M Squad: "Diamond Hard" (Latimer Productions, MCA, NBC, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

During the next hour on Thursday, February 6, while NBC was showing a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit rerun I’d already seen and CBS and ABC were running pretty dull and similar fare, I watched some videos on YouTube, including Dave Hurwitz listing 10 especially great examples of operettas and an episode of the unusually interesting 1950’s TV series M Squad. This was an attempt to do a knockoff of Dragnet, only instead of Los Angeles it’s Chicago and instead of Jack Webb playing the taciturn detective who does a voice-over narration at the start of each episode, it’s Lee Marvin. I watched an episode called “Diamond Hard,” written by Leo Gordon (story) – the same Leo Gordon who played an important supporting role in Don Siegel’s film Riot in Cell Block 11 and, since Gordon was actually an ex-convict, he was singled out for special searches whenever he and the other cast and crew entered Folsom Prison for location work – and Joel Murcott (script). It starts with Lt. Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin) of the Chicago Police Department spotting a casual acquaintance checking out a jewelry store. The casual acquaintance is Hazel McLean (Angie Dickinson, 10 years before she and Marvin would co-star in the thriller Point Blank), whom Lt. Ballinger knows as a B-girl. He questions whether she can afford anything in the jewelry store and intuits that she’s just checking it out for a criminal boyfriend to rob it, but she insists that she’s just planning to get married (to a man we never see) and they’ve already set a wedding date. Unfortunately for her, her fiancé turns out to be a criminal associate of renowned safecracker Joe Mazzerin (William Phipps). Mazzerin has just arrived in Chicago for an unspecified “job,” and with Hazel’s boyfriend unable to participate as one of the three people Mazzerin needs for his proposed robbery, he enlists Hazel to take his place, fetch his safecracking tools and drive the getaway car.

Lt. Ballinger hooks up with Mazzerin when the two are in a bar and Mazzerin starts sounding off on how much he hates cops. This leaves Ballinger stuck with spending hours with Mazzerin, unable to reveal to his fellow officers where Mazzerin will strike because Mazzerin won’t let him leave the apartment at all. Ballinger is trying to make sure Mazzerin doesn’t realize he’s a police detective, and also waiting for Mazzerin to reveal where and when his big crime is going to occur. It turns out he’s going to rob Savano’s jewelry store, the very one Ballinger ran into Hazel at in the first act (well, give Latimer Productions credit: they probably didn’t have the budget for more than one set of a possible target for crime!), and it turns out that Savano himself (Than Wyenn) is the mastermind of the caper. Yes, that’s right: it’s an old-fashioned insurance scam in which he’ll pretend to be the victim of a “robbery” and report the jewels as stolen to his insurance company. Once Hazel shows up with the necessary safecracking tools, Ballinger is able to sneak them into the room without giving Hazel a chance to recognize and “out” him. The crooks, with Ballinger tagging along, actually pull off the robbery, but the police detail that’s been following Mazzerin all along catches up to them. Ballinger shoots Mazzerin and the other cops shoot Savano, and then there’s a tag scene in which Ballinger’s chief threatens to have Hazel prosecuted for her role in the robbery, while Ballinger himself talks him out of it by persuading him that Hazel is just a basically good girl gone wrong with one man in particular and isn’t likely to repeat the mistake with someone else. I’ve seen a few of the M Squad episodes and have quite liked them, and one of the most intriguing aspects is Lee Marvin’s borderline performance. Though the writing tells us he’s certainly a policeman and we’re not supposed to “read” him as actually or potentially corrupt, Marvin already had the knack down pat of adjusting his performance so he could be either a villainous hero, a heroic villain, or whatever combination of the two the story needed from him. This knack would change him from an anonymous character villain in the early 1950’s into a major star whose very ambiguity, in the middle of the 1960’s when the whole idea of all-good good guys and all-bad bad guys was getting thrown out the window, would make him a star in a specific historical era.