When it comes to watching actresses portraying police officers or detectives, I admit that I am a bit of a chauvinist.

I prefer my cops to be big and strong like Dirty Harry, and as more television programs feature women in various enforcement roles, I find some of them tolerable and others not so much. I love this genre, however, but find myself at times cringing at some of these leading ladies. So I thought it would be fun to grade them with star ratings and invite others to do the same.

Bear in mind, however, that I can only critique shows I actually watched on a regular basis, so don’t expect to see Cagney and Lacey in this pile. Nor did I ever watch Heather Locklear in “T.J. Hooker” or the sad-eyed Peggy Lipton in “Mod Squad,” who I found snooze-inducing.

“Police Woman” (1974) Angie Dickinson **

Totally unbelievable but I liked her co-star Earl Holliman who has always been underrated. Pepper Anderson, however, became producers’ idea of what they’d like their cops to look like.

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The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)