Overrated

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

This is an absolute gem of a movie. David Janssen is charismatic and sympathetic in his role as a police sergeant desperately trying to clear himself of a manslaughter charge stemming from when he shoots a doctor in self defense. The doctor was making a house call at midnight at an upscale apartment building. Ed Begley as his superior and Keenan Wynn as his partner are both fine. But this is David Janssen's movie. He's not getting much help in solving this case. No one really believes his story so he has to investigate it all and figure it all out on his own. He interviews all these people - the little old lady in the apartment building, the playboy pilot living next door, the doctor's assistant, the doctor's widow, the doctor's stockbroker, and others - and we go along for the ride, including a plot twist or two.The female supporting cast members seem to get only one or two scenes with him.Lillian Gish plays the forgetful, eccentric old woman whom the doctor was seeing at the apartment. She's very good in a stereotypical role. Stefanie Powers is the assistant/nurse who worked for the doctor. She has an easy, light touch; similar to David Janssen, she doesn't look like she's acting. She's very believable. I wish her character's part had been bigger.Joan Collins plays David Janssen's soon-to-be ex-wife. Never one of my favorite actresses, she appears here like everywhere else I've ever seen her. She does a lot of posing and looks pretty but can't deliver a line. Eleanor Parker, meanwhile, is something else. As the boozy widow of the dead doctor, her scene was a lot of fun to watch. That scene together with the one right after, when someone gets dumped into the pool, is worth the price of admission. This is one of David Janssen's better roles. I highly recommend it.

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 Janssen, better known to television audiences as "The Fugitive", gives a highly charged performance in this 1967 thriller. While locating the killer of a California doctor, he crosses paths with a motley assortment of suspects: Lillian Gish (one of his patients), Eleanor Parker (his cold-hearted widow), and George Grizzard (as a swinging bachelor). Joan Collins is at her dazzling (and sexy) best as Janssen's ex-wife, Stefanie Powers is stunning as the doctor's devoted nurse, and Carroll O'Connor is properly staunch as a judge. With plenty of plot twists, you don't want to miss this one! Also, check out the psychedelic opening credits!

Saw this film on AMC recently for the cast and the Maltin review. It was a good time-waster but certainly not the ***1/2 film that Maltin said. As to that highly touted cast, aside from Jansen, only Lillian Gish and George Grizzard gave what could actually be called performances. Everybody else, including a young, radiant Joan Collins, had what could be politely termed extended cameos. The mystery itself was about average, with a pretty implusable ending. In short, I've seen worse, but I've seen much, much better, too.