Cahiers Du Cinéma

Jack Webb Web-Log-athon underway. The great American auteur is best known for his decade-spanning magnum opus Dragnet; where better to start than He Walked By Night, on the set of which Webb, playing a police lab technician, met an L.A.P.D ossifer who inspired Webb to rifle the L.A.P.D.'s files for cases he could transform into the numbingly naturalistic depictions of the inane droning boredom of police work he made his stock-in-trade on radio & telebision."It was Tuesday January 18th, it was raining in Los Angeles ..."