he has S&H in his office to make them hear out Lieutenant Cameron's plan), and Huggy Bear gets the same treatment, there to remind us why they have his name in the opening credits with a fun little moment at Duke's clothing store. The credits are the most recognisable thing about the episode with very little changed from Season 1's montage (though the dancing girl from 'The Bounty Hunter,' the pair as cowboys from 'The Bait,' the walking and driving combo with gun drawn from 'Silence,' as well as Hutch pushing Starsky off him after an explosion from 'The Omaha Tiger' are all new additions, I think). The big difference is that the music has changed from the crumbling old trumpet score that never truly suited the series, despite Season 1's tougher and more realistic look at city life, to a much more upbeat, slightly zany, but also, for the time, cooler, jazzier and more in keeping with the personas we'd come to know. The music changed every season, and they're all much of a muchness, but I can't deny this suited the mood of Season 2 a lot closer than the old score.

Other familiar aspects of the series continue, as you'd expect, with wacky characters aplenty and a number of in-jokes or pop culture references. I must admit, I didn't get a lot of the famous names that were mentioned by the pair of dancers as they come off stage (playing some kind of word association game), or when they're at Duke's, or even if Bugsy/Benny Siegel was a real world gangster. I assume he was, as what would be the point of making one up, but it was a reference I didn't get. One I did get was John Wayne, though my knowledge of his filmography means I don't know which film Starsky talks about where Wayne carries Victor McLaglen back to Maureen O'Hara singing 'The Wild Colonial Boy'! It's not the first time the Duke's been referenced, though ironically it was in the first season's opening episode, and by one the bad guys! 'Guys and Dolls' is also mentioned (in a weird moment where it seems like they used the same selection of dialogue for background noise when Cameron's watching through the two-way mirror, then cut to Jack saying it again). He mentions in that conversation that his and Hutch's nicknames used to be Prince and The Pauper, so that's a literary connection, and he also tells us Hutch was class valedictorian - I don't think we knew that much about Hutch's growing up years, so that's good.

There are also the facts that they're dressing up to go undercover (as usual, in bizarre outfits that make them stand out more than fit in!), one of them has a book of facts and bores the other one with it, and there's a swimming pool, and you know what that means if you've seen many episodes of the series! Being called 'Hutch and Starsky' by the prison warder is a little turnaround on the traditional sequencing of their names, and whenever that's played with, it's always intentional, but there's a much more obvious example when Ace calls Starsky, Henderson and he replies 'He's Henderson, I'm Starsky,' so as not to forget the age-old running joke of the series. You could say that the success of Hutch and uncomprehending failure of Starsky is another running joke, but it's not used so much used throughout the episode as in a couple of scenes - the jackpot machine outside the garage (an odd place to put one, but they are approaching Las Vegas), where Hutch berates his partner's gambling fever, then wins the money himself, and later when he's supposed to be losing money so they can get into a fight and be thrown in jail, he has a run of wins. The bit where he hits the rose of the girl standing next to him would later end up in the credits.

Starsky, as wronged innocent is always funny, and he gets to have the romantic side of things this time when his polite embarrassment at Vicky's state of undress makes a connection. It's not that true to his character as he never usually has a problem with such things, so it's probably more that she saw the good in him, and that he wasn't leering at her as others had, but at the same time you can believe in his old-fashioned reaction to such things because he is quirky and he does react that way when presented with honesty and openness. Vicky was played by Lynda Carter, who would go on to be most famous for being Wonder Woman in her own TV series, and even appeared on 'Smallville' as Chloe's Mum. She doesn't have a great deal to do, but a lot more than the first two dancers we see, one of whom quickly gets murdered (I think that was Sharon, the actress also playing Nina in 'The Bounty Hunter'), and the other, her friend Iris, (played by Roz Kelly, who'd been Francine back in 'Death Notice' and came back as a third character in another episode, so they must have liked her), is hardly in it at all this time, though she'd get more in Part II.

