That's what Murphy Jones says to Emma Moriarity as they leave a theater showing a typical eighties slasher film. The film is Murphy's Romance, from 1985, six years after John "Duke" Wayne had died of cancer, and Murphy is played by James Garner, who would receive his only Oscar nomination for his role.
I may not want to watch any more tv or go to a movie now that Garner has died, at the age of 86, of natural causes.
I don't know if I can articulate how much the roles Garner embodied meant to me.
I can talk about a lot of the things I admired about Garner the actor: his willingness to fight the networks when he knew they were screwing him (NBC tried doing so twice); his then-unique ability to move successfully and effortlessly between the big and small screen (can you come up with any other names who moved between the two like he did in the sixties and seventies? Maybe Rock Hudson, but once he got to tv in the seventies he more or less stayed there, and Clint Eastwood never went back to TV after the Spaghetti Westerns); his self-deprecating humor; hell, even the fact that his marriage lasted nearly sixty years.
But what mattered so much to me, and I think a lot of guys my age, was Rockford. (I am using "guy" in the sense that Lili Taylor uses it in Say Anything.)
I think it was Kenny Fitzpatrick who first turned me on to The Rockford Files when I was about ten. The show had just begun being syndicated, I think, and NBC was still showing new episodes; I was too young completely schedule my life around watching it, but I tried hard. However it happened, Rockford's life was the life I wanted to have. Or at the very least, his car was the car I wanted to drive.
Jim Rockford, a Korean War vet (like Garner), ex-con (pardoned after serving five years in Quentin), and truck driver's son, was a private investigator who lived in a trailer in Malibu, in an area called Paradise Cove. He got paid two hundred bucks a day, plus expenses. Somehow, he managed to hang onto his property, and to his gold Pontiac Firebird, despite the scrapes he found himself in. While Jim was big and strong, he often took a punch in the gut from various goons, thugs, and punks. Unlike some of the classic detectives of he hard-boiled school, he rarely ever stayed in control of every situation; what allowed him to survive was his improvisational skill, and his wit. (And his brilliant driving: his spinaround move has been adopted by the LAPD for heaven's sake.)
And hell, it was L.A. You could live on the beach, catch fish, play poker with your dad, meet pretty gals, crack wise with your cop-friend's boss, and still pay the bills. I so wanted to be Jim Rockford. I check from time to time to see how much a gold Firebird circa 1977 goes for on e-bay. Nothing more awesome to be driving that thing chasing a bad guy (or being chased by bad guy), Mike Post's great rock theme blaring out of the 8-track deck, some celeb guest star (like Rita Moreno or Lauren Bacall) sitting in the passenger seat half-scared, half-thrilled. Rockford was the man.
He was so cool. The mini-printing press in the back seat where he made up business cards, so he could pretend to be from this or that office in order to find out information. The .38 in the cookie jar. The West Texas (or Oklahoma) cowboy outfit he'd wear as Jimmie Joe Meeker, a guise he used in order to help him run a couple of big cons. His independence. Have I mentioned the Firebird?
But he was not so cool that he was out of reach. His criminal past, his struggle to make ends meet, his propensity for getting beat up, all made Rockford a sympathetic character. We loved him for his charm, but also for his human imperfections. He was a believable image of masculinity in ways that Wayne or even Eastwood could not be, because they were too big on the big screen.
Garner's personality was a big key to the success of The Rockford Files, as is often the case with tv shows. But the team around the show were also terrific. The people responsible for the show gave Garner a great supporting cast -- Joe Santos as Jim's cop buddy, Sgt (later Lt.) Dennis Becker; Gretchen Corbett as his lawyer (and sometimes girlfriend) Beth Davenport; James Luisi as Becker's boss Lt. Chapman; most hilariously, Stuart Margolin as Angel Martin, one of Jim's old buddies from San Quentin; and most affectionately, Noah Beery Jr as Joseph "Rocky" Rockford, Jim's dad. And the writers gave them generally top-notch scripts: Juanita Bartlett, co-creator Stephen Cannell, and most famously for this generation, David Chase, who co-produced the show for most of its run and wrote many an episode, include a pair of shows with low-level mobsters from New Jersey. (Yes, the germ of The Sopranos can be found in The Rockford Files.) And then there was the opening gem: every week, the phone rang, and Jim's answering machine -- kids look that up -- would declare, "this is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message, I'll get back to you." After the beep, someone would leave a hilarious message about this or that bureaucratic matter, or sometimes Rocky or Angel would ask for a favor (with Angel, it was usually money for a horse race). They did become a curse for the writers, who had to come up with something new every week, but as the various YouTube collections of those opening messages shows, it was very much worth their time.
The show's popularity allowed the producers to get a lot of big-name guest stars, though from the first some noted people can be found: Joseph Cotten is there right in the first episode, for example. I've mentioned Bacall and Rita Moreno; veteran character actor Strother Martin guested; Alex Rocco, fresh off his success as Moe Greene in the first Godfather, also made an appearance. Pop stars also sneaked in: Isaac Hayes appeared thrice as ex-con Gandy Fitch, who gets out of stir to collect some money from Jim, whom he calls "Rockfish." In the third episode, Fitch has a singer whom he likes romantically and professionally; the singer is played by Dionne Warwick. I could go on and on.
Garner's masculinity largely conformed to many conventional norms of postwar America, no doubt. And as an academic I can analyze how idealized that image of Rockford/Garner is. In the early eighties, People dubbed him "the Last Real Man." The persona is a popular American icon, that of the...yes, Maverick (lest you think I forgot about Garner's first success on tv). It's appealing because it's outside the boundaries of the law, yet working to help good people get justice. (In a two-part episode largely influenced by The Sting, Rockford helps a colleague's dad get the real sale value for his business by running a con on the man who basically beat up the dad to take the business from him for a tenth of what it was worth.) This is the kind of thing that Cannell would bring to a show he created a few years after Garner's health forced the end of Rockford: The A-Team, a show about a team of on-the-run-for-a-crime-they-didn't-commit Vietnam Vets. (Arguably, the A-Team spreads out the Jim Rockford personality onto four different characters.) I get all of those aspects of the Rockford mystique. (I'd also point out something fairly progressive about the show's representation of gays, but that's another story.)
But at heart, I'm still a twelve-year-old, reaching for my brown jacket, flipping through my phony business cards, ready to drive crazy into the Malibu sunset. Goodnight, Rockfish.
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