You couldn’t get away with the kind of light idnetity theft Jim’s engaging in here today. It would be far too easy to Google Angel’s brother-in-law. But for 1975, it’s not too shabby. He borrows Aaron’s car, and he borrows his bills and leaves them in the car to back up his claim that he is who he claims to be. It’s a smart ploy, because the kind of research they can do on him in the time that’s available to them will show that Aaron’s a real person with a real history who really owns a newspaper. Heck, we never see him so far as I remember; maybe he even really looks like Jim!
Jim’s motives start mysterious. He’s playing poker with a bunch of businessmen. He’s then tailed by someone. He gets the police to pull the person over, and he uses it to get an opportunity to follow the person himself. It turns out to be a woman calling herself Kate Flanders (Blair Brown), who wants to know about the gambling in the Bay City Boys Club. It turns out Jim’s been hired by someone calling himself Mr. Phelps (Stewart Moss), a car dealer who wants to know if the game is crooked. Angel leads a couple of guys to Jim who show him that no one in this is who they say they are.
I try not to give spoilers in these articles. It may seem silly, since we’re still working through the couple of years of the series that are older than I am. Still, I assume most of you haven’t seen it yet. On the other hand, you may have noticed the routine phrasing of “calling themselves.” This always means someone isn’t who they say they are. It’s a recurring factor in Jim’s life, after all. Jim doesn’t like it. I suspect it’s just one of those things you have to put up with as a PI.
I don’t write it up for the “Take Care of Rockford Files,” but one of the other extremely common things that happens to him is pressure. The cops pressure him. Feds pressure him. District attorneys pressure him. They have the legal option of “pulling his ticket,” getting his license suspended. They often use that legal option to pressure Jim to stop working on a case, which is part of why he refuses to work on open cases. I think the show believes that the system as a whole can work but doesn’t always, and Jim is one of the failsafes in place to make it work better. Obviously, some people don’t like that.
Southern California for Tourists: My, but the scene where Jim gets her pulled over is nostalgic for me. First off, he goes into a Jack in the Box drive through to report the tail. He actually, as today’s illustration shows, uses the old-fashioned “talk into the clown’s head” style of speaker. That one was phased out when I was a kid. Even better, it’s next to a Bob’s Big Boy, a restaurant that essentially no longer exists but which is deeply nostalgic to me. We went there the night my dad died, and I can’t remember if it had changed over yet when I went there with friends the day Kurt Cobain died, but it was the same building if not the same company.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Tailed. Held at gunpoint. Gets into a fight. Foot chase by thugs with guns.
The internet reminds me that this was the one and only time James Garner directed, and apparently only as a last minute substitute. He did a pretty good job.
Raymond Chandler fans will tell you that Bay City is where a lot of Philip Marlowe’s cases happened, and that it’s really Santa Monica with the name changed but the corruption left intact. Jim Garner would of course remember Bay City from his turn as Marlowe in the movie of the same name that served in some ways as proof of concept for The Rockford Files.
And lord help us, but the David Boreanaz reboot is on NBC’s schedule for next fall.