I'm not sure if the layout of Police HQ had changed, but I have a feeling they used to go through a door on the left of the staff area to get to Dobey's office. Mind you, the set changed a lot over the years so I can't remember which was the most common setup. This could well be the first appearance of the large Pinky & Perky pig on S&H's desk. I don't remember seeing it in Season 1, but it was something iconic, almost as much as the red-striped tomato, which, although they don't use it in this episode in exchange for an open-top sports car, can be seen sitting outside HQ. The stunt guy that often stands out when he stands in for Paul Michael Glaser could be clearly seen when Starsky runs after Vicky as she's attacked by her ex-husband, Lloyd, leaps onto his back, and in the fight (surprise, surprise), ends up in the swimming pool, but if it was him when Starsky gets thrown onto a gambling table then it was much better disguised because I couldn't decide if it was a double or not. I'm pretty sure it was David Soul who leaps into the pool to help his partner, but it's so difficult to spot his double - probably a safer stunt leaping into water, so it could well have been Soul on that occasion. And I thought I recognised some of the dancers - a shoulder-length blonde-haired guy and his long-haired partner seem to be in just about every dancing scene on the series!

They squeezed in a good number of the typical oddballs, whether it was Duke (who mainly repeats "That's right, that's right!"), to the drunk wandering the casino, to Ace, the guy that's been cutting hair for the rich and famous for over forty years while sporting a huge, bushy beard and mass of unkempt hair ('I may get mixed up with a face, but I never forget a name!'), to Jack himself. The strangler could never have been him, because he's always hyper, or zonked out, whereas the strangler is a motionless predator waiting to strike, calmly readying himself or standing, watching his sleeping victims (in what wasn't a bad cliffhanger). Jack, on the other hand, is crazy, driving like a maniac, rushing off to do other things when he's promised to show his friends the town, and generally coming across as someone on drugs. And when he talks abut buying $100 of chewing gum with Eugene doing deliveries for him, it looks more and more like he's into illicit substances. I get that Hutch hasn't seen him for years, but he's seen enough addiction to be suspicious, surely!

At the same time we're given hints about the real strangler, the woman at the store criticising her son Eugene for his beard, and showing herself to be most unsympathetic as a person, by the way she shows contempt for her black customer, Gretchen Hollander, and acts very cool towards S&H when they visit her store. Maybe that's the reason Gretchen chose to park down a dark side alley instead of right in front of the lighted windows of the store, because she knew the woman hated her? But the strangler seems to have the power to terrify women when they see him, making them cower in a quivering wreck, the horrible mystique so strong - look at the first victim we see in the teaser: the strangler never once crouches or hides in any way, but somehow this woman never sees him in a lighted car park until he's right there in front of her! Maybe it's 'TV darkness,' so she couldn't see as much as we could? I like the way they film him with the distinctive white shoes and tan trousers, never actually showing his acts of violence as they would on a modern series where every gory detail would have to see the light of day. Imagination adds to this horror. They appear to set up Lieutenant Cameron as a possible suspect since he also wears tan clothing, but although S&H come up against plenty of crooked cops in their time, just because he's set up to be unlikeable and they've apparently got a history with him, plus his manner is very icy, he wouldn't be the strangler because it's too obvious.

I was dubious at first that they'd have a realistic reason for S&H to go to Las Vegas when they have plenty of talented officers there already, but I bought Cameron's story about it being a small town where everybody knows everybody else, so he needed fresh faces. Then it becomes about Hutch's former friend being the main suspect, and when you think about it, it may still be unlikely, but who cares, it's a chance for S&H to go somewhere different and try to blend into a young, party-loving crowd, so why not start the season like that? I wonder if this was one of the main episodes the parody film aped because in some ways it's wackier than ever, with Starsky wearing those big shades and putting his feet up on the dashboard, while the scene at the casino where Hutch asks Starsky for the money is so similar to their cameo in the film when he tells his reluctant partner to give the car keys to their younger selves. Not that I liked the film, it went way too much into ridiculous parody, but it is interesting to note when the series came close to that level. And Season 2 came closer than Season 1, while not quite straying into the excesses of Season 4's 'Dandruff' or 'The Groupie,' and keeping a good, rounded mix of the elements that made the series what it was. While this first episode doesn't set the screen alight, it's a pretty good start, and a shock when it doesn't get sorted out all in one episode.

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