Dandruff

DVD, Starsky & Hutch S4 (Dandruff) (2)

If last week's episode, 'The Avenger' was the quintessential horror of the series, then this must be the most notorious comedic entry, and certainly the one I cite regularly whenever the humour turns ridiculous. Because there really is very little serious police work, or work of any kind, the duo (reprising their pseudonyms Mr. Marlene (Hutch), and Mr. Tyrone (Starsky), from 'Huggy Bear and The Turkey'), spend most of the time rolling around on the floor/bed/behind the door with various women, ostensibly 'clients' they've met during their 'work' at Hilda Zuckerman's salon in a hotel where they're 'undercover' to thwart the plans of 'The Baron' to steal the Belvedere diamonds that are being brought by courier to the hotel for auction. That's the plot, as far as it goes, but it's just the bare bones in which S&H get to muck around with Zuckerman's customers, both in the salon and out of it, while prancing about in arty garb with silly accents - Hutch, sorry, Marlene, has a lispy, high-pitched voice and wears a ridiculous wig (which I suspect is the same one sometimes used by stuntmen to stand in for shaggy-haired characters, as we've seen a few times), while Starsky adopts ze bad French perzona 'e 'as done be-fore, as Tyrone, complete with Rambo-like tie round the head, while his hairdressing equipment of choice is… a stepladder. Yes. There are token moments of S&H doing the occasional bit of detective work, but they're few and far between.

If their aim was to create such a deep cover that they wouldn't be suspected by the mysterious Baron as being cops, then they succeeded, because even I was convinced their real objective was to have as much fun as they could. But The Baron doesn't uncover their cover because he's really not concerned about it - he has his own repertoire of disguises he uses to move about the hotel. The episode isn't actually a terrible one, its over the top antics are amusing in a way that it's amusing to see someone serious being a buffoon. It's not like S&H never muck about, they do, and they love to adopt personas, almost as if they're really actors, not real cops… But it is taken to the absolute extreme, beyond the bounds of believability for two paid up detectives to, one, take on a role which they have absolutely no aptitude or training for, and two, has very little connection with the areas of the hotel this Baron is likely to frequent. It's almost unfair for such an intriguing villain to be wasted on an episode that never once planned to take itself seriously, because it would have been a great one to see S&H having to deal with the disguises and clever plans of this master criminal (as we saw in 'Murder On Stage 17'), one that actually escapes justice and sends a note to say he's looking forward to the rematch (he may as well have added 'in Season 5' - if only we'd got that far).

Instead, The Baron is almost buried between female escapades or S&H dealing with the bozo-ish hotel security man who isn't in the loop - why would the police have such a high profile operation and not include the resident security in their plans? Why would Hutch force him to fire his rounds into the carpet, so close to his own foot - it wouldn't be good for carpet or foot! It would seem common courtesy to liaise. Not that Buddy Owens is up to the job, but S&H's silliness makes him look almost professional by comparison! And that's not saying much, because he is pretty stupid for a guy in charge of such a large, expensive hotel's security. The Baron could run rings round him, and did, and really it's only Huggy Bear that foils the plot, and he's playing 'Prince Nairobi,' which might be the first time he got to play an alter ego (aside from that magician, Huggerino The Supremo, perhaps). Rene Auberjonois (later to be famous for playing the changeling, Odo, on 'DS9'), makes good use of his facial and vocal skills, bringing out personas of a doctor having an illicit cigar (Superba Corona Superbus - as if to provide a clue as to his identity!), a bellboy in the lift, a barman and a police officer. I don't know what he said to the cop in the car, but it certainly made him jog away from it at top speed so he could sail off happily in the Panda!

Talking of jogging, it's like the comedy wasn't enough that they had to have potbellied Captain Dobey running. When do you ever see that? It wasn't the most dignified thing for him, but they got the Captain in on the slapstick, too: he leans on a bedside table next to the injured Buddy's bed which promptly collapses! If they were going out of their way to make the characters appear undignified they succeeded, whether it's Hutch with his wig half hanging off after 'dealing' with Vivacious Vivian and his head popping out from under a coffee table, to bandaged Buddy's position, the camera staring at him through his feet and up his nose, it was like they were trying to make The Baron seem even more suave compared to these buffoons he's crossing. And it works. I'm not sure why they showed The Baron arriving at the hotel when they could have had more mystery by making his first appearance be the shadowy figure his two hired goons visit in a darkened hotel room, only his eyes lit by the flicker of a lighter. It undermines the drama of that scene, but then drama is not at all what this episode is about, and The Baron was quirky enough that he fitted into the bigger picture. His goons were very much undermined by little screen time, something that could have been remedied by cutting back on the extraneous 'comedy' of S&H's female entanglements. It was in the same kind of spirit as 'Murder At Sea,' but in that case the stakes were higher and they did some action scenes, too. The goons were a double-act of their own, except more subtle in their mannerisms than S&H.

