Ironside (1967)

A couple months ago I purchased a stack of dvds from the VGH Thrift Store. Among them was the James Goldstone-directed, made-for-TV movie that kicked off the Ironside series that ran on the NBC network from 1967 to 1975. I grew up watching Ironside, but had never seen how it began, with the gruff San Francisco Chief of Detectives holidaying at a colleague's chicken farm where, after feeding the chickens, he is shot from a great distance and, once discovered by a neighbouring farmer, is taken to a Catholic hospital and told by his doctor that he will be able to do everything he did prior to his injury, "but without the use of your legs."

Upon return to his workplace, Ironside is told by the SFPD Commissioner that his job is no longer his, but that his pension will be adequate. Insistent that he continue his work (we're not clear on what it is that Ironside does, apart from giving rousing speeches and quizzing people), the Commissioner offers him an assistant desk job position, but that he will have to forego his pension to take it. Ironside proposes that he work for the SFPD as a volunteer, a special projects consultant, as it were, and asks for a floor in an underused police building, which he turns into a home office and fills with cans of beef stew, and that he be given an old police truck, repurposed to meet his needs.

He also asks for, and receives, two younger assistants, a man and woman, both of whom he had mentored and, in an interesting turn, convinces a young Black man whom he had put away (and who admits to wanting to see Ironside dead) to drive his truck, push his wheelchair and put him to bed at night "You want me to be your boy," says the young man, and Ironside replies, "No, I want you to by my legs," as if demanding someone's body parts in exchange for room, board and the forgiveness of an $8.35 debt can be rationalized, with Ironside's disability equal to the racialization the young man experiences every minute of his waking life.  

With his office in place, his truck converted and his crew assembled, Ironside sets off to solve his first case: finding the person who shot him.

I have to admit, I found the Ironside character compelling, a polymath contrarian humbled, but not impeded, by injury. I also enjoyed the movie's various locations, one of which is a sculptor's studio, another a beatnik club that features a performance by Tiny Tim, who, for a Sixties moment, was everywhere. When Ironside finally catches up to the shooter, we know him as a 20-year-old former child prodigy who, at 13, published a poem in something called the National Quarterly, but whose father thought that queer and sent him to a military prep school, where whatever mental health issues he had were exacerbated. It was also at this school that he carried on an affair with his art teacher, the aforementioned sculptor, who was bitter the shooter left her for someone his own age and, in response to Ironside reminding her of that, tries to kill him with an acetylene torch.

Still reading? Good. I have one more thing to say about the Ironside movie, and that is the editing (credited to E.C. Williams, though I cannot find hide nor hair of him online). It's rather unconventional for 1967 network television, with all sorts of forward-back metric patterning, similar in style to what Alejandro Jodorowsky employs in his early films, and Dennis Hopper in his film, Easy Rider (1969). 

There is nothing easy about Ironside's ride, wheelchairs being what they were back then. But that began to change with so many young men returning from Vietnam with spinal cord injuries. How many of these young men watched Ironside while recuperating at Walter Reed Hospital? How many of them looked to Ironside for inspiration?