As I promised yesterday, I'm back tonight with another Christmas review. Tonight, I'll be looking at an episode of the 1960s iteration of Dragnet, titled "The Christmas Story", which originally aired December 21, 1967.
On Christmas Eve, Sergeant Joe Friday (working in Burglary/Auto Theft division in this episode) is sitting at his desk, making out the last of his Christmas cards. Bill Gannon, his partner, comes in with a little fir tree cutting for a table-top Christmas tree. Gannon gives Friday a little grief for buying his girlfriend a monogrammed stationary set for Christmas, until Gannon lets slip that he bought his wife a sewing machine.
They get called out to the San Fernando Mission Church, where the parish priest, Father Rojas, reports that the baby Jesus statue has been stolen from the Nativity scene. Father Rojas emphasizes how meaningful the Nativity scene is to the largely poor parishioners. Friday and Gannon begin searching for the statue but face little chance of getting it back in time for Christmas the next day. They try a store that sells religious figures but don't learn anything useful.
Friday and Gannon are visited by one of the altar boys, who tells them he saw a man leaving the church with a bundle about the size of the statue. They determine that the man is named Claude Stroup and that he has a record. Friday and Gannon find Stroup at the mens' hotel where he lives. When they take him downtown for questioning, it quickly becomes clear that Stroup has nothing to do with the missing statue and they release him.
Friday and Gannon return to the church to tell Father Rojas of their failure to the find the baby Jesus statue. As they are about to speak to the Father, a little boy comes into the church, pulling a wagon with the baby Jesus statue inside it. The boy, Paquito, tells the men that he prayed for a new wagon and promised to give the baby Jesus a ride if he got one. Paquito admits to taking the statue, but all is forgiven. Friday and Gannon depart to celebrate Christmas.
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"The Christmas Story" is in fact the third time that Dragnet creator/star Jack Webb adapted this story. It was first adapted for the radio version of Dragnet under the name "The Big Little Jesus" on December 22, 1953. It was then produced for the first TV version of Dragnet and aired just two days after the radio version, on Christmas Eve, 1953. As with every episode of Dragnet, " The Christmas Story" is based upon an actual event. Unlike every other episode, this story is taken from the files of the San Francisco Police Department rather than the Los Angeles Police Department.
Series creator Jack Webb strove for a level of technical accuracy that had not been seen before in a police series. Appropriate terminology and techniques were applied to the scripts. This could vary in anything from investigative technique to evidence gathering to depicting the duties of officers throughout the department.
As far back as the 1950s, Webb sought to make clear, though his character Joe Friday, that police work takes long hours and effort to doggedly pursue evidence to catch criminals. Webb presciently noted that brilliant deductions based on scant evidence don't really happen in actual police work, as seems so prevalent on police shows these days. Dragnet sought to depict policemen as hard-working people making sacrifices for the greater good, and worked to improve both public perceptions of the police and how police could and should work within the community.
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