As if to ram home how 'funny' the episode is, it's crammed full of zany characters, perhaps more than any other episode, and with the few more ordinary folk, it has the potential to be one of the largest cast rosters. Mostly, the wackiness is at varying levels, so for instance, the henchmen, Ellis and Dinty (?), are slightly offbeat, but they're nothing compared with their employer's acted roles, most notably as the doctor. So the real list of crazies goes more like this: Hilda (whom I thought was the same actress we'd seen before in 'Tap Dancing Her Way Right Back Into Your Heart,' coincidentally a similar role in charge of S&H's extreme undercover personas, but it wasn't), who seems fairly normal until she start talking and keeps talking in unbroken jabber about how happy she is to do her civil (civic?), duty and suchlike. Then we get to the real wackies, such as the woman Starsky unties the shoe of - admittedly she's not that strange, except that she has an old guy in her bath who calls himself The Baron. Leo the tobacconist, the blind cigar seller who has a game he plays called the sniff and tell game, guessing people's professions from their smell, was certainly odd, flinging his head back and forth as if to make it very clear he couldn't see. Hilda's other customers are the most weird, though, with Vivian, who entraps Hutch while, presumably her husband, Harry, walks in completely unconcerned about her rolling around the room with a stranger; Bernice, the old woman Hutch is working on at the salon who appears to have drunk too much; and there's someone credited as Lorraine, which could be the ditziest person we've ever seen on the series, who's into numerology and is counting when Hutch plunges her head into a basin, and continues counting when he remembers to pull her up after chatting with Starsky!

There's a credit for 'Voluptuous Girl,' which could be the woman at the pool where we first meet Starsky, who is, unsurprisingly, rolling around on the floor with her. It's almost too many people to keep track of, and there are others with the angry woman whose hair is messed up by S&H and ends up looking like (and squawking like), a cockatoo, the parallel made very clear by there actually being a cage of cockatoos in the salon itself! She squeals like Miss Piggy at what S&H have done to her hair. And the angry woman who throws things at the door of her room when S&H enter on the hunt for the escaping Baron. It turns out they aren't very good at being hairdressers or pedicurists, and they've lost their detective ability through expending so much energy on their undercover roles, The Baron fooling them despite some hi-tech equipment being used: a bug. In fact The Baron uses a bug to eavesdrop on the plans for the auction, while Dobey and his team use it to track the pouch (or box, as Belvedere courier Davidowsky says they call it in the trade, after which S&H say they call it a bug in the trade and he says it looks like a listening device). So that was interesting. S&H do get an early action scene when they foil a robbery in the hotel - some shifty character makes off with a bag of money and they race him to the pool, in true tradition of the series, leaping into it, pulling the criminal down. It's what they always do: see a body of water and have to go in. You can just make out it's their stunt doubles doing the actual jump, with Picerni visible for about the only time this season so far.

There's a slight international flavour to the episode with Dobey talking about Scotland Yard, who provided them with the details on The Baron - we've had barons before in the series: Roger E. Mosley's 'The Baron' in 'The Set-Up Part Two,' another Baron, the villainous bodyguard in 'Murder On Voodoo Island,' and I always think English criminal Squire Fox of 'Bust Amboy' was a baron, but he wasn't. It would have been good if this Baron was a return of the Squire. There were some returning faces: both henchmen, Ellis (Blackie Dammett, his third role in three seasons), and Dinty (Madison Arnold, roles in Season 1 and 2), and that's it. There were even a few normal characters to round out the cast, with Mr. Adachi and Mr. Van Dam (winner of the auction), the other two bidders that, fortunately for Huggy, outbid his Prince Nairobi, and the nurse who's a completely ordinary dupe for The Baron's cunning. But it can't disguise the thin excuse for a pantomime to the extreme like never before. I think there was another similar episode this season, but nothing ever got quite as silly as this one. You could almost say it was gloriously silly, except it's more towards the rude end rather than a witty or slapstick comedy routine and doesn't put S&H in the best light. I like that it exists because you can put this side by side with something like the hard-hitting personal struggle of 'The Fix' and see the variety they were able to… I want to say 'get away with,' because that's what this episode comes across as: something they got away with doing, whether that was the writers, the actors, or the characters, the only person that didn't get away with anything was The Baron himself, so I suppose you could say there's a moral there, however small!

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