M Squad: "Decoy in White" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The final thing I watched overnight was at 2:30 a.m. November 9: a YouTube post of an episode in an unexpectedly fascinating police procedural TV showed called M Squad (for “murders,” I guess). It was an attempt to do their own Dragnet, though set in Chicago instead of L.A., and the closed-off nature of much of Chicago’s land is a key dramatic point. The episode was called “Decoy in White,” and the bad guys are John Spicer (Mike Road), a disbarred attorney and gangster who’s been using the bank owned, or at least run, by Paul Maitland (James Flavin), to launder his ill-gotten gains; and his associate Coskie (the great Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet and the 1945 RKO Dick Tracy). Spicer, who himself is reporting to a higher-up with bigger gangland credentials and an Italian-sounding name, uses Coskie as his designated hit man because Coskie is a devoté of karate and therefore can kill people without making the sound of a firearm. The gangsters are after Maitland and one of his employees, who received a “hot” $20 bill and immediately recognized its serial number from a list of bills used to pay a ransom from a kidnapping a year before. To lure Maitland, the gang hires a 21-year-old prostitute (at least that’s what’s hinted at by writer Robert Tallman) and hard-bitten blonde named Kitty Osborne (a nice femme fatale performance by Judy Bamber), who bused from her native South Dakota to Chicago to make it as … well, something-or-other. The lead cop, detective lieutenant Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin, whose presence as star is probably the only reason anyone is still interested in this show), interrogates Kitty and gradually worms out of her that she was hired to meet up with this guy, intoxicate him with the promise of sex (or at least veiled hints thereof) and plenty of alcohol, and then turn him over to Spicer and Coskie so they could kill him.

Later the two baddies catch up to Wiles, the bank clerk in Maitland’s payroll department who noticed the “hot” bill in the first place, and off him as well; they don’t bother to bait him with a honey trap because they don’t need to; he’s convinced that Spicer is an FBI agent after counterfeiters (a mistake because the agency that tracks counterfeiters is actually the Secret Service) and is thus willing to go to a meeting where Coskie is lying in wait to knock him off. The crooks and the cops both realize at about the same time that the key to nailing the gang is one of the “hot” $20 bills that Kitty grabbed and kept at the scene of Maitland’s murder. She originally kept it to take it somewhere and break it into smaller bills, but never got around actually to doing that. The crooks come to her apartment first and ransack it while she’s out, then the cops come by and she admits she still has the bill and turns it over to them. Ultimately a narration delivered by Lee Marvin, Dragnet-style, explains that Spicer, Coskie and the guy they worked for are all serving long prison sentences after conviction. What makes this show still interesting 55 years after it was made is Lee Marvins’ tough-as-nails performance; the quite good acting of Judy Bamber (who ultimately returns home to her parents in South Dakota in an ending ripped off by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader in Taxi Driver 16 years later); and the show’s musical score. Both the opening and closing themes were written and played by Count Basie (though because of YouTube copyright restrictions the closing theme had to be left off this post), while the background score was by another jazz giant, Benny Carter. Though my husband Charles says he’s tired of watching crime shows that glorify the police (which is the main reason I didn’t wait to share this one with him), I found M Squad to be quite well done, pretty obviously shot on film rather than live or on early videotape because of the sheer dimensionality and quality of the images. It’s a quite good show and I’d like to watch more of it!