Warning Shot (1967)

Am I Missing Something?

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

David Janssen stars as L.A. police sergeant Tom Valens, who, along with his partner(played by Kennan Wynn) are staking out an apartment complex when Tom spots a suspicious figure lurking around. He sees that the figure has a gun, so shoots and kills him, only to discover that the victim is a respected doctor, and that his gun cannot be found. Tom is then suspended from the force and charged with manslaughter, and becomes determined to find the gun, prove that the doctor was no saint, in order to clear his name.Both star David Janssen and director Buzz Kulik were veterans from the classic TV series "The Fugitive", and this film has a similar feel, though is not up to it in terms of quality. Mystery is OK, if nothing exceptional, with a good supporting cast. Bittersweet ending will make you wonder how Tom will be able to prove anything at all...

You can take Buzz Kulik's Warning Shot one of two ways. It's either a crackling good cop show, filled with procedure and great pacing, and David Janssen at his most heroically pathetic (and empathetic) as an LAPD detective facing a manslaughter charge or the movie is an over-clichéd snapshot of forced topicality in the Mirandized late '60's. It's really your call.I'd like to think of Warning Shot as both, the way The Detective and Madigan mixed the vulnerable with the vulgar. After about the fourth time Janssen's character, Tom Valens, gets abused or beaten or gassed by the well-to-do slimeballs he's sworn to defend, you might start to notice how he'd probably be better off copping a plea for shooting a philanthropist doctor. Instead he swears grimly that he's going to defend his own honor to the bitter end (and repeatedly almost gets his way).Warning Shot is packed with cameos, people who were legends when I was a kid, and now, forty years after its release, most of the performers are unrecognizable, which makes the story more accessible and less of an exercise in "Hey, look--it's . . . " What makes the movie work is that David Janssen, looking ten years older than 35, is so very real as a man of good character with no excess intelligence, just grim determination.A key figure in the story refers to Valens as "Sgt. Gumshoe" or something like that. It fits. Janssen's Valens is ordinary and vulnerable to the hyperventilating police-haters all around him. He can't do much more than reel and lurch from one disaster to the next, while awaiting his guaranteed-to-be-convicted trial. At one point, he gets the stuffing kicked out of him and doesn't even lay a finger on his attackers.His ex-wife (played by the reptillian Joan Collins) tries to screw him while busting the very organs she's depending on for their quickie. The District Attorney (the equally scaley Sam Wannamaker) announces to Valens that he likes to crush solid and stolid cops whenever possible. By the end, Janssen has no one to turn to for even the most rudimentary support, not even a union rep (a very young and lovely Stephanie Powers, the dead doctor's nurse, can do no more than cluck over his sincerity and give him a ride home).Nobody can help this poor shlub except himself.Which brings me back to why Warning Shot is a mixture of reality and topical paranoia. Often, in crisis, people have to revert back to their core values to save themselves. Either they don't have anyone to help them or they don't trust anyone and decide to go it alone. Janssen's Tom Valens does just that. Yet, at one point, he's told that his career is through no matter what happens. You can see the pain of this reality on Janssen's face as he surveys the damage he's done at the end of Warning Shot. He tosses his piece on the hood of a police car (no gun love here--it's just an ugly tool he wants out of his hand) and looks almost ready to cry from frustration and exhaustion. Like Frank Sinatra's Joe Leland and Richard Widmark's Dan Madigan, Tom Valens needs to get as far away from police work as possible.

David Jansen gives a bravura performance as a police sergeant who gets tagged with a "Mad Dog" label after a stakeout turns into what appears to be a bad shoot. Ed Begley is terrific as the boss. Sam Wanamaker gives a convincingly cold-blooded performance. Steve Allen has fun as a blowhard newsman who selects Jansen as his target du jour. Lots of interesting twists, appropriately downbeat music, sharp-edged dialogue, and taut direction by Buzz Kulik make this one of my favorite mysteries of the 1960's, right up there with Harper and Wait Until Dark.

It's a definite cult classic - that's all that I can say. But it does have an incredible cast, filled with once and future stars. The direction is quite stylish, and the theme is still timely. In many ways, _Warning Shot_ is rather like a film-noir shot in color. Like DOA, there's the theme of one man against the entire world - and the forces of time, also. There is emphasis on his need to prove himself - because he is a man. Like all noirs, the actual plot is irrelevant, although Whit Masterson (Touch of Evil) did think up some good twists. It's the atmosphere that you take away with you from this one.