JERICHO OF SCOTLAND YARD (2005)

Another British police procedural?  Well, yes and no as it’s different than 90% of the others.  Also better.*  Instead of the current default model: troubled lead investigator/less quirky apprentice seconding/impenetrable North UK accents/equally impenetrable clues that don’t add up; this one is both set in the late-fifties/early-sixties, and to some extent uses the filming style of that era.  Though looser in camera technique and franker in violence & sexual content, but finding a bright period color palette with grain to match and multi-composition within the frame you might have seen from a British director like Mike Hodges (though he’s more ‘70s) or in the cycle of mid-‘60s Hollywood detective films that might have starred Paul Newman, James Garner or even those late-career urban crime dramas Frank Sinatra walked thru in a failed attempt to stay with-it and relevant on the big screen.  Like a particularly nasty one imaginatively titled THE DETECTIVE/’68.  And with Robert Lindsay in the lead here, we’re not so far from '60s Sinatra physically.  Only this film is good.  Those late Sinatra films are stinkers; out-of-touch squares trying to be hip.  They made four of these JERICHO films*, each about 100", only the first seen here, and it follows a typical format of having two seemingly unrelated crimes (one murder/one kidnaping) turning out to be connected when Lindsay and his team of vets and a beginner are pulled from the murder case of a Black ‘nobody’  to the kidnaping of a rich immigrant whose fortune, wife and kids are all facade/no foundation.  Physical period detail and (far less seen) gestural period acting given unusually close attention, not just costumes & cars, but posture & the entitled habits of social position.  The cast is all good (Tom Burke exceptional as a too loyal son), but it’s Lindsay’s show.  Busy in the UK, but not much seen here once a promising Stateside career collapsed after his Tony-winning B’way turn in ME AND MY GIRL was stopped in its tracks by Carl Reiner in the disastrous  BERT RIGBY, YOU'RE A FOOL/’89.  It’s never too late.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The quality of these Brit-Crime dramas hardly seems to matter as they’re all so similar.  Only the ones that turn too cute for words becoming truly unwatchable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Three more of these were made, so I guess that makes for a Quadruple-Bill.  Hopefully they're as good as this one.