Frankie Drake Mysteries: “The Last Dance” (Shaftesbury Films, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Before watching The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry I had put on PBS for an episode of Frankie Drake Mysteries, an unusual program set in Toronto, Canada in the 1920’s (and oddly there seems to be an awful lot of clandestine drinking and booze-making in this show even though Canada, unlike the U.S., was not subject to Prohibition) which I’ve tried a few times before but though rather unsatisfying. This one was a good deal better and quite entertaining, with the same mistaken-identity gimmick – the villains intend to kidnap a rich man but actually take his much poorer friend – as Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low (an Ed McBain crime thriller Kurosawa and his writers transposed from the U.S. to Tokyo and in this case it’s the son of a servant to an auto magnate who’s kidnaped instead of the magnate’s own son). It revolves around a dance marathon supposedly taking place at the Palais Royale ballroom and hosted by the building’s owner, Jonny Cork (Alan Davies, who seems to have got his whole idea of how to play a marathon-dance host from the late Gig Young in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?). Among the participants are Thomas Enfield (Eric Osborne), son of the owner of the Enfield steel mills that are the town’s biggest employer, and his girlfriend Jennifer (Tessa Mossey), along with Shawn Wilkington (Robert Bazzocchi) and his fiancée Audrey Smith (Jocelyn Hudon). Their numbers in the contest are reverses of each other – Enfield’s and Jennifer’s is 24, and Shawn’s and Audrey’s is 42 – and Shawn and Audrey are hoping to win the $250 grand prize for a 48-hour marathon dance to get the money to use for their wedding.

Only during one of the five-minute breaks the dancers were allowed Shawn sneaks off and grabs a needle and hypodermic syringe, obviously giving himself some drug, only we don’t know what the drug is and in any case he’s snatched before he can complete the injection. The kidnaper turns out to be a janitor named Ed (Kevan Kase), only he turns up dead himself, having either fallen or been pushed off a bridge (we don’t learn which until later). The Frankie Drake Mysteries actually feature a team of four women private detectives in 1920’s Toronto (though the music is very much more in the style of the 1930’s than the 1920’s, something that’s bothered me about this show before): Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith), whose shock of bright long red hair makes her easily the most recognizable character; Black woman Trudy Clarke (Chantel Riley), who can infiltrate nightclubs because she has a professional-quality singing voice and can always get a job with a band; Mary Shaw (Rebecca Liddiard) and Dr. Flo Chakowitz (Sharron Matthews), a woman of size who puts her medical expertise at the team’s service. Dr. Flo traces the needle Shawn used to a University of Toronto study about a brand-new treatment for diabetics, insulin – before which, as the script reminds us, diabetes was a near-uniformly fatal disease. The doctor conducting the study explains that if Shawn isn’t found and given his insulin shot within 10 hours he will almost certainly die, so the detectives are racing against time to find the place where Shawn is being held since Ed, being dead, is no longer available to tell them where he stashed Jonny.– and, despite the attempts of a newly assigned official police detective, Greyson (Anthony Lemke), to solve the case himself – something our Four Heroines are worried about because, like most kidnappers, they have specifically warned Thomas’s imperious mother (Laura de Carteret) not to involve the police or they will kill their captive – they ultimately run through some red-herring suspects (including Jonny, whom they think may have been the kidnaper because the ballroom was deeply in debt and he could have used the ransom money to bail it out) but realize that Thomas Enfield hired Ed to “kidnap” him to get some money out of mom so he and Jennifer (of whom mom definitely disapproved) could leave Toronto and the steel mill he was supposed to inherit and set up a new life together somewhere else.

They also establish that Ed’s death really was an accident – he and Jennifer were having an argument on the top of that bridge when he slipped and fell through some cracked railings on one side – and so it’s unclear what, if anything, Thomas and Jennifer are going to be charged with. This episode of the Frankie Drake Mysteries, inevitably called “The Last Dance,” was quite charming, a sort of Canadian extension of the classic British style of mystery that manages to maintain a light tone even though there’s at least one corpse involved whose untimely death powers the story. I’d tried this show a few times but this was the first one I genuinely enjoyed – even though I found the anachronisms a bit much to take; just like the Mad magazine parodists of the TV show Happy Days, who had one of the characters complain, “Just when in the 1950’s is this show supposed to take place, anyway?,” Frankie Drake Mysteries throws up a bunch of confusing and internally inconsistent time frames, including the whole plot line about insulin being an experimental drug (the papers that proved it was a successful and effective treatment for diabetes had been published in 1922 and I’ve read articles that suggest the basic research had been done even earlier), while in an episode revolving around public dancing the songs were late 1920’s and the musical style of the band closer to the 1930’s (and I have enough jazz, pop and dance records from both those decades I can certainly tell the difference!).